Daniel's Corner

Interlingua es un lingua natural e musical de parolas international e un grammatica minimal. Es comprensibile facilemente per personas intelligente e es un medio de communication adequate e ideal pro le solution del confusion linguistic international.

Recently I’ve been reading about Interlingua. It is an international auxiliary language (IAL), in some ways similar to Esperanto. An IAL is a language meant for communication between people with different native languages. A Spaniard and a German could both learn Interlingua and use it to communicate.

Why don’t we all just learn English?

Well, English does get used a lot as an auxiliary language, but natural languages are very difficult to learn and master. IALs are designed to be easy. You can reasonably learn Interlingua or Esperanto 4 times faster than a natural language.

What makes Interlingua interesting

The way Interlingua is designed is actually quite interesting: It starts by looking at 7 European languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Russian. A word that is present in several of these languages becomes a word in Interlingua.

For example, the word “hospital” looks almost the same in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and Italian. So “hospital” is a word in Interlingua. Other words include: natural, musical, international, etc. And all of those words mean exactly what you expect. Some times you find words that are not exactly the same, but look very similar (grammar, Grammatik, grammaire, gramática, grammatica). In this case, Interlingua tries to pick the form that is most recognizable to everyone.

The end result is a language that is mostly just the vocabulary that we already agree on. It turns out that we already largely agree on a huge amount of vocabulary, and that’s what goes into Interlingua.

Interlingua vs Esperanto

It is worth comparing Interlingua and Esperanto:

1. Esperanto is the IAL spoken by most people, but Interlingua is the IAL understood by most people. Speakers of Romance languages, and educated speakers of Germanic languages can mostly figure it out.

2. Both languages have a very simple grammar and vocabulary. Interlingua definitely has the simpler grammar. Building words is easier in Esperanto, but Interlingua’s words are more recognizable. Esperanto is more regular.

3. In Esperanto, each sound corresponds to a letter. So there is no “sh” or “ch”, but there are other entirely new letters for those sounds. Esperanto has 6 new letters unique to Esperanto. Interlingua, on the other hand, uses only the standard 26 Latin letters and makes use of “sh”, “ch” and the like, in the ways that most European languages already use them.

4. I can’t figure out the pronunciation of some Esperanto letters, and some times I can’t see the distinctions it makes. For example, here it says that the Esperanto ĵ (j^) sounds like the “s” in pleasure and ŝ (s^) sounds like the “s” in sugar… forgive me, but to me those two sound the same

Interlingua isn’t like that. No new letters, no picky distinctions. Everything sounds the way you’d expect with the exception that vowels sound like in continental languages (Spanish, German, etc). You know, “a” as in “papa”, “e” ans in “Fred”, i as in “in”, o as in “no” and u sounds like “too”.

---

In summary, I would say that Esperanto tries to go close to the theoretical ideal for a language, whereas Interlingua tries to build a language based on the things that we already agree on. The difference can be exemplified with this table:

Esperanto	Interlingua	English	Italian
sana	san	healthy	sani
sano	sanitate	health	salute
malsana	malade	sick	malato
malsano	maladia	disease	malattia
malsanulejo	hospital	hospital	ospedale
saniĝi	recovrar	to recover	recuperare
sanigi	curar	to cure	curare

It may be logical to derive the word for hospital from the word for “healthy”, but I think that tomorrow you are more likely to remember that the Interlingua word for hospital is hospital than that the Esperanto word word for hospital is malsanulejo.