thank you to Robert Nielsen, Luiz Borges Gomide, Vikram Sundarraman, HTTP.DYLAN, Jordan Stein,
A Duck, FishyCuber, Nick Warren, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the between language, Interlingua.
Interlingua is an IAL that was created from 1937 to 1951 by the International Auxiliary
Language Association.
it was based on major Romance languages and English, resulting in a language that’s
basically just Spanish if Spanish was more like Latin.
if you speak a Romance language or English, then Interlingua is pretty easy to understand.
otherwise, good luck! its consonants are:
this isn’t the worst consonant inventory I’ve seen.
there’s a lot of variation on how these sounds can be pronounced.
the glottal fricative is completely optional, the postalveolar fricative can also be an
affricate, the rhotic can be whatever you want, (though it’s usually a tap or a trill)
and there isn’t a distinction between the labiovelar approximant and the voiced labiodental
fricative or between the voiced and voiceless alveolar fricatives.
Interlingua’s vowels are:
the five vowel system in found in many common languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and Swahili.
it’s also found in the majority of international languages, including Interlingua.
the diphthongs are:
I’m not entirely sure why /eu/ keeps showing up in these international languages.
it’s not a very common diphthong! seriously, even if you just look at Interlingua’s source
languages, /eu/ is missing from like half of them!
I just don’t get it.
the most common language that’s compatible with Interlingua’s phonology is Spanish,
which makes sense, since that’s the most common Romance language.
one other notable thing about the phonology is that the stress is pretty irregular.
most of the time, the stress goes on the vowel before the last consonant, but sometimes it
just goes on the first syllable, and sometimes it just goes on the second to last syllable,
and sometimes it just goes on the second syllable, and sometimes there’s affixes that override
the default stress, and sometimes THEY don’t follow the normal stress rules.
despite all that, most materials about Interlingua I could find proudly said that the stress
is regular, completely ignoring the problem.
Interlingua’s orthography tries to be naturalistic.
some of the stuff it does for the sake of naturalism is pretty commonplace, like using
the letter q exclusively in the digraph qu, or using the letter x to represent /ks/.
most IALs that try to be naturalistic stop there, but Interlingua goes several steps further.
for example, the digraph ch represents the sound /tʃ/ usually, but in words of French
or English origin, it’s /ʃ/, and in words of Greek origin, it’s /k/. so in order to
know how a word with ch in it is pronounced, you need to know what language it’s taken from.
there’s also the fact that the highly irregular stress isn’t written in any way.
all this stuff together means that you basically need to learn how a word is spelled and pronounced
at the same time, since you can’t predictably extrapolate one from the other.
the grammar is a tad inconsistent.
there isn’t case, except for pronouns where there’s five cases, except that none of
them actually have all five forms.
there really doesn’t seem to be any sort of structure here.
it’s the sort of asymmetry you’d expect to see in a natural language, but it really
has no place in an IAL. oh, while we’re looking at pronouns, notice how the accusative
masculine third person pronoun, le, is also the definite article.
the third person pronouns collectively go out of their way to associate the vowel e
with the masculine, but then the rest of the vocabulary uses e as though it were neutral.
anyway, verbs are regular enough.
it’s kinda weird that the International Auxiliary Language Association thought it
was more necessary to have separate suffixes for gerund and perfect forms of verbs than
it was to have a suffix for the imperative, but other than that this is mostly fine.
Interlingua’s vocabulary was generated by looking at English, French, Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese. if a word appears in at least three of those languages, then it’s considered
international enough to be added to Interlingua.
oh, but since Spanish and Portuguese are so similar in terms of their vocabulary, they
were counted as one language.
oh, and if a word is only in two of the source languages, it can still be added if it’s
also in either German or Russian, and if it’s in only one of the source languages, it can
be added if it’s in German AND Russian.
this might sound like a good way to generate recognizable vocabulary, but there’s one
major problem.
those languages aren’t actually representative of what most people speak.
just look at that.
about sixty percent of the world’s population doesn’t speak any of Interlingua’s source
languages, and that’s if you pretend that multilingual people don’t exist!
to be fair, ignoring like two in three people has its benefits for the one in three people
that aren’t ignored.
as an English speaker, I can look at any given chunk of Interlingua text and get the gist
of what’s being said.
it’s pretty obvious to me that this says “Esperanto is written with the Roman Alphabet,
minus the letters q, w, x, and y, and plus six accented letters created by Zamenhof”,
even though I wouldn’t be able to generate that sentence myself, and even though I’m
not sure how most of those words are pronounced.
all in all, I’d say that Interlingua is an interesting case.
although it makes perfect sense to describe it as an un succ essful international language,
its goals don’t really line up with what other interlangs try to do.
it doesn’t care about simplicity or universality. all Interlingua wants is to be easily understood
by speakers of Romance languages and languages with large amounts of Romance loanwords.
if all I cared about was how well languages met their own goals, then Interlingua would
easily be one of the best international languages I’ve reviewed.
however, that’s not really what this show is about.
what matters more to me is how appealing the goals of a language are, and Interlingua’s
goals aren’t that great.
that in mind, I’d say that I like Interlingua more than I like Vötgil, but not as much
as I like aUI, making it the eighth best interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Solresol.
I suppose you think that's cute.
What it makes you is a fraud.