PELICAN BOOKS PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS INTERGLOSSA A DRAFT OF AN AUXILIARY FOR A DEMOCRATIC WORLD ORDER, BEING AN ATTEMPT TO APPLY SEMANTIC PRINCIPLES TO LANGUAGE DESIGN LANCELOT HOGBEN 1 2 PELICAN BOOKS Advisory Editors: H. L. Beales, Reader in Economic History, University of London ; W. B. Williams, Director, the Army Bureau of Current Affairs; Secretary, the British Institute of Adult Education INTERGLOSSA BY LANCELOT HOGBEN THE AUTHOR LANCELOT HOGBEN was born at Southsea in 1895. He became a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1912. By profession he is a biologist; and has been a professor at universities in South Africa, the United States, London and Aberdeen. He has travelled far afield on four continents, having visited Japan and Hawaii. He is the author of a monumental work of popularization, Science for the Citizen, and of several volumes of essays on educational topics, notably Dangerous Thoughts. He is married to Enid Charles, the well-known population statistician, and has four children. PELICAN BOOKS INTERGLOSSA A DRAFT OF AN AUXILIARY FOR A DEMOCRATIC WORLD ORDER, BEING AN ATTEMPT TO APPLY SEMANTIC PRINCIPLES TO LANGUAGE DESIGN by LANCELOT HOGBEN (Author of Science for the Citizen) ILLUSTRATIONS IN ISOTYPE BY OTTO NEURATH PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND 245 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A. 5 First Published 1943 Czech or Chinese Learn it with ease, Basque or Bantu Can too. Burnet Woolf Facsimile prepared and composed by The Millrind Press MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HAZELL, WATSON & VINEY, LTD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY 6 CONTENTS Chapter Page Foreword….……….……….….………………….………..9 PART I THE DESIGN OF INTERGLOSSA I. Interglossa and its Predecessors ………………….…… 11 II. The Essential Grammar of Interglossa ………………..35 III, The System of Operators …….……..……..…..…….. 49 IV. Heuristic Intermission …….……..……..….…….….. 63 PART II THE SEMANTICS OF INTERGLOSSA V. Pseudonyms ; Articles ; Imperative and Interrogative Particles ; Negation and Comparison; Generic Substantives (60)………………………………….96 VI. Prepositional, Conjunctive and Auxiliary Amplifiers(80)…………………….…..…………………126 VII. General Amplifiers (335)………….…….….………147 VIII. Verboids (20).………….…………………………..189 IX. Substantives (385).………….……………………….240 PART III THE ETYMOLOGY OF INTERGLOSSA X. Expansion of Vocabulary ; Conventional Formulae….262 XI. Samples of Translation from English to Interglossa…269 XII, Alphabetical List of Vocables ; and Mnemotechnic Notes.……….….……………………….………….……..276 Appendix …………..….…..….…..…….….…..…….. 329 7 8 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-a-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 Ost-wald 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 9 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 8,000-word English- Inter-glossa 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. 10 PART I THE DESIGN OF INTERGLOSSA I. 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 end 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, he 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. 11 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-a-vis each of these difficulties. 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 generally2 true that the verb complex of a sentence is the part which predicates process or state.