Interlingue

Occidental
Interlingue
Created by	Edgar de Wahl (1922)
Setting and usage	International auxiliary language
Purpose	constructed language based on Indo-European languages
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ie
ISO 639-2	ile
ISO 639-3	ile
Linguist List	ile

Interlingue is a constructed language. It was called Occidental between 1922 and 1947. Edgar de Wahl, one of the first Esperantists, created it. De Wahl was from the city of Tallinn in Estonia, which was in the Russian Empire but later became its own country. He spoke German, Russian, Estonian and French since he was a child^[1] and had natural ability in languages. He is often called de Wahl.

Interlingue looks a lot like languages in the Romance language family: French, Spanish, Italian, and so on.^[2][3][4] De Wahl made a rule called De Wahl's rule that made changing verbs to nouns easier and more regular. For example, the change of d in the word exploder (to explode) to s (making explosion and explosiv) is a regular change when following this rule.

De Wahl was not happy with Esperanto. He decided to create a language called "Occidental". He published it in 1922. In 1949 the users of Occidental voted to change the name to Interlingue.

There were already many types of constructed languages during de Wahl's time. Some of them, like Esperanto and Ido, are called schematic because they follow their own design even if the words look more artificial. Others, like Latino sine flexione and Idiom Neutral, are called naturalistic because they try to look like natural languages. The difficulty was that creators had to choose between being regular or looking natural. Louis Couturat, the creator of Ido, wrote the same thing in 1903,^[5] and called it a paradox: "The international words are not regular, and the regular words are not international." The language that de Wahl made had a goal to be a language that was both regular and natural at the same time.

1. ↑ "Cosmoglotta, Nr. 41 (4), Juli-August 1927". dicta.bplaced.net. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
2. ↑ Cosmoglotta B, 1945, p. 90: Translation: "Occidental being a neo-Latin language, the influence of the languages French, Italian and Spanish will probably still be greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons."
3. ↑ Cosmoglotta B, 1944, p. 104: Translation: "and what else is Occidental than a simplified Italian, or, to state it more generally, the simplified commonality of all Romance languages?"
4. ↑ Cosmoglotta B, 1944, p. 116: Translation: "Latin is dead, even though it is still used for a few limited purposes. But the mother language Latin still lives in her daughters, the Romance languages - and Occidental is one of them."
5. ↑ Couturat, Louis; Leau, Léopold (1903). Histoire de la langue universelle. Robarts - University of Toronto. Paris Hachette.