International Auxiliary Languages Research Articles

Constructed Languages

Linguistic research focuses primarily on the thousands of naturally occurring languages, but there are also languages that have been consciously created by individuals. There are four main types of these constructed languages. First, so-called philosophical languages were created in the seventeenth century as a way to better capture the reality of the world. Second, many international auxiliary languages were constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way to solve practical problems of international communication. Third, many languages have been created in recent decades for the purposes of fiction (e.g., novels, film, television), especially in the realms of science fiction and fantasy, or simply as an enjoyable hobby. Fourth, it is now common to construct languages for use in psycholinguistic experiments. Each of these types of constructed languages presents interesting research questions and deserves increased attention from linguists.

The New Modernist Studies ed. by Douglas Mao

Reviewed by: The New Modernist Studies ed. by Douglas Mao Gül Bilge Han The New Modernist Studies. Edited by Douglas Mao. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Modernist studies over the past few decades have undergone a radical sea change that has altered some of the field’s long-standing assumptions about the foundations and meanings of modernism as a theoretical and historical category. Recent critical interventions into what is now commonly referred to as “the new modernist studies” have charted paths that extend the traditional axis of modernism beyond early twentieth-century Euro-American arts and literature. By showing how modernist works operate in diverse geographical locations and cultural forms, and on different timelines, these scholarly activities have transgressed modernism’s previous disciplinary boundaries in various “spatial, temporal and vertical directions,” as Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz wrote in their seminal essay “The New Modernist Studies,” published in PMLA in May 2008 (737). Such efforts have led to the reconfiguration of modernism as a polycentric rather than a singular phenomenon while rendering the term itself increasingly elusive and at times hard to grasp. The publication of this new collection of essays, The New Modernist Studies, continues and advances such critical work by rigorously documenting and responding to the field’s key areas of debate and self-inquiry, which were first developed in edited volumes such as Bad Modernisms (Duke UP, 2006), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2012), and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia UP, 2016), and recently anthologized in The New Modernist Studies Reader (Bloomsbury, 2021), to list but a few. With its fourteen essays divided into two parts, “Histories” and “Horizons,” the current volume, edited by Mao, both historicizes the critical currents of (the new) modernist studies from its origins to the present (Part I) and identifies productive points of departure for fresh paths of inquiry oriented toward the future (Part II). The two essays in “Histories,” by Michael North and Mark Wollaeger, provide a useful and comprehensive overview of the birth and growth of modernism’s trajectory as a cultural, intellectual, and academic formation. The remaining twelve essays in “Horizons” collectively explore a wide array of topics from a largely contextualizing perspective with a simultaneous emphasis on textual specificities and formal features. The volume undertakes the task of rethinking text-context relations in ways that resist the immediate prioritization of context over textual meaning. Such prioritization of context can be said to have dominated the field of the new modernist studies from its inception. Several chapters set out to explore modernism’s spatial and global dimensions, highlighting patterns of transaction between diverse cultural and geographical contexts as well as individual texts and movements. María del Pilar Blanco’s contribution begins with a theoretical reflection on the notion of the planetary, which critically builds on previous models developed particularly by Gayatri Spivak and Susan Stanford Friedman. Taking as its case study Spanish American modernismo and French Décadence, the essay underscores the continuities and ruptures between the two movements through translation, linguistic correspondence, and individual travel. Modernismo ’s encounters [End Page 118] with the Décadence movement serve as a testing ground for comparative, planetary readings that nevertheless remain cautious of flattening out the temporal and linguistic boundaries through a homogenizing Anglo-American institutional lens. This revisionary approach to modernism as a global and transnational project emerges as a key concern in several other essays from a notably broad range of angles: Friedman’s chapter, for instance, proposes transnationally situated comparative readings that bring together figures like Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster based on their mutual engagement with religious identity and empire. Aarthi Vadde probes the formal and conceptual allegiances between the technological and scientific engineering of international auxiliary languages, on the one hand, and mid-twentieth-century global modernist literature, on the other. Steven S. Lee’s contribution examines the global revolutionary projects of communism before and after the Cold War as a generative force for modernist aesthetics’ engagement with social realism. Edwin Hill is equally invested in uncovering modernism’s wider cultural and spatial flows in his exploration of noir film and its use of jazz as a...

Einige Bemerkungen zur dreisprachigen Erziehung (Polnisch-Esperanto-Deutsch) meiner Kinder

The article contains some remarks concerning the trilingual development of my two children. Research on children’s language development and bilingualism has been known mainly in historic natural languages studies. So far, international auxiliary languages like Esperanto have been hardly considered so far in the research on language acquisition. Including Esperanto in such considerations yields valuable insight and findings. Interference and other peculiarities of Polish, German and Esperanto in the earlier period of language acquisition are illustrated with the aid of examples collected by the author of this article. Examples are related to spelling, vocabulary, morphology, syntax and semantics.

A Survey of Interjections in International Auxiliary Languages

In this paper, I examine various aspects of interjections in international auxiliary languages. Many authors of works on such languages give little or no attention to interjections, apparently thinking that it is not necessary or important to say much about them. The main matter to be discussed is how interjections were created; in some cases they were derived by means of a suffix from words of other classes, in others, zero-derived from other words. In some languages, they are marked in a particular way, distinguishing them from words of other parts of speech. Most works on international auxiliary languages provide very little, if any, information on how interjections are to be used; we will see some instructions which have been given. I will also bring up some of the ideas that language designers have about interjections.

A Survey of Interjections in International Auxiliary Languages

A Survey of Interjections in International Auxiliary Languages

The Representation of Uralic Languages in Artificial International Auxiliary Languages

Artificial international auxiliary languages, particularly the major ones such as Esperanto and Interlingua, have taken relatively few words or grammatical features from Uralic languages (or from other non-Indo-European languages). In this paper I will examine some auxiliary languages which have used one or more Uralic languages as sources. Among these languages are Angos, Ardano, Budinos, Eura, Kweda, Lingwa de Planeta, Neo Patwa, Uusisuom/Lapsi, and Veltparl. In general Uralic items make up only a small part of the language as a whole.

The Representation of Korean and Other Altaic Languages in Artificial International Auxiliary Languages

Korean and other Altaic languages are generally not well represented in artificial international auxiliary languages: the best known such languages (such as Esperanto and Ido) have borrowed almost nothing from them, instead almost exclusively using Indo-European languages as sources. In this paper I will present some auxiliary languages which have taken words and/or parts of their grammar from Altaic languages, looking at which items have been borrowed and in some cases what percentage of the vocabulary they account for. The languages discussed (most of which were created relatively recently) include Ardano, Dousha, Dunia, Konya, Kosmo, Kumiko, Lingwa de Planeta, Neo Patwa, NOXILO, Olingo, Pan-kel, Sambahsa-mundialect, Sona, and Unish. In the cases of most of these languages only a small proportion of the total vocabulary comes from Altaic languages. Further, some of the words said to have been taken from an Altaic language originally came from an Indo-European language. In addition, I will compare the proportion of Korean items to those taken from the other languages of the Altaic family. Overall Korean has been drawn upon less than Japanese, but (not surprisingly) more than Mongolian, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek. Most conclusions are tentative because the vocabularies of most of the auxiliary languages examined have not been fully developed and because often information about sources of words is not given.

The Case of Correlatives: A Comparison between Natural and Planned Languages

Since the publication of Volapük, the most important functional and deictic words present in grammar—interrogative, relative and demonstrative pronouns, and adjectives among others—have been described in planned grammars in a series or a table, namely “correlatives,” showing a considerable level of regularity. This article compares the degree of regularity in the correlatives series of International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) with the correlative series of natural languages of the world—e.g., with a special attention English, French, German, and Latin, i.e., the languages that influenced directly the most important IALs, from Volapük (1879) to IALA’s Interlingua (1951). Moreover, some examples in languages not belonging to the Standard Average European (SAE) sprachbund are presented for control. Finally, the correlatives of Klingon and Na’vi, two languages planned in recent times, not for auxiliary but for fictional purposes, are presented by contrast. The main result of this comparison is that, in the case of correlatives, some natural languages are surprisingly far more regular than their planned daughters, in spite of the fact that regularity was a major claim of the efforts in planning IALs during the late XIX and early XX centuries in Europe.

Invented languages and new worlds

THE LIFE of a language involves relationships between linguistic elements and extra-linguistic contexts. The linguistic elements are varied and multiple, involving both written and spoken symbols and grammars, while the extra-linguistic contexts are the innumerable societies, cultures, and sub-cultures of humankind, including its worlds of reality, imagination, and ideology. This article discusses invented languages, partly in order to explore the motivations and schemes of their inventors and partly to compare languages created for international use (often called international auxiliary languages or IALs) with English, which itself functions as an IAL but is very much an uninvented language.

Marketing an International Auxiliary Language: Challenges to a New Artificial Language

This paper examines international auxiliary languages from the point of view that they are products competing in the world linguis-tic market place....

Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG

Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG

Three Dictionaries of International Auxiliary Languages

Three Dictionaries of International Auxiliary Languages Cynthia L. Moore Introduction In 1887, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof drafted a manual entitled An International Language: Introduction and Complete Manual [Mezhdunarodny Yazyk: Predislovie i Polny Uchebnik] under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto, or "Doctor Hope." This manual was a small dictionary that displayed the essence of Dr. Zamenhof's language: a vocabulary of some 900 words and a grammar of 16 rules (Large 1985, 72). The manual launched Esperanto, one of the most widely recognized International Auxiliary Languages (IALs). In this paper, I will compare the dictionaries of three IALs: Interlingua-English a Dictionary of the International Language, by the International Auxiliary Language Association (1951; reprint 1971); Novial Lexike, by Otto Jespersen (1930); and Glosa 6000, by Wendy Ashby and Ron Clark (1992), which is based on Interglossa, a language developed by Lancelot Hogben. I begin by discussing the developers ' reasons for creating their IALs. I then take up the organization of each dictionary, followed by a brief survey of the vocabulary. In the conclusion, I look at whether each dictionary satisfies the needs of IAL users. A synopsis of my comparison appears at the end of the paper (Table 1). In choosing the IALs and their dictionaries, I sought a range. Interlingua illustrates an IAL with staying power; Novial shows an IAL effort that, although carried out by an eminent linguist, could not stand the test of time; and Glosa demonstrates a recent IAL initiative . I do not attempt to analyze the three underlying IALs in this paper. Instead, I concentrate on the lexicographic issues relating to their dictionaries. 56Cynthia L Moore IALs, sometimes called "artificial languages," are "deliberately constructed for international use" (Jacob 1947, 144). The goal of IAL developers has been to create a cross-national language to supplement, but not supplant, national languages. Some developers, including Zamenhof, view their IAL as a path to world peace. Others profess more limited goals, such as avoiding time-consuming and costly translation at international conferences. In creating an IAL, the developers first decide which existing languages will supply roots (frequently Latin-based languages or Greek). Then they establish a set of rules for word formation and meaning. Finally, they arrange the words of the new language into a dictionary. Interlingua Background In 1924, Alice V. Morris and Dave Hennen Morris founded the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). They did so in the belief that an IAL is "one of the means for developing the international community" (IALA [1951] 1971, x-xi). The IALA's goals were "(1) to obtain agreement on one definite planned language system and to obtain official sanction for that language and (2) to secure the general acceptance of the sanctioned language which would include its teaching in the schools" (Jacob 1947, 144). The IALA identified five candidate languages: Esperanto, Esperanto II (developed by René de Saussure), Ido (another Esperanto derivative), Occidental (developed by Edgar de Wahl), and Latino sine Flexione (developed by Guiseppe Peano) (LALA xii).1 In 1930, the IALA organized a conference in Europe, convened by Jespersen, to allow linguists and IAL experts to exchange ideas (xii). Other conferences followed, as well as considerable research. After much study, the IALA chose not to select one of the candidate languages , but to broaden its focus. It decided to start from the basis that underlay all of the candidate languages, "namely the basis of the international vocabulary, or, in other terms, the words common to the greatest number of widely distributed cultural languages" (Jacob 1947, 147). From this principle emerged Interlingua. 1 In its General Report of 1945, the IALA includes Jespersen's Novial (1945, 16), but the Association does not mention it in the IED's introductory materials. Three Dictionaries of International Auxiliary Languages57 Once the IALA decided its course of action, it began the "systematic recording of the international vocabulary" (IALA [1951] 1971, xvii). In 1951, it presented its "international vocabulary" in InterlinguaEnglish a Dictionary of the International Language (IED) and reprinted it in 1971. To complement the dictionary, it published Interlingua a Grammar of the International Language in the same year. (The grammar was also reprinted in 1971.) The IED was the first stage of an active...

The biological side of Otto Jespersen’s linguistic thought

SummaryCentral ideas of Darwin’s theory of natural selection figure prominently in the work of Otto Jespersen (1860–1943). As early as 1886, Jespersen treated linguistic change in Darwinian terms: variation in the pronunciation and meaning of the various units, and factors that raise or lower a variety’s viability. His critique of the neogrammarian principle of exceptionlessness of sound change includes the point that phonologically parallel words often differ in the relative viability of their variants. By 1904, Jespersen was using ‘functional load’ in explaining differences in how much resistance each language offers to various natural phonetic tendencies. He argued that conformity to a sound-symbolic generalization raises a form’s viability and can thus exempt some words from sound changes and accelerate the adoption of novel words and of novel meanings for existing words. Natural selection figures even in Jespersen’s papers on international auxiliary languages, as in his account of whybil, the winner in a contest for a word for ‘automobile’, spread so rapidly in Scandinavia. Jespersen’s speculative scenario for language origins is in terms of Darwinian ‘preadaptation’: conventionalized sound/meaning correspondences can arise in numerous ways prior to the development of anything like a language (Jespersen argues that singing, in all its diverse social functions, developed prior to language), and a language would develop notex nihilobut by members of a human community segmenting and imposing arbitrary semantic analyses on some of this large body of meaningful sound, and starting to combine the pieces in novel ways, as modern children do anyway (Jespersen argues) in the course of acquiring a language. Jespersen thereby vindicated his unpopular conclusion that early human languages had highly irregular morphology and syntax.