Edgar de Wahl

Edgar von Wahl
Edgar de Wahl
Born	(1867-08-23)23 August 1867 Olwiopol, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	9 March 1948(1948-03-09) (aged 80) Tallinn, Estonia
Citizenship	Russia (1867 – 1918) Estonia (1917 – 1948)
Known for	Inventor of Interlingue a.k.a. Occidental

Edgar Alexei Robert von Wahl or de Wahl (23 August 1867 – 9 March 1948) was a Baltic German teacher, mathematician and linguist. He is most famous for being the creator of Interlingue (known as Occidental throughout his life), a naturalistic constructed language based on the Indo-European languages, which was initially published in 1922.

Edgar de Wahl was born in Kherson and spent his early childhood in Ukraine. Later, he moved with his family to Tallinn and then to Saint Petersburg, where he studied and served in the Imperial Russian Navy. After that, he worked as a teacher in Tallinn from 1894. When his home in Tallinn was bombed in 1943, he was imprisoned by Nazi troops. He refused to adhere to Heim ins Reich and was released in 1944 after his friends requested his transfer to a hospital due to his mental health issues. He died in a psychiatric hospital in 1948.

De Wahl was first introduced to interlinguistics through Volapük, which his father's colleague Waldemar Rosenberger introduced him to. He composed a lexicon of marine terminology for the language before turning to Esperanto in 1888. He supported Esperanto and influenced the early work on its grammar and vocabulary along with the ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof. After the failure of Reformed Esperanto, which he supported, he started creating his ideal form of an international language. In 1922, de Wahl published a "key" to a new language, Occidental, and the first edition of the periodical Kosmoglott (later Cosmoglotta). He developed the language over several decades with input from its speakers but became estranged from the movement centered in Switzerland from 1939 after the start of World War II. Later, he joined the Committee of Linguistic Advisors, part of the International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented Interlingua in 1951.