CONTENTS
Foreword … page 7
PART I — THE DESIGN OF INTERGLOSSA
PART II — THE SEMANTICS OF INTERGLOSSA
PART III — THE ETYMOLOGY OF INTERGLOSSA
FOREWORD
Some people may ask why a scientific worker should devote empty hours of fire-watching in Aberdeen to a task which professional linguists might more properly undertake. There is one sufficient answer to this question. Just because they are professional linguists, professional linguists are apt to underrate the linguistic difficulties of ordinary people, and hence to underrate the social importance of the language issue vis-à-vis world peace and world-wide human co-operation. Because natural science is the only existing form of human co-operation on a planetary scale, men of science, who have to turn to journals published in many languages for necessary information, are acutely aware that the babel of tongues is a social problem of the first magnitude. Men of science, more than others, have at their finger-tips an international vocabulary which is already in existence; and a biologist who looks forward to a health-conscious future cannot fail to recognize how popularization of new health standards is daily adding to the stock-in-trade of internationally current words in daily use.
Curiously enough, the first person to devise an interlanguage was an Aberdonian, George Dalgarno. His Ars Signorum came out in 1651. Its successor, the Real Character of Bishop Wilkins, appeared in 1678, issued at the expense and at the request of the Royal Society. From that day to this scientific workers have been prominent in the movement for promoting a world-auxiliary. The world-famed scientist Wilhelm Ostwald was in the forefront of the interlinguistic renaissance during the latter half of the nineteenth century; and Peano, the mathematician, is the author of one of the best recent projects. So there is no lack of good precedent.
More than three hundred pioneers have already put forward projects such as this. The author of Interglossa does not flatter himself with the hope that it will ever become the common language of international communication. A good enough reason for publishing this draft is that the post-war world may be ripe, as never before, for recognition of need for a remedy which so many others have sought. When need becomes articulate, it will be relatively simple for an international committee to draw on a common pool of effort, seemingly spent with little result. To that common pool the author modestly consigns this first draft in the hope that readers will make suggestions and offer constructive criticisms as a basis for something better. It is not a primer for the beginner. Were it so, the arrangement would be totally different, and it would be set out with sufficient showmanship to win the confidence of the beginner. Its aim is to enlist interest among those already familiar with the controversies which Basic English and other recent projects for an international auxiliary have excited. Consequently it touches on many issues which are not necessarily relevant to the task of learning it. Above all, it is a draft to stimulate fresh thinking. As such it invites constructive criticism from those who are not zealots of a particular faction. The pages which follow are the agenda for a discussion. The author wishes to express gratitude first to Mrs. Dorothy Baker, M. A., for assistance in preparing the final script and the 8,ooo-word English-Interglossa dictionary to follow this volume in the same series, also to Miss Dorothy Whitson who typed successive drafts with unfailing patience and accuracy.
Lancelot Hogben.
December, 1942.
THE DESIGN OF INTERGLOSSA
chapter
I. Interglossa and its Predecessors … 9
II. The Essential Grammar of Interglossa … 30
III. The Operative System … 42
IV. Heuristic Intermission … 56
INTERGLOSSA AND ITS PREDECESSORS
What follows is the outline of a project for a new constructed auxiliary. The writer believes that the alternative to barbarism is repudiation of national sovereignties in greater units of democratic co-operation, and that day-to-day co-operation of ordinary human beings on a planetary scale will not be possible unless educational authorities of different nations agree to adopt one and the same second language. The hope that it will be possible to induce educational authorities to do so is not Utopian. In many countries, some instruction in a second language is already part of the school curriculum for all children.
To fulfil the purpose stated above, a universal second language must be one in which children can progress towards proficiency more rapidly than they usually do. If it is to be a natural language, some simplified form of English, such as Ogden’s Basic, has no serious competitor. What is not so certain is that it would be wise to choose a natural language. There is much force in the contention that adoption of a natural language as an auxiliary would give those who habitually use it as a mother-tongue a position of undue cultural privilege, that this in its turn would breed resentment against them as a linguistic Herrenvolk, and that such resentment would eventually defeat the ends in view. A satisfactory auxiliary must be everybody’s language because it is also nobody’s language.
Whether such arguments do, or do not, prevail, one thing is clear. In assuming the task of making it easy for others to learn English, Ogden’s pioneer labours have brought into glaring relief defects of previous projects for a constructed auxiliary. If the considerations stated above turn the scales in favour of a constructed auxiliary, Ogden will not have laboured in vain. By ingenious manipulation of essentially English syntax, has pointed to possibilities which none of the pioneers of the international Auxiliary Language movement had taken into account, Proposals put forward so far have one or other of certain drawbacks which have been clarified by criticisms bestowed on them by partisans of others. If Interglossa does nothing more than stimulate criticism by its novel features, it will serve the useful purpose of clarifying a task for others to carry out with greater success.
It is therefore pertinent to specify some outstanding defects of artificial languages which have had a vogue in the past, more especially Volapük (V), Esperanto (E), Idiom Neutral (I.N.), Ido (I), Peano’s Interlingua (P)1, and Novial (N). We can best do so, if we recognize what characteristics make a language difficult to learn. Three major difficulties are: (a) surfeit of grammatical rules, (b) excessive number of essential words which the beginner has to memorize, (c) intrinsic unfamiliarity of the words themselves. Let us compare Basic with its competitors vis-à-vis each of these difficulties.
1 Peano is the Italian pioneer of mathematical logic. His work was the starting-point of Bertrand Russell’s. Some of it he published in his own auxiliary.
International Grammar
All artificial language projects so far devised have either (a) too much grammar of the wrong sort, or (b) not enough of the right. Of those mentioned, V, E and I retain flexions which English, Dutch, Scandinavian, Romance languages, and even German, have long since discarded. N, which is latest in the field, has more dead derivative apparatus than English. P alone follows the maxim: the best grammar is no grammar. Like Chinese, a totally flexionless language, it has gone further than English along the same road. From this point of view it might seem to be a simpler task to learn P than to learn English. The conclusion is dubious if we give due weight to what has been a powerful motive militating against Peano’s radical attitude to superfluous flexions of the type characteristic of Aryan languages. To do it justice a digression is here necessary.
Though it is not true to say that all nouns are concrete things or that all words which stand for processes or states are verbs, the converse of the first statement is correct, and it is generally (not so the verb be, except when it predicates real existence) true that the verb complex of a sentence is the part which predicates process or state. In a rough and ready way the fact that nouns and verbs have characteristic terminals does mean that we can more easily pick out what is thing, what is state or process—in short, that we can get some sort of picture of the sentence-landscape. This helps the beginner to translate a passage which contains unfamiliar words, and by doing so increases confidence in the prospect of further progress.
To say this does not mean that the existence of such terminals or the acceptance of morphological categories characteristic of the Aryan and Finno-Ugrian families is the only or the best way of achieving the same result. There are other devices. Two are: (i) a fixed pattern of word-order; (ii) the existence of empty words, such as the French article which sticks to the noun with the same Romantic fidelity as the substantive suffix of E, and is therefore a signpost pointing to an oncoming substantive.
Because P is the isolating offspring of its highly flexional parent, Latin, it has a poor equipment of empty words, and an aristocratic indifference to the necessity for simple rules of sentence-construction. The fact is that no pioneer of language-planning—least of all Peano—has undertaken the task of investigating what rules of word-order contribute most to intrinsic clarity of meaning and ease of recognition. Like Jespersen, and like his predecessors, all of whom had adopted a much more conservative attitude to structural grammar, Peano never got to grips with the essentials of syntax. The essentials of international syntax include: (a) a sentence-landscape designed in conformity with straightforward rules; (b) elimination of different word-forms with the same semantic content, and other redundant modes of expression.
Word-economy
Authors of all projects mentioned above underestimated the difficulty of mastering an unnecessarily large vocabulary, and failed to understand the need for semantic spring-cleaning as a prelude to any effective policy for mitigating it. None of them attempted analysis of the irreducible minimum of vocables essential for self-expression. The fact that Ogden has done so, rather than any intrinsic merit of English itself, is one sufficient reason for the popularity of Basic and for its appeal to those who regard projects for an artificial auxiliary with little favour. Peano, who was mainly concerned with the needs of science and technology, made no attempt to keep an essential word-list within the limits of what ordinary people without a large vocabulary of technical terms can easily learn. The authors of V, E, I.N., I and N made a half-hearted attempt which has justly earned the vigorous criticism of Ogden and some of his supporters.
What word-economy recent designers of constructed auxiliaries have aimed at achieving is of one sort only. On what seem to be purely a priori grounds, they have chosen batteries of affixes to multiply word-forms with the same recognizable root. Some of these affixes merely trail in the peculiar grammatical traditions of Aryan languages. Some have absolutely no semantic content at all (cf. E um for indefinite relationship). Others (e.g. E bo- for in-law as in mother-in-law) are merely shorthand for trivial types of relationship sufficiently expressed by other and necessary formal elements already part of the verbal stock-in-trade. The authors of E, I, I.N. and N tried to establish order where chaos existed (cf. -ship, -dom, -head, -hood, -ity in English) without probing into the intrinsic value of what they were salvaging. When we look at the result as a whole, their choice of derivative affixes reflects the same preoccupation which motivated the prevailing attitude to flexion.
The only satisfactory way of dealing with the problem of word-economy is Ogden’s way; to start with words as experimental material and analyse what semantic elements enter into large classes. It may well, and in fact does, happen that these elements have little relation to the pattern of derivative affixes or of flexions in languages which have grown in the haphazard manner common to all existing natural ones. This very fact, as Ogden’s work so richly illustrates, has a corollary which enthusiasts for auxiliary language proposals have been slow to recognize. If Ogden has achieved such outstanding success within the strait-jacket of acceptable English usage, what economies might be possible if someone undertook the task with complete freedom to prescribe an idiom best suited to maximate word-economy?
International Word-material
When all is said and done, learning a language involves memorizing a large number of new words. When we have reduced the number as far as we can without prejudice to the end in view, the beginner has to commit to memory what remains. Ease of doing so depends largely on familiarity with the material, i.e. on what associations we can make when first confronted with any single vocable. It is possible to reduce to negligible dimensions the load of new words with no helpful associations for the beginner, if we take stock of three facts:
(i) During the past two centuries, science has created a world-wide technical vocabulary;
(ii) As modern technology transforms everyday life, what was once the vocabulary of the laboratory becomes the vocabulary of the street-corner;
(iii) Scientific terms such as stratosphere, aeroplane, heterodyne, panchromatic, telephone, phonograph, gramophone, and hundreds of others on the lips of every schoolchild to-day come almost exclusively from Latin or Greek, more especially from Greek.
To the extent that Latin roots predominate in all the projects mentioned, all of them, like English itself, have a large stock-in-trade of truly international roots for which the beginner can readily make associations. The fact remains that most artificial languages have a large stock of national words presumably included to propitiate national sentiment of one sort or another. Thus Novial, the latest arrival, is essentially—like English—a Latin-Teutonic hybrid, and the Teutonic ingredients are sheer dead-weight to anyone who does not speak German, Dutch or a Scandinavian dialect. The same criticism does not apply to the flexionless, but otherwise scholarly, Latin of Peano. With due regard to the number of borrowed Greek words in classical Latin, P is open to a criticism applicable to every constructed language yet devised. None of them contains as high a proportion of Greek roots as English itself.
A truly international vocabulary must be the offspring of technology, and technology increasingly turns to Greek rather than to Latin for new material. Of the many who know that micro- means small, few know that parvus means the same. Current articles on nutrition and psychology in any woman’s journal, or on photography and radio in any schoolboy’s magazine, illustrate the daily invasion of everyday speech by Greek roots. Peano apart, authors who have put forward plans for constructed auxiliaries lived at a time—or like Jespersen formed their views at a time—when few scientists and technicians, still fewer linguists, anticipated the present tempo of infiltration of Greek roots into everyday life. Consequently artificial languages so far proposed scarcely touch the fringe of the problem of word-familiarity. In the simplest possible terms, our task is to assemble a vocabulary based on internationally current roots of which the semantic content is as transparent as that of geo-, aer-, tele-, phon-, graph-, micro-, phot- and the like. The possibility of achieving this result gives the problem of word-economy a new impetus. The success of our efforts in part depends on keeping the number of words required within the limits of equipment at our disposal.
The mere fact that there is already an international vocabulary of medicine, of agriculture, of horticulture, of navigation, of mensuration, of astronomy, of chemical manufacture, of engineering, of cartography and of mathematics, or that the number of such terms in everyday speech has increased by leaps and bounds since the time of Zamenhof, are not the only facts about the impact of Science on speech relevant to choice of satisfactory word-material for a properly constructed auxiliary. Equally important is the fact that this existing international vocabulary rings the changes on certain roots which have established firm claims to further use. Consequently we know which way the cat will jump. We can forecast with some assurance what roots of given meaning can or cannot come into general use through the increasing infiltration of new technical terms into daily speech. If need arises to adopt a new technical term to label waterproof autograph forms for water-polo champions, it is highly likely to contain necto, which turns up in many biological names for swimming organisms. If a special root for swimming appliances invades daily speech on a world-wide scale, it is not likely to recall the French word nager or its Esperanto equivalent.
Essential Features of Interglossa
From this brief commentary upon the defects of artificial languages exposed by contrast with the considerable merits of Basic English, we now turn to a brief summary of the essential features of Interglossa.
(i) Interglossa is a purely isolating language. It admits many compounds built from bricks which are independent elements, but it has no dead affixes prescribed in accordance with a priori considerations. In so far as it is a flexionless language, it resembles Chinese (or Peanese), but it differs from P because it has a large stock-in-trade of compounds sufficiently explicit in an appropriate context to anyone who knows or can recognize their parts. It also differs from P with respect to the remaining characteristics specified below.
The reader may here ask whether an isolating language has any advantage over a language of the agglutinative type, i.e. a flexional language like Esperanto with no irregularities. There are three sufficient reasons for preferring the former:
(a) Mass production in language tuition calls for maximum division of labour in the plant. That is to say, maximum word-economy in the sense defined above implies maximum mobility of all the elements of meaning.
(b) Familiarity breeds contempt. That is to say, flexion, however regular, forces units of meaning into situations where they are irrelevant and therefore more liable to semantic erosion.
(c) The grammar of an isolating (analytical) language is the highest common factor of all grammar. It is the native idiom of China, and does not confront the Japanese or the Bantu with the arbitrary difficulties inherent in any agglutinative language based on Aryan models. In short, any language designed like V or E imposes the grammatical idiosyncrasies of a particular language family on everybody who uses it. Unlike its predecessors, designed exclusively, and admittedly,1 to meet the taste of Western Europe and the English-speaking peoples, Interglossa is for a world in which China, Japan, and eventually the peoples of Africa, will march in step with the U.S.S.R. and with western civilization.2
1 See Jespersen, An International Language, p. 53 and elsewhere.
2 An isolating language has a further advantage. It is easy to make every element explicit through visual aids. Thus freedom from lifeless affixes simplifies the task of instruction through the medium of the universal picture-language isotype without recourse to exposition in the home vernacular. We can therefore contemplate production of manuals for a world-wide market. The history of Japanese writing sufficiently shows the difficulties which beset the attempt to adapt a pictographic script to a language of the agglutinative type.
(ii) Interglossa has a very rigid and straightforward word-order, with features designed to limit recourse to congested expressions. The pattern is the same for statements, questions, requests, commands, and for all classes of subordinate (including relative) clauses. The verbal stock-in-trade of Interglossa includes a small battery of empty words to act as signposts of sentence-landscape. For the same reason, certain classes of words have a characteristic final syllable, but these classes do not correspond to arbitrary non-semantic categories (parts of speech) defined by flexions. Interglossa has no flexions.
(iii) Interglossa has a vocabulary based on internationally current roots. It therefore has a Greek content enormous in comparison with that of earlier projects. Its very name symbolizes the fact that it is a Latin-Greek hybrid, as Novial is a Latin-Teutonic hybrid. Since we have many Latin-Greek alternatives in current international technical terms, it is possible to combine the claims of word-economy vis-à-vis self-expression (see pp. 22-23) with the advantages of a residual battery of synonyms for stylistic purposes.
Each word has a number, and if Interglossa sufficiently interests the public it will be easy to test out the claims to priority of two or more synonyms for each numbered pigeon-hole in the semantic schema which follows. Designing all the details of a fully-fledged interlanguage is not a one-man job. Mass observation on the basis of questionnaires sent out to different groups of people of different nationalities would settle which words in each pigeon-hole are entitled to first rank. Readers may suggest alternatives, and an international committee could submit the result to ballot.
The use of psychologically live word-material necessarily limits an ideal solution of the phonetic difficulties of learning languages. Fortunately the Mediterranean vowel battery is small, but Greek abounds in consonant-clusters which offer great difficulties to people who speak Japanese, Chinese, Bantu or Polynesian dialects. Where equivalent Greek and Latin roots are internationally current, this fact should guide the choice of the designer and that of the beginner (see p. 30). We can take advantage of Latin and Greek alternatives to exclude homophones (cf. the root homophones sol in solar and solitary). The root xero in many botanical and horticultural terms (e.g. xerophyte) would be a near-homophone to zero, because many people find it difficult to pronounce an initial x as ks or z as ts. So it cannot have first choice as the equivalent word for dry.
If we aim at easy recognition and easy association, it is fatal to maltreat roots for the sake of uniform spelling. Uniformity is less important than consistency. It does not matter whether one sound always has one symbol. What does matter is whether the same symbol stands for only one sound (cf. the vagaries of G and J, S and Z in English). The main difficulty about the spelling conventions of a Latin-Greek stock-in-trade of words is that different nations do not follow the same plan with respect to Romanization of Greek roots, e.g. French, German and English have PH where Scandinavians and Italians use the F. Since the international binomial nomenclature of systematic biology, and that of anatomy and chemistry, stick to the older forms, Interglossa provisionally adopts them. As Ogden has emphasized, spelling is a secondary issue, if a language has great potential word-economy. And we may leave the details to an international committee.
(iv) Interglossa has a system of word-economy which takes full advantage of its analytical grammar, and hence combines features characteristic of Basic English and of Chinese. To clarify the principles involved, two terms are useful. As we call identical vocables which mean different things homophones, we may call different vocables with the same semantic content homosemes. Likewise we may call words with a common element of meaning coenosemes, Thus ascend (go up) and descend (go down) are coenosemes, as are study (work-room) and worker (work-man). The word homoseme does not mean quite the same as synonym. Big, large and great are synonyms in the most everyday sense of the term; but the homosemes much and great are not. The reason why most of us hesitate to call them synonyms is that they are not always interchangeable. The rules of grammar prescribe a definite context for each. Much predicating largeness may be the qualifier of a verb or another epithet, great can predicate largeness of nouns alone.
As Chinese is handicapped with an overgrowth of homophones, Aryan languages are overloaded with homosemes, which produce difficulties of the opposite sort when a person new to their idiosyncrasies tries to learn them. In contact-vernaculars such as Beach-la-Mar or Pidgin-English, we get a practical demonstration of what happens when a multiplicity of semantically redundant word-forms defeats the comprehension of the newcomer; and we can apply the lesson to the design of a constructed language. Relatively little economy by reduction of homosemes is possible within the framework of acceptable English idiom; but the only limit to doing so in an artificial language is the need to keep a clear prospect of “sentence-landscape” in view. The author of Basic English has made the very best of a bad job by pruning the luxuriant overgrowth of English coenosemes to the limit consistent with educated speech.
The combination of both principles, i.e. reduction of homosemes as in Chinese and of coenosemes as in Basic, is a distinctive feature of Interglossa among artificial languages put forward to date. The outstanding characteristic of word-economy in Basic is the reduction of verb coenosemes by recourse to verbal operators. In combination with other words these eighteen operators do all the work of four thousand verbs in a French dictionary, and far more in an English one. In a constructed language we can do the same with noun coenosemes. Within the framework of English usage we can make postman, hangman, milkman, dustman with the common seme man; playhouse, bakehouse, alehouse with the common seme house; footwear, handwear, headwear with the common seme wear. In the design of a constructed language with a rich assortment of generic terms we are free to build up a host of other domestic and occupational compounds without adding new elements to our word-stock. By the use of the negative particle as a qualifier equivalent to the affixes un- or in- of untrue, unclean, incompatible, we can also eliminate the need for many “opposites” for which natural languages prescribe separate words. At this point partisans of Basic English may ask why it is necessary to list 880 vocables in place of the 850 essential items on the Basic English word-list.1 The answer is that the figures are not comparable. Interglossa and Basic English start from different assumptions about how much work a single word can profitably do. If the end in view is to make things easy for the beginner we have to bear in mind two considerations:
(a) Suitable definition of familiar objects often calls for more effort than learning a new label;
(b) When no common thread of meaning connects one use with another, an additional label is not necessarily more difficult to learn than an additional use of the same vocable.
1 The list of essential vocables on pp. 249-256 contains 880 numbered items and an additional 74 of which the internationally current form is consonant with the phonetic pattern of Interglossa. Actually our list of 880 numbered ítems contains at least twenty words which are internationally current in the form prescribed, e.g.: agenda (809); bureau (816); cardo (740); coxa (533); data (827); fenestra (714); flora (581); lamina (757); libido (284); major (45); minor (46); minus (115); plus (118); propaganda (846); radio (386); spatula (775); telefon (855); telegram (856); zero (26). The names of the metals are simply the plural forms of the corresponding items in the international periodic table. Plural forms which are also internationally current include spectra (662) and entera (502). It is therefore fair to say that our list of essential vocables other than words which we can adopt from the international vocabulary of technics or commerce without any change of form contains less than 860 constructed elements in all. In reality the 850 word-list printed on a folded slip in the primers of Basic omits 17 necessary pronouns and possessives, 32 numerals and 56 flexional forms of the operative verbs. If we charitably overlook the fact that Basic operates at large with the -ing and -ed terminals without a general rule about what class of words invariably take them or about how they affect the meaning of the end-product, it is fair to say that Basic demands mastery of at least 950 distinct vocables, not counting calendrical items.
In its choice of abstract terms Basic English takes a highly indulgent attitude to what constitutes a common thread of meaning. When we apply one word sharp to a remark, to a tooth, and to a pain, the only thread of meaning common to all three situations is a vague value judgment; and if we let metaphor have full rein in this way it is easy to keep down the number of items on our word-list. Indeed, there is only one limit to the process of reduction. In the end we are left with two vocables, one for approval, the other for disapproval. Admittedly, we cannot set it limit to suggestive use of metaphor in daily life. Nor can we draw a clear-cut boundary between metaphorical and generic usage of words. Still, we can provide a sufficient number of specific terms for qualities with no very obvious connexion; and this has been the aim of the author.
A constructed language cannot admit words of so diverse semantic content as order, listed in the miniature Basic Dictionary as meaning: arrangement, sequence, class, command, religious body, decoration.1 It cannot admit such definitions as (ibid.) “undertaking” for enterprise and “(statement of) undertaking” for promise. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idiom which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder. In what follows the aim has been to keep sharpness of definition within the limits set by two dispensations:
(a) Since action and its product are necessarily co-existent, the same word (e.g. writing in English) can suffice for both in a given context;
(b) Where a metaphorical usage is common to equivalent words of different origin and unrelated language families (cf. tongue-language for the organ of that name and for a local variety of speech) it is permissible to conclude that the link between the two is substantial. (Unfortunately, there is no source to which one can turn for a world survey of metaphorical extensions such as the example cited.)
1 This is especially true of the hundred items (“Operations”), which make up the grammatical matrix of Basic. Laying aside the eighteen verbs—not one of which has an absolutely clear-cut terrain—the remaining words (82) include such obvious pitfalls for the unwary as any, some, that, ever, well, still, even, only, all. The prepositions, on the use of which Basic relies so much, are by no means above reproach. Those that have a single characteristic meaning (e.g. in) enter into innumerable and inescapable idiomatic combinations. Several (e.g. against, with, by) have more than one characteristic meaning. Others (of, for) are as empty as the “essential” articles a and the. All in all, at least a third of the words listed as operations are so polyvalent as to claim front rank among the booby traps for the beginner who is learning English.
The numerical word-economy of Basic English owes much to two circumstances which are not propitious to the needs of the beginner. It includes abstract words with wide diversifications of meaning by metaphorical extension; and it has a very small number of names for common objects. In conformity with the principle stated above, Interglossa does not aim at economy of either sort. Where self-explicit compounds involving generic terms are not available as names for common things, it is far better to provide a new one than to leave the learner to fish for a periphrastic definition. Consequently, our list of picturable names is almost twice as large as that of Basic English. Basic offers 25 botanical or zoological and 34 anatomical words. Chapter IX of this draft lists 80 botanical or zoological and 68 anatomical terms as numbered items, in addition to 60 plant, animal or medical names not numbered because assimilated without change of the internationally current form.
Choice of words in Ogden’s Basic list depends on the exigencies of accepted English usage. So also choice of words in a language designed in accordance with the principles stated above depends less on abstract logical principles than on what internationally current root material is to hand. The system of word-economy implicit in the design of Interglossa makes it possible to do with less than 750 words what Basic does with 850; but it would be absurd to restrict the vocabulary within such limits, if only because Basic has a ready-made residual stock-in-trade on which to draw. In a certain sense this is true of Interglossa, since Interglossa permits coining of new amplifiers or substantives from internationally current roots in accordance with rules prescribed for terminals. None the less, the English dictionary is more accessible than those technical works in which internationally current roots abound.
Common nouns come last in the classes of words arranged in what follows. It is necessarily arbitrary to fix the number of essential common nouns, because every occupation and social group within a speech-community has its own peculiar ones. Even novels abound in technical terms which are mere expletives to most readers. One thing which simplifies our task is the fact that an interlanguage word-list need contain no national names, i.e. words for specifically local institutions (casino, bazaar), officials (kaiser, concierge), proper names (Stalin, Leningrad), or implements (samovar, sjambok). It will tolerate such words automatically, as so often happens in the history of natural languages. This means that people of any speech-community have the last word about how to spell their own towns (Wien, København), or countries (Deutschland, Suomi); and the same words serve as adjectives (e.g. Scotch tweed = Scotland texti). Another class of words calls for similar treatment. Few people talk about gills and fins, unless they have some technical interest in comparative anatomy. Those who have, will know the internationally current terms (branchia and pterygia) for them.
At this point, a necessary qualification to preceding remarks will forestall misunderstanding at a later stage. Semantic rectitude does not prescribe that juxtaposition of two vocables in a particular order must have the same singularity of meaning as have two ordered symbols of a non-commutative algebra. Everyday discourse has functions other than those of mathematical symbolism, if only because it has to engage the interest of an audience. If the fact receives tardy recognition in elementary teaching of highly flexional languages, the study of completely isolating ones, e.g. of the Chinese group, or of an almost completely isolating language such as Anglo-American, forces us to recognize how extensively we rely on context to convey meaning without multiplication of verbal counters or of grammatical devices to complicate the rules of the game. Divorced from its context, we are free to interpret the couplet religious worker as: (a) any member of the working class with religious convictions or professions; (b) a person who does regular voluntary or paid work for a religious organization. In an actual slab of sustained discourse its organic relation to the semantic gestalt would rarely if ever give rise to misunderstanding between English-speaking people; and the disadvantages of sacrificing word-economy or economy of space and effort to legislate for so few occasions would out-weigh the benefits.
To some extent, mathematics also relies on context to supply the necessary clue to correct interpretation. For instance, we interpret the cluster d2x both as a differential of the second order in the domain of the infinitesimal calculus and as the product of x and the square of d in the domain of elementary algebra. If we speak here or elsewhere of a couplet or compound as self-explicit, the epithet is therefore shorthand for sufficiently explicit in a context where it will commonly crop up. Context, and context alone, dictates how we interpret the vagaries of the allegedly “possessive” terminal ’s in father’s debts, father’s death and father’s dress-shirt. Context, and context alone, endorses the relationship implicit in churchyard, brickyard, backyard. A little reflection on such illustrations of its role should encourage the fastidious reader to take a tolerant view about the need for hard and fast rules for framing compounds whose meaning is sufficiently suggestive in an appropriate situation. Words are not mere atoms. They are organs of communication. As such, their functions inescapably depend on the whole body of discourse.
Reading and Self-expression
Three classes of difficulties discussed in what has gone before do not exhaust those which confront a person who is learning a language. Language-learning involves four skills as different as arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry. The skills necessary for complete mastery are: (a) auditory recognition; (b) pronunciation and intonation; (c) self-expression in writing; (d) recognition of the written word. Whether one of them is more or less difficult to acquire than another depends partly on personal gifts, such as visual memory and mimetic aptitude. Opportunities for use by reading, by travel or by correspondence play a part, as also intrinsic characteristics of the language itself.
Languages which are relatively holophrastic, such as French, offer greater difficulties for auditory recognition than more staccato languages like German. The syntax of German makes reading difficult, and Hottentot clicks or Chinese tones are hard to mimic without special phonetic training. With due allowance to these considerations, one thing stands out clear. On the whole, most people master reading knowledge with least difficulty, and acquire the trick of auditory recognition last of all. With constant use, the latter comes easily to anyone who has acquired the knack of self-expression in writing. So auditory recognition is of minor interest, if the end in view is to make things easy for the beginner.
What is more important is the difficulty of reading relative to the difficulty of self-expression. A difference between the skill required for reading knowledge and the skill required for self-expression is relevant to a criticism unjustly levelled against Basic English. All of us know the meaning of many native words which we never use in speech or writing, and the gap between the vocabulary of reading and that of self-expression is inevitably greater when our means of Communication is a foreign language. To read a language we need to be able to recognize a relatively large number of words when memory (and ingenuity) is prompted by context. Self-expression involves very ready recollection of a relatively small number of words without extrinsic help. So part of the art of mastering a language is to get a thorough knowledge of a small battery of essential words for self-expression, and a nodding acquaintance with a much larger residual stock for reading.
Since it is much harder to remember words without help from the context than to remember them when the context prompts us, the desirability of designing a language with great potential word-economy is not incompatible with the stylistic advantage of having a copious vocabulary. Ogden has shown us that English has astonishing possibilities of word-economy, and we all know that it has a richer residual battery of synonyms than any other language. This is partly due to its hybrid structure, and Interglossa is also a hybrid. If we want to combine potential word-economy for ready self-expression with what versatility of expression safeguards style against monotony, we can take advantage of this fact. Different roots of international technical terms may have the same semantic content. Hence the problem of choosing word-material is not as difficult as it might seem. We are not forced to undertake a statistical word-count of internationally current roots. Part of our essential word-list offers the beginner a choice of two words. For purposes of self-expression the beginner will naturally choose the one to which he (or she) associates most readily, or can most easily pronounce. For purposes of reading, or communication with others who associate more readily to the alternative form, a cursory study of the word-list will usually suffice.
In this context it is fitting to forestall the intelligible criticism that a page of Interglossa does not look easier than a page of Novial. Anyone who has had a good secondary school education in Britain or America can guess his or her way through a passage of Novial (or other interlanguage of the same type) without the preliminary precaution of consulting a grammar or dictionary. This fact gives anyone who has not thought much about interlinguistic problems an unduly favourable impression of the ease with which it is possible to master Novial. It would not be difficult to construct a highly latinized strip of English through which an otherwise well-educated Frenchman with no knowledge of our language could also guess his way. English of this type would certainly (if only because the acceptable operative constructions on which Basic word-economy depends are Teutonic in origin) be more difficult to learn thoroughly than is Ogden’s Basic.
To an English reader Novial looks more easy than it is for two reasons. It takes over the grammatical pattern common to Aryan languages (with the semantic inconsistencies inherent in it), and it has a large hybrid stock-in-trade of words from the two major sources of our own. One has less formal grammar to learn than one would have if one set out to learn French or German; but, having traversed the first few milestones, one has still to grapple with the semantic difficulties inherent in the pattern of the Aryan group. One has to go on piling up a word-list without information concerning which words are most essential, The fact that Novial looks so easy to read is a feature of high publicity value. It does not signify that it is also easy to master the art of self-expression in Novial.
To cut down the difficulties by judicious word-economy we have to delve more deeply into semantic issues which Jespersen and his predecessors side-stepped. Inevitably, we find our-selves gravitating away from the grammatical pattern of the Aryan family to a more universal idiom with features common to Chinese. The result is that learning a language so designed is a lively training in clear thinking of a kind which anyone can usefully undertake. In fact, the grammar of Interglossa, as is largely true of Basic, is semantics. Its author does not claim that it is easy to read a page of Interglossa at sight without previous information concerning its structure. It is designed with the aim of reducing to a minimum time and effort necessary for complete mastery of self-expression. From that point of view, all that the average intelligent person can achieve by months devoted to the study of E, I, I.N., P or N should be over in the same number of days devoted to Interglossa.
Here, as elsewhere, word-economy means numerical limitation of vocables necessary for unaffected discourse about matters of common interest between people of different nationalities. A stock-in-trade of word-material limited in this way will not necessarily offer a compact means of expressing every fine distinction found in a lexicon. To avoid misunderstanding about claims put forward for our essential word-list, it is well to remind ourselves of what Ogden has stressed in the exposition of his own method for adapting English to international use. Dictionary definitions give a false impression of what precision even well-educated people do—or can—achieve when they discuss matters outside a common domain of specialist knowledge. Part of the job of a dictionary is to divulge what limitations the specialist as such imposes on familiar words in a particular field of technical discourse. Such limitations do not and cannot impose a censorship on everyday speech. English-speaking people who are not biologists use and will go on using the term bug without concern for what limitations biologists impose on it in a discussion at the Royal Society. They use and will continue to use the term adultery with little, if any, regard for its unilateral definition in canon law. Where precision is essential at this level of communication, Interglossa prescribes international technical terms if such are available, local terms for local occurrences, or failing either, small residual batteries drawn up by Specialists concerned by use of internationally current roots in accordance with rules for expansion of vocabulary in Chapter X. Professor Edgar de Wahl, author of a project which he has called Occidental, and Lott, the inventor of Mundolingue, have done the necessary spade work.
Teaching Interglossa
Some linguists will protest that I flatter the public by assuming the widespread existence of a large technical vocabulary. In fact, those who are hostile to plans for a constructed language expect to have it both ways. They underestimate the difficulties which natural languages put in the way of collaboration between ordinary men and women who are not gifted linguists, and they overestimate the difficulties of learning an artificial language, because they are not en rapport with the cultural realities of the modern world. Professors of Greek who do not know what a heterodyne set is would be surprised at the number of such words in any hobbies magazine for schoolboys. It is therefore pertinent to add two comments upon objections of this kind:
(a) The intrusion of international technical terms into daily speech is daily gathering momentum, especially in countries where there is public encouragement for scientific research and its application, or good popular scientific journalism. The spectacular infiltration of such terms into the Russian language since the Revolution is sufficiently evident in place-names alone.1 Because the tempo of infiltration is increasing we can prospect with tolerable confidence what roots are likely to come into daily speech in the near future.
1 If pushed to define what is an international root in an age of potential plenty, I would say I mean a root which occurs in: (a) any technical term in a League of Nations Report on agriculture, malnutrition, public health or the drug traffic; (b) any proper name printed with a capital letter in a gardener’s catalogue; (c) most words printed in italics in the index of The Science of Life, Science for the Citizen, The Outline of the Universe or other book of the same genre.
(b) It is not likely that any considerable group of speech-communities will adopt an interlingua unless the forces working for international co-operation are stronger than those which are also working to perpetuate militarism and racialism. To put forward a plan of this sort therefore presupposes confidence in the possibility of a more enlightened world in which the disposition to spread scientific knowledge as a basis of social prosperity and a high standard of communal health prevails. In short, Interglossa, or any other artificial language, is a project for a civilization in which education will deal far more with the realities of health and the productive forces of everyday life, than with the dreary superstitions of the past. Biology is already taking the place of the classics in the school curriculum. A world which can be induced to adopt an auxiliary will be a techno-conscious and a health-conscious world, a world with a much larger common stock of everyday words derived from roots current in modern technology.
Since the word-material of Interglossa is based on roots internationally current in science, every vocable can form the basis of association with familiar words or with new and interesting information about the world we live in. The process of learning the vocabulary can therefore have the excitement of the chase. Thus we track down poly (many) from what is common to polygon and polygamy. From polygon and pentagon the pupil would track down gono (angle), from pentagon and pentameter through gasometer we get penta (five) and metro (measure), thence via cyclometer and bicycle through cycli (circle) via bigamy, giving bi (two) back through polygamy to gameo (marriage). From this we can start in various directions. Anyone who has taken a school course in elementary biology will recognize the last word as the root in gametes (sperm and egg), whose marriage gives rise to the embryo. It turns up again in Phanerogams (conifers and flowering plants) so called because their marital arrangements are manifest (phanero) or clear to the eye in contradistinction to Cryptogams (ferns, mosses, seaweeds and fungi), whose sexual processes are cryptic, i.e. hidden (crypto). Though they are common in international scientific terms, some of the roots employed in what follows are not yet in everyday speech or in school science instruction. Admittedly, copa (oar), which occurs in international zoological names for many swimming animals with oar-like limbs, is not an ingredient of daily conversation; but since the Copepoda (a tribe of small shrimps so called for the reason stated) constitute the majority of animal species in the surface layers of the sea and are the chief food of herrings, the act of learning the meaning of copa need not be as lifeless as that of learning the equivalent Finnish word airo.
With the help of the teacher the beginner should thus be able to associate the meaning of each new vocable with a word already familiar or with some new and arresting piece of information about the modern world. Since this draft is for the English-speaking reader, it is sufficient to show how to do so if the beginner speaks English. Chapter IV and the Mnemotechnic notes on pp. 256-282, give appropriate examples for every vocable listed. The claim of Interglossa is that if it contains no psychologically inert word-material such as lapin or Knabe. At the school stage learning Interglossa would be learning semantics, everyday science and comparative etymology hand-in-hand.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I
WORD-MATERIAL OF ESPERANTO AND INTERGLOSSA
Many readers may be unfamiliar with Esperanto except by hearsay. So it is pertinent to set forth, in tabular form, representative specimens of its word-material side by side with the Interglossa equivalents. It would obviously be easy to exaggerate the shortcomings of Esperanto by choosing a small battery of samples from a large class of vocables such as nouns or adjectives. Since space does not permit the author to give the Esperanto equivalent of every vocable of Interglossa, the only just way of bringing out the eclecticism of Esperanto and the international currency of the word-stock of the present project is to give a fairly complete exposition of certain small classes of words which are of particular interest from the standpoint of syntax. We shall therefore list side by side the personal pronouns, numerals, chief prepositions and conjunctions of Esperanto with their Interglossa substitutes. The right-hand column gives an Anglo-American key-word to aid recognition of the Interglossa equivalent; and the reader who has any doubts about the mnemotechnic credentials of the latter can refer to the notes in Chapter XI, where each vocable hits a reference number, indicated in parenthesis.