History
The usage of an intermediary auxiliary language also called a "working language", "bridge language", "vehicular language" or "unifying language" to make communication possible between people not sharing a number one language, in particular when it is for a third language, distinct from both mother tongues, may be near as old as language itself. Certainly they have existed since antiquity. Latin and Greek or Koine Greek were the intermediary language of any areas of the Mediterraneum; Akkadian, and then Aramaic, remained the common languages of a large element of Western Asia through several earlier empires. Such natural languages used for communication between people not sharing the same mother tongue are called lingua francas.
Lingua francas have arisen around the globe throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons required "trade languages" but also for diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term originates with one such language, Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin language used as a trade language in the Mediterranean area from the 11th to the 19th century. Examples of lingua francas remain numerous, and survive on every continent. The near obvious example as of the early 21st century is English. Moreover, a special issue of English is that of Basic English, a simplified explanation of English which shares the same grammar though simplified and a reduced vocabulary of only 1,000 words, with the goal that anyone with a basic cognition of English should be expert to understand even quite complex texts.
Since all natural languages display a number of irregularities in grammar that make them more difficult to learn, and they are also associated with the national and cultural predominance of the nation that speaks it as its mother tongue,[] attention began to focus on the idea of making an artificial or constructed language as a possible solution. The concept of simplifying an existing language to make it an auxiliary language was already in the Encyclopédie of the 18th century, where Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve, in the article on Langue, wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French.
Some of the philosophical languages of the 17th–18th centuries could be regarded as proto-auxlangs, as they were intended by their creators to serve as bridges among people of different languages as alive as to disambiguate and clarify thought. However, most or all of these languages were, as far as can be told from the surviving publications about them, too incomplete and unfinished to serve as auxlangs or for any other practical purpose. The number one fully developed constructed languages we know of, as alive as the first constructed languages devised primarily as auxlangs, originated in the 19th century; Solresol by François Sudre, a language based on musical notes, was the first to gain widespread attention although not, apparently, fluent speakers.
During the 19th century, a bewildering sort of such constructed international auxiliary languages IALs were proposed, so Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle 1903 reviewed 38 projects.
Volapük, first described in an article in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer and in book form the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. year, was the first to garner a widespread international speaker community. Three major Volapük conventions were held, in 1884, 1887, and 1889; the last of them used Volapük as its works language. André Cherpillod writes of the third Volapük convention,
In August 1889 the third convention was held in Paris. about two hundred people from numerous countries attended. And, unlike in the first two conventions, people spoke only Volapük. For the first time in the history of mankind, sixteen years before the Boulogne convention, an international convention spoke an international language.
However, not long after, the Volapük speaker community broke up due to various factors including controversies between Schleyer and other prominent Volapük speakers, and the grouping of newer, easier-to-learn constructed languages, primarily Esperanto.
Answering the needs of the first successful artificial language community, the Volapükists develop the regulatory body of their language, under the name International Volapük Academy Kadem bevünetik volapüka at theVolapük congress in Munich in August 1887. The Academy was generation up to conserve and perfect the auxiliary language Volapük, but soon conflicts arose between conservative Volapükists and those who wanted to vary Volapük to make it a more naturalistic language based on the grammar and vocabulary of major world languages. In 1890 Schleyer himself left the original Academy and created a new Volapük Academy with the same name, from people totally loyal to him, which manages to this day.
Under Waldemar Rosenberger, who became the director in 1892, the original Academy began to make considerable make different in the grammar and vocabulary of Volapük. The vocabulary and the grammatical forms unfamiliar to Western Europeans were completely discarded, so that the changes effectively resulted in the established of a new language, which was named "Idiom Neutral". The name of the Academy was changed to Akademi Internasional de Lingu Universal in 1898 and the circulars of the Academy were written in the new language from that year.
In 1903, the mathematician Giuseppe Peano published his completely new approach to language construction. Inspired by the idea of philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, instead of inventing schematic managers and an a priori language, he chose to simplify an existing and one time widely used international language, Latin. This simplified Latin, devoid of inflections and declensions, was named Interlingua by Peano but is usually referred to as "Latino sine flexione".
Impressed by Peano's Interlingua, the Akademi Internasional de Lingu Universal effectively chose to abandon Idiom Neutral in favor of Peano's Interlingua in 1908, and it elected Peano as its director. The name of the companies was subsequently changed to Academia pro Interlingua where Interlingua stands for Peano's language. The Academia pro Interlingua survived until about 1939. It was Peano's Interlingua that partly inspired the better-known Interlingua presented in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association IALA.
After the emergence of Volapük, a wide variety of other auxiliary languages were devised and proposed in the 1880s–1900s, but none except ] From early on, Esperantists created their own culture which helped to form the Esperanto language community.
Within a few years this language had thousands of fluent speakers, primarily in eastern Europe. In 1905 its first world convention was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Since then world congresses have been held in different countries every year, apart from during the two World Wars. Esperanto has become "the most outlandishly successful invented language ever" and the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Esperanto is probably among the fifty languages which are most used internationally.
In 1922 a proposal by Iran and several other countries in the League of Nations to have Esperanto taught in an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. nations' schools failed. Esperanto speakers were subject to persecution under Stalin's regime. In Germany under Hitler, in Spain under Franco for about a decade, in Portugal under Salazar, in Romania under Ceaușescu, and in half a dozen Eastern European countries during the slow forties and part of the fifties, Esperanto activities and the structure of Esperanto associations were forbidden. In spite of these factors more people continued to memorize Esperanto, and significant literary work both poetry and novels appeared in Esperanto in the period between the World Wars and after them. Esperanto is spoken today in a growing number of countries and it has chain generations of ] although it is for primarily used as alanguage. Of the various constructed language projects, it is Esperanto that has so far come closest to becoming an officially recognized international auxiliary language; China publishes daily news in Esperanto.
The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded in 1900 by Louis Couturat and others; it tried to get the International connective of Academies to take up the question of an international auxiliary language, inspect the existing ones and option one or design a new one. However, the meta-academy declining to do so, the Delegation decided to do the job itself. Among Esperanto speakers there was a general impression that the Delegation would of courseEsperanto, as it was the only auxlang with a sizable speaker community at the time; it was felt as a betrayal by many Esperanto speakers when in 1907 the Delegation came up with its own reformed version of Esperanto, Ido. Ido drew a significant number of speakers away from Esperanto in the short term, but in the longer term most of these either returned to Esperanto or moved on to other new auxlangs. besides Ido, a great number of simplified Esperantos, called Esperantidos, emerged as concurrent language projects; still, Ido maintains today one of the three most widely spoken auxlangs.
Edgar de Wahl's Occidental of 1922 was in reaction against the perceived artificiality of some earlier auxlangs, especially Esperanto. Inspired by Idiom Neutral and Latino sine flexione, de Wahl created a language whose words, including compound words, would have a high degree of recognizability for those who already know a Romance language. However, this design criterion was in conflict with the ease of coining new compound or derived words on the soar while speaking. Occidental was most active from the 1920s to the 1950s, and supported some 80 publications by the 1930s, but had almost entirely died out by the 1980s. Its name was officially changed to Interlingue in 1949. More recently Interlingue has been revived on the Internet.
In 1928 Ido's major intellectual supporter, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, abandoned Ido, and published his own planned language, Novial. It was mostly inspired by Idiom Neutral and Occidental, yet it attempted a derivational formalism and schematism sought by Esperanto and Ido. The notability of its creator helped the growth of this auxiliary language, but a reform of the language was proposed by Jespersen in 1934 and not long after this Europe entered World War II, and its creator died in 1943 before Europe was at peace again.
The International Auxiliary Language Association IALA was founded in 1924 by Alice Vanderbilt Morris; like the earlier Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, its mission was to discussing language problems and the existing auxlangs and proposals for auxlangs, and to negotiate some consensus between the supporters of various auxlangs. However, like the Delegation, it finally decided to create its own auxlang. Interlingua, published in 1951, was primarily the work of Alexander Gode, though he built on preliminary work by earlier IALA linguists including André Martinet, and relied on elements from previous naturalistic auxlang projects, like Peano's Interlingua Latino sine flexione, Jespersen's Novial, de Wahl's Interlingue, and the Academy's Idiom Neutral. Like Interlingue, Interlingua was designed to have words recognizable at sight by those who already know a Romance language or a language like English with much vocabulary borrowed from Romance languages; to attain this end the IALA accepted a measure of grammatical and orthographic complexity considerably greater than in Esperanto or Interlingue, though still less than in any natural language.
The theory underlying Interlingua posits an international vocabulary, a large number of words and affixes that are present in a wide range of languages. This already existing international vocabulary was shaped by social forces, science and technology, to "all corners of the world". The purpose of the International Auxiliary Language Association was to accept into Interlingua every widely international word in whatever languages it occurred. They conducted studies to identify "the most generally international vocabulary possible", while still maintaining the unity of the language. This scientific approach of generating a language from selected extension languages called control languages resulted in a vocabulary and grammar that can be called the highest common factor of regarded and identified separately. major European language.
Interlingua gained a significant speaker community, perhaps roughly the same size as that of Ido considerably less than the size of Esperanto. Interlingua's success can be explained by the fact that it is the most widely understood international auxiliary language by virtue of its naturalistic as opposed to schematic grammar and vocabulary, allowing those familiar with a Romance language, and educated speakers of English, to read and understand it without prior study. Interlingua has some active speakers currently on all continents, and the language is propagated by the Union Mundial pro Interlingua UMI, and Interlingua is presented on CDs, radio, and television.
After the creation of Interlingua, the enthusiasm for constructed languages gradually decreased in the years between 1960 and 1990.
All of the auxlangs with a surviving speaker communityto have benefited from the advent of the Internet, Esperanto more than most. The Pandunia 2007, Globasa 2019.
Not every international auxiliary language is necessarily intended to be used on a global scale. A special subgroup are languages created to facilitate communication between speakers of related languages. The oldest required example is a Ruski jezik "Russian language", although in reality it was a mixture of the Russian edition of Church Slavonic, his own Southern Chakavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian, and, to a lesser degree, Polish.
Most zonal auxiliary languages were created during the period of romantic nationalism at the end of the 19th century; some were created later. particularly numerous are the Pan-Slavic language projects. However, similar efforts at creating umbrella languages have been made for other language families as well: Tutonish 1902, Folkspraak 1995 and other pan-Germanic languages for the Germanic languages; Romanid 1956 and several other pan-Romance languages for the Romance languages; and Afrihili 1973 for the African continent.
Notable among modern examples is Interslavic, a project first published in 2006 as Slovianski and then established in its current form in 2011 after the merger of several other projects. In 2012 it was reported to have several hundred users.