Interlingua... a review

[BGMan]

First of all, my general opinion of artificial languages like Esperanto and Interlingua is that their roles are easily co-opted by natural languages. English, for example, is a naturalistic Germanic-Romance blend which easily usurps Esperanto's natural role (despite having little Slavic influence), and Interlingua's natural role is similarly more or less lost to Spanish, which has quite a regular grammar and is very conservative for a Romance language, plus hundreds of millions of speakers.

That said, I found Interlingua far more personally appealing than Esperanto, which often makes weird and unintuitive selections for its vocabulary.

As far as the vocabulary goes, I don't really have any criticisms of Interlingua's vocabulary in and of itself. The team did a good job at filling out its dictionary.

That said, though, I do have some criticism of the excessive simplification, some of which was explicitly done because of the odd quirks of English.

1) First of all, the invariable article le. Interlingua does away with gender entirely. I can see the appeal in resolving mistakes with nouns ending in -e, but I think la should be made at least optional for feminine Romance cognates, or to keep it as simple as possible, all female entities or inanimate nouns ending in -a, but le for everything else.

2) The past participle is similarly set by changing the infinitive -r to -te, so the infinitive visitar becomes visitate, "visited". The choice of the final -e instead of -o is because Interlingua is genderless. But I don't understand the necessity of doing this, it makes it a bit confusing because Italian, Slavic, Greek etc. speakers will trip over the participle thinking it's an imperative or a second-person plural verb conjugation. Why not -to instead (visitato) like in Italian? The participle is invariable already anyway (Italian hanno visitato, they have visited, not *visitati, or even *visitate for a group of women).

3) Speaking of verb conjugation, Interlingua basically uses the 3s form plus the necessary pronoun, So, nos scriba, "we write", but again, real Romance speakers would have to get used to it not being "s/he writes to us". And frankly, why not have a very simple verb conjugation? Few Europeans would have any trouble with it. My proposal would be -(-V)o, -s, -, -mo, -te, -n. Scribo, scribas, scriba, scribamo, scribate, scriban. (Present "to be" would have to be memorized, and "to have" would also be irregular -- both already are in Interlingua in fact.)

4) Optionally, use Italian-style plurals (-o and -e to -i, and -a to -e, nouns ending in consonants could still add -es) instead of Spanish-style plurals. The reason for that is the difficulty in maintaining the final -s in the real world, causing many Spanish speakers to lose the distinction between singular and plural entirely.

[Nachtswalbe]

For 4) why keep plurals around at all? Latino sine flexione does away with them

[äreo]

3) Speaking of verb conjugation, Interlingua basically uses the 3s form plus the necessary pronoun, So, nos scriba, "we write", but again, real Romance speakers would have to get used to it not being "s/he writes to us". And frankly, why not have a very simple verb conjugation? Few Europeans would have any trouble with it. My proposal would be -(-V)o, -s, -, -mo, -te, -n. Scribo, scribas, scriba, scribamo, scribate, scriban. (Present "to be" would have to be memorized, and "to have" would also be irregular -- both already are in Interlingua in fact.)

This more than anything else you listed strikes me as a poor decision. Eliminating a feature to make the language "simpler" and "easier" even though the loss of that feature makes the language less immediately comprehensible to the people most likely to have an interest in learning it? Way to saw off the branch you're sitting on.

EDIT: Just found Interslavic, which maintains conjugation for person and even gender and case! I think we could make the case that there is a Western European bias toward over-optimization or "superfluous efficiency."

[BGMan]

For 4) why keep plurals around at all? Latino sine flexione does away with them

A lot of varieties of Spanish do as well, in their spoken forms. Although Latino sine flexione does strike me as a bit biased toward analyticism, to put it mildly. Are prepositions and other particles really in fact intrinsically easier to use than noun and verb conjugations? I'm not at all convinced.

[Linguoboy]

4) Optionally, use Italian-style plurals (-o and -e to -i, and -a to -e, nouns ending in consonants could still add -es) instead of Spanish-style plurals. The reason for that is the difficulty in maintaining the final -s in the real world, causing many Spanish speakers to lose the distinction between singular and plural entirely.

I thought most of those varieties maintained the distinction, just with a different phonetic realisation (i.e. vocal tenseness).

At the very least, you still have the plural suffix /es/ added after consonants and stressed vowels. So, for example, <lápiz> and <lápices> would still be distinguished as /ˈlapi/ and /ˈlapise/ even with complete deletion of final /s/, meaning that no dialects lose the distinction entirely. (A better example might be French, but even there you still have suppletive plurals like <yeux> and <chevaux>.)

[Darren]

If Interlingua's main aim is to be a written pan-Romance language, then having plurals in -s is a no-brainer. If it wants to be a spoken global auxlang, then I don't know.

[Moose-tache]

I think a suffix works better for an auxlang, since it doesn't require you to futz with the shape of borrowed words. Italian caffe doesn't change in the plural, but presumably our Italian-inspired conlang would have to have cafe>cafi. It's way better to have cafe>cafes.

[Ares Land]

At the very least, you still have the plural suffix /es/ added after consonants and stressed vowels. So, for example, <lápiz> and <lápices> would still be distinguished as /ˈlapi/ and /ˈlapise/ even with complete deletion of final /s/, meaning that no dialects lose the distinction entirely. (A better example might be French, but even there you still have suppletive plurals like <yeux> and <chevaux>.)

We could also say French marks plurals with a prefix (mostly). Maybe using the definite/indefinite articles would make sense for an auxlang?

[Travis B.]

If Interlingua's main aim is to be a written pan-Romance language, then having plurals in -s is a no-brainer. If it wants to be a spoken global auxlang, then I don't know.

I think that aiming to be a pan-Romance language is a better idea than trying to be a global auxlang (just look at Esperanto and Lojban...).

[Kuchigakatai]

1) First of all, the invariable article le. Interlingua does away with gender entirely. I can see the appeal in resolving mistakes with nouns ending in -e, but I think la should be made at least optional for feminine Romance cognates, or to keep it as simple as possible, all female entities or inanimate nouns ending in -a, but le for everything else.

2) The past participle is similarly set by changing the infinitive -r to -te, so the infinitive visitar becomes visitate, "visited". The choice of the final -e instead of -o is because Interlingua is genderless. But I don't understand the necessity of doing this, it makes it a bit confusing because Italian, Slavic, Greek etc. speakers will trip over the participle thinking it's an imperative or a second-person plural verb conjugation. Why not -to instead (visitato) like in Italian? The participle is invariable already anyway (Italian hanno visitato, they have visited, not *visitati, or even *visitate for a group of women).

3) Speaking of verb conjugation, Interlingua basically uses the 3s form plus the necessary pronoun, So, nos scriba, "we write", but again, real Romance speakers would have to get used to it not being "s/he writes to us". And frankly, why not have a very simple verb conjugation? Few Europeans would have any trouble with it. My proposal would be -(-V)o, -s, -, -mo, -te, -n. Scribo, scribas, scriba, scribamo, scribate, scriban. (Present "to be" would have to be memorized, and "to have" would also be irregular -- both already are in Interlingua in fact.)

The thing about Interlingua is that one of its explicit design goals was to accommodate genderless, conjugation-poor English. It may have been sold as a Romance auxlang at times, but English was always in mind. This answers points 1-3, and arguably 4 as well.

[Travis B.]

The thing about Interlingua is that one of its explicit design goals was to accommodate genderless, conjugation-poor English. It may have been sold as a Romance auxlang at times, but English was always in mind. This answers points 1-3, and arguably 4 as well.

But what's the point in doing that? You might as well speak English then.

[zompist]

The thing about Interlingua is that one of its explicit design goals was to accommodate genderless, conjugation-poor English. It may have been sold as a Romance auxlang at times, but English was always in mind. This answers points 1-3, and arguably 4 as well.

But what's the point in doing that? You might as well speak English then.

That's pretty much what the world has decided, but actual auxlangers aren't going to agree, and why even bother having that argument?

For like 150 years now, every discussion about what an auxlang should be like devolves into conlanging. (Which is fine: auxlangs can be an interesting design challenge if you don't take them too seriously.) There is no right answer, and why the world isn't interested in auxlangs is not because of the presence or lack of any particular language feature.

[WeepingElf]

The thing about Interlingua is that one of its explicit design goals was to accommodate genderless, conjugation-poor English. It may have been sold as a Romance auxlang at times, but English was always in mind. This answers points 1-3, and arguably 4 as well.

But what's the point in doing that? You might as well speak English then.

That's pretty much what the world has decided, but actual auxlangers aren't going to agree, and why even bother having that argument?

For like 150 years now, every discussion about what an auxlang should be like devolves into conlanging. (Which is fine: auxlangs can be an interesting design challenge if you don't take them too seriously.) There is no right answer, and why the world isn't interested in auxlangs is not because of the presence or lack of any particular language feature.

Precisely.

[xxx]

the world isn't interested in auxlangs

English, with all the force of its soft power, has for the time being forbidden any attempt to develop any auxlang whatsoever...

however, no conlang can afford to ignore its communication objectives,
if it is not to sink into the abyss of a mere linguistic model, a fakelang...

any self-respecting conlang must consider the role of auxlang, as any natural language can....

[WeepingElf]

any self-respecting conlang must consider the role of auxlang, as any natural language can....

I have no aspirations of such a kind with any of my projects. I wrote up my ideas about auxlang design here many years ago, and I am considering making an actual conlang based on these ideas, but only as an intellectual exercise and without any intention to have it adopted as a global or regional auxlang. The race has been run, and the winner's name begins with "E" but doesn't end with "o"

[Ketsuban]

the world isn't interested in auxlangs

English, with all the force of its soft power, has for the time being forbidden any attempt to develop any auxlang whatsoever...

The idea that the English language itself is suppressing auxlangs is quite a courageous assertion, considering you're talking to the person who wrote this which I think adequately explains the lack of impetus for taking up an auxlang without needing to construct something tantalisingly close to a conspiracy theory.

Auxlangers sometimes attempt to quantify the cost of the "language problem"-- e.g. they tot up the cost of translation within European companies or the Brussels bureaucracy, and compare it to the huge monolingual market in the US.

Such efforts are not so much wrong as misleading. First, they benefit from the specious impresiveness of large-scale sums. Heck, chewing gum is a $4 billion industry in the U.S. alone. In a $6 trillion economy, it's not hard to wallop people with high numbers.

The calculations should be done per capita. How much do I lose by not knowing Arabic? Then let's compare that to the cost of learning Arabic-- or, if you like, your favorite auxlang. This should be compared to the cost of hiring a translator for the times I need to talk to an Arabic speaker or read Arabic media. And let's not forget the opportunity costs: the money and time it takes to learn Arabic or Esperanto isn't available to do something else.

I suspect that if you did all these calculations, you'd find that we're already minimizing language costs, and that spending more money on teaching a rarely-used auxlang to everyone would be uneconomical. Translators are awfully cheap, considering.

[xxx]

to construct something tantalisingly close to a conspiracy theory.

it's just a fact, English is present as auxlang all over the world...
there is no place for other auxlangs, following the Highlander principle...

I have no aspirations of such a kind with any of my projects. I wrote up my ideas about auxlang design here many years ago, and I am considering making an actual conlang based on these ideas, but only as an intellectual exercise and without any intention to have it adopted as a global or regional auxlang.

as English, and all the languages that preceded it, teach us,
there's no particular characteristic to have, except that of being able to talk about everything,
and that's a goal that an aspiring language must consider...

[Travis B.]

Of course, one must remember that there are auxlangs specifically designed off English, such as Simplified Technical English.

[WeepingElf]

to construct something tantalisingly close to a conspiracy theory.

it's just a fact, English is present as auxlang all over the world...
there is no place for other auxlangs, following the Highlander principle...

Yes - there can be only one.

I have no aspirations of such a kind with any of my projects. I wrote up my ideas about auxlang design here many years ago, and I am considering making an actual conlang based on these ideas, but only as an intellectual exercise and without any intention to have it adopted as a global or regional auxlang.

as English, and all the languages that preceded it, teach us,
there's no particular characteristic to have, except that of being able to talk about everything,
and that's a goal that an aspiring language must consider...

Of course, I am planning to develop at least Old Albic into a fully functional language, which then could be used as an international auxiliary language, but suitability as an IAL is not a primary design goal. Any sufficiently developed conlang can be used that way.

[keenir]

as English, and all the languages that preceded it, teach us,
there's no particular characteristic to have, except that of being able to talk about everything,
and that's a goal that an aspiring language must consider...

Goal or ability?

English can be used to speak the words of Enkindu's lovers, as can Elgin's Liaden(sp)...but neither of these languages were created to do so.

to construct something tantalisingly close to a conspiracy theory.

it's just a fact, English is present as auxlang all over the world...
there is no place for other auxlangs, following the Highlander principle...

Yes - there can be only one.

Exactly, its Arabic!

Wait, no, its Cantonese!

Wait, no, its Spanish!

Wait, no, its...

Gee, its like the Gathering hasn't happened yet...or that there can in fact be many possible "auxlangs" by that definition of the word.