History of Interlingue

Because de Wahl announced his language in the magazine Kosmoglott in 1922, this is where the Occidental activities can be seen. However, de Wahl started making the language long before this. In between 1906 and 1921 he started experimenting with his own language, and it changed a lot. At the time he called it Auli, or "auxiliary language" (auxiliary means helpful). The other nickname for Auli is proto-Occidental (which means "old Occidental").[2] When de Wahl announced his language in 1922, it was almost but not quite done.[3][4] He actually wanted to wait a bit longer, but there was big news in 1921: the League of Nations was looking at the idea of an international language. De Wahl had also sent a letter and got a positive reply from the League of Nations in September 1921.[5]

Occidental began having followers because it was easy to read and understand, despite a complete lack of grammars and dictionaries.[6] Two years later in 1924, de Wahl wrote that he was exchanging letters with 30 people "in good Occidental" despite the lack of learning material.[7]

Kosmoglott was also a forum for various other planned languages, while still mainly written in Occidental. The name was changed to Cosmoglotta in 1927 as it began to officially promote Occidental instead of other languages, and in January of the same year the magazine's editorial and administrative office was moved to Vienna in the region of Mauer, now part of Liesing.[8][9] Much of the early success for Occidental in this period came from the office's new central location, along with the efforts of Engelbert Pigal, also from Austria, whose article Li Ovre de Edgar de Wahl (The Work of Edgar de Wahl) led to interest in Occidental from users of the Ido language.[9] By early 1930, the language was spoken in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and most recently in France where it began to be used two years before.[10]

When the magazine Cosmoglotta was based in Vienna, the users of the language had enough money for the first time and were in a city with a convenient location. Two important supporters were Hans Hörbiger, also from Vienna, and G.A. Moore from London, from which "Cosmoglotta was able to live without difficulty and gained a circle of readers despite the economic crisis". But Hörbiger and Moore both died in 1931, so this period did not last long. After this Cosmoglotta had to find money from other places: subscriptions, books, magazines, and so on.

The growing movement began a more strong and self-confident campaign for the language in the early 1930s in which it took advantage of its easy way to be understood at first sight. They contacted organizations such as companies, embassies and printing houses using letters completely in Occidental that were often understood and responded to, were produced at this time as well to introduce the idea of an international language and support Occidental as the answer to Europe's "tower of Babel". Recordings of spoken Occidental on gramophone records for distribution also began to be made in this period.

The years 1935 to 1939 were even more active. This is when Cosmoglotta started publishing a second edition. First it had the name Cosmoglotta-Informationes, but was soon called Cosmoglotta B. Cosmoglotta B had more discussions that were interesting to the users of Occidental such as the language's development, Occidental in the news, and how much money they had.

Meanwhile, the years leading up to World War II led to problems for Occidental and other planned languages which were made illegal in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, forced to break up, kept watched over by Gestapo, and had their educational materials destroyed. The prohibition of auxiliary languages in Germany was especially damaging as this was where most Occidentalists lived at the time. The inability to accept payment for subscriptions was a financial blow, and a difficulty that continued after the war along with Germany's division into zones of influence. No communication happened between de Wahl in Tallinn and the Occidental Union in Switzerland from 1939 to October 1947, first due to the war itself and after that from intercepted mail between Switzerland and the Soviet Union. Not knowing this, de Wahl was confused at the lack of response to his continued letters and even a large collection of translated poetry into Occidental which were never delivered; the only letter of his received in Switzerland was one that arrived in 1947 asking the Occidental Union "why it never responded to any letters from Tallinn". Meanwhile, de Wahl's house and his whole library had been destroyed during the bombardment of Tallinn. De Wahl himself was in jail for a time after refusing to leave Estonia for Germany, and later hid in a psychiatric hospital where he lived during his final years.

The sudden start of war in 1939 stop the publications of both Cosmoglottas extending into 1940, but in 1941 Cosmoglotta B began publication once again and continued until 1950. An edition of either Cosmoglotta A or B was published every month between January 1937 and September 1939, and then (after the first shock of the war) every month from September 1941 to June 1951. During the wartime period, only those in neutral Switzerland and Sweden were able to fully work on the language, carrying on activities in a semi-official form.

During the war, Occidentalists saw that the language was often permitted to be sent by telegram within and outside of Switzerland (especially to and from Sweden)[58] even without official recognition, guessing that censors were able to understand it[59] and may have thought them to be written in Spanish or Romansch,[60] a minor yet official language in Switzerland that at the time dind't have a standardized orthography. This allowed a certain amount of communication to take place between the Occidentalists in Switzerland and Sweden. The other centres of Occidental activity in Europe did not continue, with the stocks of study materials in Vienna and Tallinn having been destroyed in bombings[61] and numerous Occidentalists sent to concentration camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia.[62][63] Contacts were reestablished shortly after the war by those who remained, with letters from countries such as France, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Great Britain reaching Cosmoglotta by users informing the editorial office that they were ready to begin activities again for the language.[64][65] Cosmoglotta had subscribers in 58 cities in Switzerland[66] a few months before the end of World War II in Europe, and Cosmoglotta A began publication again in 1946.[42]

One of these activities was language standardization.[45] De Wahl had created Occidental with some unchangeable features, but believed that its following of the "laws of life" gave it a firm enough base that it could follow a "natural evolution"[46] with a flexibility which would "allow time and practice to take care of modifications that would prove to be necessary".[47] As a result, some words had more than one allowed form and could not be settled by decree alone, thus leaving the ultimate decision to the community by including both possible forms in the first Occidental dictionaries.[48] One example concerned the verb scrir (to write) and a possible other form scripter, as both created internationally recognizable derivations: scritura and scritor from scrir, or scriptura and scriptor from scripter.[49] De Wahl expressed a preference for scrir, finding scripter to be somewhat heavy, but commented that the latter was certainly permissible and that Occidental might take on a similar evolution to natural languages in which both forms come into common use, with the longer form having a heavier and formal character and the shorter form a lighter and more everyday tone (such as English story vs. history).[49]

Orthography was another area in which several possibilities existed: etymologic orthography (adtractiv, obpression), historic orthography (attractiv, oppression), or simplified orthography (atractiv, opression).[50] Simplified orthography became the standard by 1939.[51] Much of the standardization of the language took place in this way through community preference (e.g. both ac[52] and anc were proposed for the word "also" but the community quickly settled on anc), but not all. With questions still remaining about the official form of some words and a lack of general material destined for the general public,[53] much time during World War II was spent on language standardization and course creation, and in August 1943 the decision was made, given the length of the war, to create an interim academy to officialize this process.[45] This process had just about begun not long before the war, and the Swiss Occidentalists, finding themselves isolated from the rest of the continent, opted to concentrate on didactic materials to have prepared by the time the war reached its end.[54][55] While doing so, they frequently found themselves confronted with the decision between two "theoretically equally good" forms that had remained in popular usage, but whose presence could be confusing to a new learner of the language.[56] The academy maintained that standardization efforts were based on actual usage, stating that "...the standardization of the language has natural limits. 'Standardizing' the language does not mean randomly randomly one of the possible solutions and rejecting the others as indesirable and irritating. One only standardizes solutions that have already been sanctioned through practice."[57]

The International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), founded in 1924[67] to study and decide the best planned language for international communication, was at first viewed with disbelief by the Occidental community. The co-founder Alice Vanderbilt Morris was an Esperantist, as were many of its staff members,[68] and many Occidentalists including de Wahl himself[68] believed that its leadership under Esperantist William Edward Collinson (known among readers of Cosmoglotta for an article of his entitled "Some weak points of Occidental")[69] meant that it had been set up with a staff of professional language experts under a neutral and scientific pretext to help a final recommendation for Esperanto. Relations soon improved, however, as it became clear that the IALA intended to be as impartial as possible by familiarizing itself with all existing planned languages. Ric Berger, a prominent Occidentalist who later joined Interlingua in the 1950s, described one such visit he made in 1935 to Morris (whose husband was the US representative in Brussels) that hugely improved his opinion of the organization:

My personal opinion was not so negative-minded, for, finding myself in Brussels in 1935, I searched for Mrs. Morris and soon got an audience with her where my charming host invited me to speak in Occidental. She asked her husband, the American ambassador, to come hear me to confirm what seemed to very much interest them: a language in which all words can be understood without having learned it! [...] Mrs. Morris could have used her fortune to simply support Esperanto, which was her right as a convicted Esperantist. But instead of that she [...] decided to donate her money to a neutral linguistic court to solve the problem scientifically, even if the judgement goes against her convictions.[70]

As a result, opinions in the Occidental community of the IALA and its activities began to improve and reports on its activities in Cosmoglotta became more and more positive. In 1945, the IALA announced that it planned to create its own language and showed four possible versions under consideration, all of which were naturalistic[71] as opposed to schematic. Occidentalists were pleased that the IALA had decided to create a language so almost the same in nature to Occidental, seeing it as a credible association that gave weight to their argument that an auxiliary language should proceed from study of natural languages instead of attempting to fit them into an artificial system. Ric Berger was particularly positive in describing the language the IALA was creating as a victory for the natural school ("Li naturalitá esset victoriosi!")[71] and "almost the same language" in 1948,[72] though was not without reservations, doubting whether a project with such a almost the same aspect and structure would be able to "suddenly cause prejudices [against planned languages] to fall and create unity among the partisans of international languages"[73] and fearing that it might simply "disperse the partisans of the natural language with nothing to show for it" after Occidental had created "unity in the naturalistic school" for so long.[73]

While the two languages had a 90% identical vocabulary[74] without orthographic differences taken into account (e.g. with filosofie and philosophia considered the same word), they were very different with regards to structure and derivation. De Wahl's Rule in Occidental had eliminated Latin double stem verbs (verbs such as act: ager, act- or send: mitter, miss-), while Interlingua simply accepted them as an important part of a naturalistic system.[75] The control languages (Italian, Spanish and/or Portuguese, French, English) used by Interlingua to form its vocabulary for the most part require an eligible word to be found in three source languages (the "rule of three"),[76] which would conflict with Occidental's Germanic substrate and various other words which would be by definition ineligible in a unified language that retained Interlingua's methodology. Accepting Occidental words such as mann, strax, old and sestra (Interlingua: viro, immediatemente, vetere, soror) into Interlingua could only be done by doing away with the control languages, the very core of Interlingua's methodology for determining its vocabulary. Interlingua also allowed optional irregular verbal conjugations (such as so, son and sia[77] as the first-person singular, third-person plural and subjunctive form of esser, the verb 'to be') that Occidental had never even considered and viewed as incompatible with an easy international auxiliary language.

All of this happened in a time when Occidental, based in Europe, was still recovering from the war. The movement had economic difficulties, not like the well-funded[81] IALA which was based in New York.

International politics was another difficulty for Occidentalists after the war. The beginning of the Cold War created a particularly uncomfortable situation for the Occidental-Union,[82][83][84] which had the same name as an anti-Russian political league, and which the Occidentalists in Switzerland believed to be the reason for the interception of all of de Wahl's letters sent from Tallinn.[85] De Wahl remained in the dark about developments in the language and the proposal up to his death in 1948.[86] In early 1948 the Czechoslovak Occidentalists had begun asking for the approval for a new name that would allow them to continue their linguistic activities without problems, proposing the name Interal (International auxiliari lingue), to which the union responded that the term Interlingue would be more appropriate and that they were free to introduce the language as "Interlingue (Occidental)", or even remove the mention of Occidental in parentheses if they felt it necessary.[87] Ric Berger began supporting a change of name from Occidental to Interlingue in 1948[88] which he also hoped would help in uniting both languages.[89] The official vote on the name change to Interlingue took place at the plenum of the Occidental Union in 1949 and was passed with 91% support, making the official name Interlingue, with Interlingue (Occidental) also permitted, valid as of 1 September 1949.[90]

Once Interlingua was announced in 1951, Interlingue-Occidental suffered as now it had a competitor in the field of naturalistic planned auxiliary languages. Vĕra Barandovská-Frank's perception of the situation at the time was as follows (translated from Esperanto):[91]

In the field of naturalistic planned languages Occidental-Interlingue was until then unchallenged (especially after the death of Otto Jespersen, author of Novial), as all new projects were nearly imitations of it. This applied to Interlingua as well, but it carried with it a dictionary of 27 000 words put together by professional linguists that brought great respect, despite in principle only confirming the path that De Wahl had started. The Senate of the Interlingue-Union and the Interlingue-Academie took up the proposals that (1) the Interlingue-Union become a collective member of the IALA and (2) the Interlingue-Union remain favourable to the future activity of the IALA and morally support it. The first proposition was not accepted, but the second was, giving a practical collaboration and support to Interlingua.

André Martinet, the second-last director of the IALA, made similar observations to those of Matejka. He confessed that his preferred variant of Interlingua was the one closer to Interlingue than the one officialized by Gode. In these circumstances the efforts by Ric Berger to move all users of Interlingue en masse to Interlingua de IALA was a shock. His heresy caused doubt and interruptions in Interlingue circles, especially after he became involved in the publication of "Revista de Interlingua". The former idea of a natural fusion of both languages was shown to be unrealistic, with the new language becoming a rival.[92]

Don Harlow's summary of the year 1951 for Occidental[81] is also similar to that of Barandovská-Frank's:

Interlingua had a ready-made group of supporters. Almost thirty years had passed since the creation of Occidental, whose strength in the "naturalistic" world had prevented other "naturalistic" projects from developing their own movements. But Occidental's star had lessened since the war. Now, like a bolt from the blue, came this heaven-sent gift: a new constructed language even more "naturalistic" than Occidental. In spite of attempts by loyal supporters of Occidental to stop off the unavoidable — for instance, by such strategies as renaming their language Interlingue — most remaining Occidentalists made the short holy trip to the shrine of Interlingua.

Issue 325 of Cosmoglotta for the period January to December 2019.

While the moving of so many users to Interlingua had very much weakened the Interlingue movement, the following drop in activity was gradual and happened over decades.[11][12] Cosmoglotta B stopped being published after 1950, and the frequency of Cosmoglotta A began to slowly drop: once every second month from 1952, and then once per quarter from 1963. Other bulletins in Interlingue continued to appear during this time such as Cive del Munde (Switzerland), Voce de Praha (Czechoslovakia), Sved Interlinguist (Sweden), International Memorandum (United Kingdom), Interlinguistic Novas (France), Jurnale Scolari International (France), Buletine Pedagogic International (Francia), Super li Frontieras (France), Interlingue-Postillon (1958, Germany), Novas de Oriente (1958, Japan), Amicitie european (1959, Switzerland), Teorie e practica (Switzerland-Czechoslovakia, 1967), and Novas in Interlingue (Czechoslovakia, 1971). Barandovská-Frank believed that the decrease of interest in Occidental-Interlingue happened at the same time as generation that was first drawn to it from other planned languages was getting older (translated from Esperanto):

Most of those interested in Interlingue belonged to the generation that became familiar in turn with Volapük, Esperanto and Ido, later on finding the most aesthetic (basically naturalistic) solution in Occidental-Interlingue. After that, many moved to IALA's Interlingua, which however did not prove to be much more successful despite the impression its scientific origin made, and those who remained loyal to Occidental-Interlingue did not succeed in giving their excitement to a new generation.

Activity in Interlingue eventually reached a low during the 1980s and early 1990s, when Cosmoglotta publication stopped for a some years. This can be seen in the frequency of Cosmoglotta: while issue 269 was published in 1972 after publishing once per season between 1963, issue 289 was not reached until summer 2000[13] for an average of less than one issue per year. According to Harlow, "in 1985 Occidental's last periodical, Cosmoglotta, ceased publication, and its editor, Mr. Adrian Pilgrim, is quoted as having described Occidental as a 'dead language.'" A decade later, a documentary film in 1994 by Steve Hawley and Steyger on planned languages introduced Interlingue speaker Donald Gasper as "one of the last remaining speakers of the language Occidental".[14]

As was the case for other planned languages, it was the arrival of the internet that allowed the language to revive.[15][16][11] In the year 1999 the first Yahoo! Group in Occidental was founded, Cosmoglotta had begun publishing intermittently again, and the language became a subject of discussion in literature on auxiliary languages.[17] One example is The Esperanto Book published in 1995 by Harlow, who wrote that Occidental had an intentional emphasis on European forms and that some of its leading followers espoused a Eurocentric philosophy, which may have set back its spread.[18] Still, the opposite view[19][20] was also common in the community and Occidental gained supporters in many nations including Asian nations.[21][22] An Interlingue Wikipedia was approved in 2004. In recent years official meetings between Interlingue speakers have begun taking place again: a meeting in Ulm on 10 January 2013,[23] another in Munich in 2014 with three participants,[24] and a third in Ulm on 16 August 2015 with five.[25]

The most recent edition of the magazine Cosmoglotta is volume 325, for the period January to December 2019.