CONTENTS

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-à-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 Ostwald 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 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,ooo-word English-Interglossa 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.

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 ends 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, 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.

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-à-vis each of these difficulties.

¹ Peano is the Italian pioneer of mathematical logic. His work was the starting-point of Bertrand Russell’s. Some of it he published in his own auxiliary.

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 generally (not so the verb be, except when it predicates real existence) true that the verb complex of a sentence is the part which predicates process or state. In a rough and ready way the fact that nouns and verbs have characteristic terminals does mean that we can more easily pick out what is thing, what is state or process—in short, that we can get some sort of picture of the sentence-landscape. This helps the beginner to translate a passage which contains unfamiliar words, and by doing so increases confidence in the prospect of further progress.

To say this does not mean that the existence of such terminals or the acceptance of morphological categories characteristic of the Aryan and Finno-Ugrian families is the only or the best way of achieving the same result. There are other devices. Two are: (i) a fixed pattern of word-order; (ii) the existence of empty words, such as the French article which sticks to the noun with the same Romantic fidelity as the substantive suffix of E, and is therefore a signpost pointing to an oncoming substantive.

Because P is the isolating offspring of its highly flexional parent, Latin, it has a poor equipment of empty words, and an aristocratic indifference to the necessity for simple rules of sentence-construction. The fact is that no pioneer of language-planning—least of all Peano—has undertaken the task of investigating what rules of word-order contribute most to intrinsic clarity of meaning and ease of recognition. Like Jespersen, and like his predecessors, all of whom had adopted a much more conservative attitude to structural grammar, Peano never got to grips with the essentials of syntax. The essentials of international syntax include: (a) a sentence-landscape designed in conformity with straightforward rules; (b) elimination of different word-forms with the same semantic content, and other redundant modes of expression.

Word-economy

Authors of all projects mentioned above underestimated the difficulty of mastering an unnecessarily large vocabulary, and failed to understand the need for semantic spring-cleaning as a prelude to any effective policy for mitigating it. None of them attempted analysis of the irreducible minimum of vocables essential for self-expression. The fact that Ogden has done so, rather than any intrinsic merit of English itself, is one sufficient reason for the popularity of Basic and for its appeal to those who regard projects for an artificial auxiliary with little favour. Peano, who was mainly concerned with the needs of science and technology, made no attempt to keep an essential word-list within the limits of what ordinary people without a large vocabulary of technical terms can easily learn. The authors of V, E, I.N., I and N made a half-hearted attempt which has justly earned the vigorous criticism of Ogden and some of his supporters.

What word-economy recent designers of constructed auxiliaries have aimed at achieving is of one sort only. On what seem to be purely a priori grounds, they have chosen batteries of affixes to multiply word-forms with the same recognizable root. Some of these affixes merely trail in the peculiar grammatical traditions of Aryan languages. Some have absolutely no semantic content at all (cf. E um for indefinite relationship). Others (e.g. E bo- for in-law as in mother-in-law) are merely shorthand for trivial types of relationship sufficiently expressed by other and necessary formal elements already part of the verbal stock-in-trade. The authors of E, I, I.N. and N tried to establish order where chaos existed (cf. -ship, -dom, -head, -hood, -ity in English) without probing into the intrinsic value of what they were salvaging. When we look at the result as a whole, their choice of derivative affixes reflects the same preoccupation which motivated the prevailing attitude to flexion.

The only satisfactory way of dealing with the problem of word-economy is Ogden’s way; to start with words as experimental material and analyse what semantic elements enter into large classes. It may well, and in fact does, happen that these elements have little relation to the pattern of derivative affixes or of flexions in languages which have grown in the haphazard manner common to all existing natural ones. This very fact, as Ogden’s work so richly illustrates, has a corollary which enthusiasts for auxiliary language proposals have been slow to recognize. If Ogden has achieved such outstanding success within the strait-jacket of acceptable English usage, what economies might be possible if someone undertook the task with complete freedom to prescribe an idiom best suited to maximate word-economy?

International Word-material

When all is said and done, learning a language involves memorizing a large number of new words. When we have reduced the number as far as we can without prejudice to the end in view, the beginner has to commit to memory what remains. Ease of doing so depends largely on familiarity with the material, i.e. on what associations we can make when first confronted with any single vocable. It is possible to reduce to negligible dimensions the load of new words with no helpful associations for the beginner, if we take stock of three facts:

(i) During the past two centuries, science has created a world-wide technical vocabulary;

(ii) As modern technology transforms everyday life, what was once the vocabulary of the laboratory becomes the vocabulary of the street-corner;

(iii) Scientific terms such as stratosphere, aeroplane, heterodyne, panchromatic, telephone, phonograph, gramophone, and hundreds of others on the lips of every schoolchild to-day come almost exclusively from Latin or Greek, more especially from Greek.

To the extent that Latin roots predominate in all the projects mentioned, all of them, like English itself, have a large stock-in-trade of truly international roots for which the beginner can readily make associations. The fact remains that most artificial languages have a large stock of national words presumably included to propitiate national sentiment of one sort or another. Thus Novial, the latest arrival, is essentially—like English—a Latin-Teutonic hybrid, and the Teutonic ingredients are sheer dead-weight to anyone who does not speak German, Dutch or a Scandinavian dialect. The same criticism does not apply to the flexionless, but otherwise scholarly, Latin of Peano. With due regard to the number of borrowed Greek words in classical Latin, P is open to a criticism applicable to every constructed language yet devised. None of them contains as high a proportion of Greek roots as English itself.

A truly international vocabulary must be the offspring of technology, and technology increasingly turns to Greek rather than to Latin for new material. Of the many who know that micro- means small, few know that parvus means the same. Current articles on nutrition and psychology in any woman’s journal, or on photography and radio in any schoolboy’s magazine, illustrate the daily invasion of everyday speech by Greek roots. Peano apart, authors who have put forward plans for constructed auxiliaries lived at a time—or like Jespersen formed their views at a time—when few scientists and technicians, still fewer linguists, anticipated the present tempo of infiltration of Greek roots into everyday life. Consequently artificial languages so far proposed scarcely touch the fringe of the problem of word-familiarity. In the simplest possible terms, our task is to assemble a vocabulary based on internationally current roots of which the semantic content is as transparent as that of geo-, aer-, tele-, phon-, graph-, micro-, phot- and the like. The possibility of achieving this result gives the problem of word-economy a new impetus. The success of our efforts in part depends on keeping the number of words required within the limits of equipment at our disposal.

The mere fact that there is already an international vocabulary of medicine, of agriculture, of horticulture, of navigation, of mensuration, of astronomy, of chemical manufacture, of engineering, of cartography and of mathematics, or that the number of such terms in everyday speech has increased by leaps and bounds since the time of Zamenhof, are not the only facts about the impact of Science on speech relevant to choice of satisfactory word-material for a properly constructed auxiliary. Equally important is the fact that this existing international vocabulary rings the changes on certain roots which have established firm claims to further use. Consequently we know which way the cat will jump. We can forecast with some assurance what roots of given meaning can or cannot come into general use through the increasing infiltration of new technical terms into daily speech. If need arises to adopt a new technical term to label waterproof autograph forms for water-polo champions, it is highly likely to contain necto, which turns up in many biological names for swimming organisms. If a special root for swimming appliances invades daily speech on a world-wide scale, it is not likely to recall the French word nager or its Esperanto equivalent.

Essential Features of Interglossa

From this brief commentary upon the defects of artificial languages exposed by contrast with the considerable merits of Basic English, we now turn to a brief summary of the essential features of Interglossa.

(i) Interglossa is a purely isolating language. It admits many compounds built from bricks which are independent elements, but it has no dead affixes prescribed in accordance with a priori considerations. In so far as it is a flexionless language, it resembles Chinese (or Peanese), but it differs from P because it has a large stock-in-trade of compounds sufficiently explicit in an appropriate context to anyone who knows or can recognize their parts. It also differs from P with respect to the remaining characteristics specified below.

The reader may here ask whether an isolating language has any advantage over a language of the agglutinative type, i.e. a flexional language like Esperanto with no irregularities. There are three sufficient reasons for preferring the former:

(a) Mass production in language tuition calls for maximum division of labour in the plant. That is to say, maximum word-economy in the sense defined above implies maximum mobility of all the elements of meaning.

(b) Familiarity breeds contempt. That is to say, flexion, however regular, forces units of meaning into situations where they are irrelevant and therefore more liable to semantic erosion.

(c) The grammar of an isolating (analytical) language is the highest common factor of all grammar. It is the native idiom of China, and does not confront the Japanese or the Bantu with the arbitrary difficulties inherent in any agglutinative language based on Aryan models. In short, any language designed like V or E imposes the grammatical idiosyncrasies of a particular language family on everybody who uses it. Unlike its predecessors, designed exclusively, and admittedly,¹ to meet the taste of Western Europe and the English-speaking peoples, Interglossa is for a world in which China, Japan, and eventually the peoples of Africa, will march in step with the U.S.S.R. and with western civilization.²

¹ See Jespersen, An International Language, p. 53 and elsewhere.

² An isolating language has a further advantage. It is easy to make every element explicit through visual aids. Thus freedom from lifeless affixes simplifies the task of instruction through the medium of the universal picture-language isotype without recourse to exposition in the home vernacular. We can therefore contemplate production of manuals for a world-wide market. The history of Japanese writing sufficiently shows the difficulties which beset the attempt to adapt a pictographic script to a language of the agglutinative type.

(ii) Interglossa has a very rigid and straightforward word-order, with features designed to limit recourse to congested expressions. The pattern is the same for statements, questions, requests, commands, and for all classes of subordinate (including relative) clauses. The verbal stock-in-trade of Interglossa includes a small battery of empty words to act as signposts of sentence-landscape. For the same reason, certain classes of words have a characteristic final syllable, but these classes do not correspond to arbitrary non-semantic categories (parts of speech) defined by flexions. Interglossa has no flexions.

(iii) Interglossa has a vocabulary based on internationally current roots. It therefore has a Greek content enormous in comparison with that of earlier projects. Its very name symbolizes the fact that it is a Latin-Greek hybrid, as Novial is a Latin-Teutonic hybrid. Since we have many Latin-Greek alternatives in current international technical terms, it is possible to combine the claims of word-economy vis-à-vis self-expression (see pp. 22-23) with the advantages of a residual battery of synonyms for stylistic purposes.

Each word has a number, and if Interglossa sufficiently interests the public it will be easy to test out the claims to priority of two or more synonyms for each numbered pigeon-hole in the semantic schema which follows. Designing all the details of a fully-fledged interlanguage is not a one-man job. Mass observation on the basis of questionnaires sent out to different groups of people of different nationalities would settle which words in each pigeon-hole are entitled to first rank. Readers may suggest alternatives, and an international committee could submit the result to ballot.

The use of psychologically live word-material necessarily limits an ideal solution of the phonetic difficulties of learning languages. Fortunately the Mediterranean vowel battery is small, but Greek abounds in consonant-clusters which offer great difficulties to people who speak Japanese, Chinese, Bantu or Polynesian dialects. Where equivalent Greek and Latin roots are internationally current, this fact should guide the choice of the designer and that of the beginner (see p. 30). We can take advantage of Latin and Greek alternatives to exclude homophones (cf. the root homophones sol in solar and solitary). The root xero in many botanical and horticultural terms (e.g. xerophyte) would be a near-homophone to zero, because many people find it difficult to pronounce an initial x as ks or z as ts. So it cannot have first choice as the equivalent word for dry.

If we aim at easy recognition and easy association, it is fatal to maltreat roots for the sake of uniform spelling. Uniformity is less important than consistency. It does not matter whether one sound always has one symbol. What does matter is whether the same symbol stands for only one sound (cf. the vagaries of G and J, S and Z in English). The main difficulty about the spelling conventions of a Latin-Greek stock-in-trade of words is that different nations do not follow the same plan with respect to Romanization of Greek roots, e.g. French, German and English have PH where Scandinavians and Italians use the F. Since the international binomial nomenclature of systematic biology, and that of anatomy and chemistry, stick to the older forms, Interglossa provisionally adopts them. As Ogden has emphasized, spelling is a secondary issue, if a language has great potential word-economy. And we may leave the details to an international committee.

(iv) Interglossa has a system of word-economy which takes full advantage of its analytical grammar, and hence combines features characteristic of Basic English and of Chinese. To clarify the principles involved, two terms are useful. As we call identical vocables which mean different things homophones, we may call different vocables with the same semantic content homosemes. Likewise we may call words with a common element of meaning coenosemes, Thus ascend (go up) and descend (go down) are coenosemes, as are study (work-room) and worker (work-man). The word homoseme does not mean quite the same as synonym. Big, large and great are synonyms in the most everyday sense of the term; but the homosemes much and great are not. The reason why most of us hesitate to call them synonyms is that they are not always interchangeable. The rules of grammar prescribe a definite context for each. Much predicating largeness may be the qualifier of a verb or another epithet, great can predicate largeness of nouns alone.

As Chinese is handicapped with an overgrowth of homophones, Aryan languages are overloaded with homosemes, which produce difficulties of the opposite sort when a person new to their idiosyncrasies tries to learn them. In contact-vernaculars such as Beach-la-Mar or Pidgin-English, we get a practical demonstration of what happens when a multiplicity of semantically redundant word-forms defeats the comprehension of the newcomer; and we can apply the lesson to the design of a constructed language. Relatively little economy by reduction of homosemes is possible within the framework of acceptable English idiom; but the only limit to doing so in an artificial language is the need to keep a clear prospect of “sentence-landscape” in view. The author of Basic English has made the very best of a bad job by pruning the luxuriant overgrowth of English coenosemes to the limit consistent with educated speech.

The combination of both principles, i.e. reduction of homosemes as in Chinese and of coenosemes as in Basic, is a distinctive feature of Interglossa among artificial languages put forward to date. The outstanding characteristic of word-economy in Basic is the reduction of verb coenosemes by recourse to verbal operators. In combination with other words these eighteen operators do all the work of four thousand verbs in a French dictionary, and far more in an English one. In a constructed language we can do the same with noun coenosemes. Within the framework of English usage we can make postman, hangman, milkman, dustman with the common seme man; playhouse, bakehouse, alehouse with the common seme house; footwear, handwear, headwear with the common seme wear. In the design of a constructed language with a rich assortment of generic terms we are free to build up a host of other domestic and occupational compounds without adding new elements to our word-stock. By the use of the negative particle as a qualifier equivalent to the affixes un- or in- of untrue, unclean, incompatible, we can also eliminate the need for many “opposites” for which natural languages prescribe separate words. At this point partisans of Basic English may ask why it is necessary to list 880 vocables in place of the 850 essential items on the Basic English word-list.¹ The answer is that the figures are not comparable. Interglossa and Basic English start from different assumptions about how much work a single word can profitably do. If the end in view is to make things easy for the beginner we have to bear in mind two considerations:

(a) Suitable definition of familiar objects often calls for more effort than learning a new label;

(b) When no common thread of meaning connects one use with another, an additional label is not necessarily more difficult to learn than an additional use of the same vocable.

¹ The list of essential vocables on pp. 249-256 contains 880 numbered items and an additional 74 of which the internationally current form is consonant with the phonetic pattern of Interglossa. Actually our list of 880 numbered ítems contains at least twenty words which are internationally current in the form prescribed, e.g.: agenda (809); bureau (816); cardo (740); coxa (533); data (827); fenestra (714); flora (581); lamina (757); libido (284); major (45); minor (46); minus (115); plus (118); propaganda (846); radio (386); spatula (775); telefon (855); telegram (856); zero (26). The names of the metals are simply the plural forms of the corresponding items in the international periodic table. Plural forms which are also internationally current include spectra (662) and entera (502). It is therefore fair to say that our list of essential vocables other than words which we can adopt from the international vocabulary of technics or commerce without any change of form contains less than 860 constructed elements in all. In reality the 850 word-list printed on a folded slip in the primers of Basic omits 17 necessary pronouns and possessives, 32 numerals and 56 flexional forms of the operative verbs. If we charitably overlook the fact that Basic operates at large with the -ing and -ed terminals without a general rule about what class of words invariably take them or about how they affect the meaning of the end-product, it is fair to say that Basic demands mastery of at least 950 distinct vocables, not counting calendrical items.

In its choice of abstract terms Basic English takes a highly indulgent attitude to what constitutes a common thread of meaning. When we apply one word sharp to a remark, to a tooth, and to a pain, the only thread of meaning common to all three situations is a vague value judgment; and if we let metaphor have full rein in this way it is easy to keep down the number of items on our word-list. Indeed, there is only one limit to the process of reduction. In the end we are left with two vocables, one for approval, the other for disapproval. Admittedly, we cannot set it limit to suggestive use of metaphor in daily life. Nor can we draw a clear-cut boundary between metaphorical and generic usage of words. Still, we can provide a sufficient number of specific terms for qualities with no very obvious connexion; and this has been the aim of the author.

A constructed language cannot admit words of so diverse semantic content as order, listed in the miniature Basic Dictionary as meaning: arrangement, sequence, class, command, religious body, decoration.¹ It cannot admit such definitions as (ibid.) “undertaking” for enterprise and “(statement of) undertaking” for promise. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idiom which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder. In what follows the aim has been to keep sharpness of definition within the limits set by two dispensations:

(a) Since action and its product are necessarily co-existent, the same word (e.g. writing in English) can suffice for both in a given context;

(b) Where a metaphorical usage is common to equivalent words of different origin and unrelated language families (cf. tongue-language for the organ of that name and for a local variety of speech) it is permissible to conclude that the link between the two is substantial. (Unfortunately, there is no source to which one can turn for a world survey of metaphorical extensions such as the example cited.)

¹ This is especially true of the hundred items (“Operations”), which make up the grammatical matrix of Basic. Laying aside the eighteen verbs—not one of which has an absolutely clear-cut terrain—the remaining words (82) include such obvious pitfalls for the unwary as any, some, that, ever, well, still, even, only, all. The prepositions, on the use of which Basic relies so much, are by no means above reproach. Those that have a single characteristic meaning (e.g. in) enter into innumerable and inescapable idiomatic combinations. Several (e.g. against, with, by) have more than one characteristic meaning. Others (of, for) are as empty as the “essential” articles a and the. All in all, at least a third of the words listed as operations are so polyvalent as to claim front rank among the booby traps for the beginner who is learning English.

The numerical word-economy of Basic English owes much to two circumstances which are not propitious to the needs of the beginner. It includes abstract words with wide diversifications of meaning by metaphorical extension; and it has a very small number of names for common objects. In conformity with the principle stated above, Interglossa does not aim at economy of either sort. Where self-explicit compounds involving generic terms are not available as names for common things, it is far better to provide a new one than to leave the learner to fish for a periphrastic definition. Consequently, our list of picturable names is almost twice as large as that of Basic English. Basic offers 25 botanical or zoological and 34 anatomical words. Chapter IX of this draft lists 80 botanical or zoological and 68 anatomical terms as numbered items, in addition to 60 plant, animal or medical names not numbered because assimilated without change of the internationally current form.

Choice of words in Ogden’s Basic list depends on the exigencies of accepted English usage. So also choice of words in a language designed in accordance with the principles stated above depends less on abstract logical principles than on what internationally current root material is to hand. The system of word-economy implicit in the design of Interglossa makes it possible to do with less than 750 words what Basic does with 850; but it would be absurd to restrict the vocabulary within such limits, if only because Basic has a ready-made residual stock-in-trade on which to draw. In a certain sense this is true of Interglossa, since Interglossa permits coining of new amplifiers or substantives from internationally current roots in accordance with rules prescribed for terminals. None the less, the English dictionary is more accessible than those technical works in which internationally current roots abound.

Common nouns come last in the classes of words arranged in what follows. It is necessarily arbitrary to fix the number of essential common nouns, because every occupation and social group within a speech-community has its own peculiar ones. Even novels abound in technical terms which are mere expletives to most readers. One thing which simplifies our task is the fact that an interlanguage word-list need contain no national names, i.e. words for specifically local institutions (casino, bazaar), officials (kaiser, concierge), proper names (Stalin, Leningrad), or implements (samovar, sjambok). It will tolerate such words automatically, as so often happens in the history of natural languages. This means that people of any speech-community have the last word about how to spell their own towns (Wien, København), or countries (Deutschland, Suomi); and the same words serve as adjectives (e.g. Scotch tweed = Scotland texti). Another class of words calls for similar treatment. Few people talk about gills and fins, unless they have some technical interest in comparative anatomy. Those who have, will know the internationally current terms (branchia and pterygia) for them.

At this point, a necessary qualification to preceding remarks will forestall misunderstanding at a later stage. Semantic rectitude does not prescribe that juxtaposition of two vocables in a particular order must have the same singularity of meaning as have two ordered symbols of a non-commutative algebra. Everyday discourse has functions other than those of mathematical symbolism, if only because it has to engage the interest of an audience. If the fact receives tardy recognition in elementary teaching of highly flexional languages, the study of completely isolating ones, e.g. of the Chinese group, or of an almost completely isolating language such as Anglo-American, forces us to recognize how extensively we rely on context to convey meaning without multiplication of verbal counters or of grammatical devices to complicate the rules of the game. Divorced from its context, we are free to interpret the couplet religious worker as: (a) any member of the working class with religious convictions or professions; (b) a person who does regular voluntary or paid work for a religious organization. In an actual slab of sustained discourse its organic relation to the semantic gestalt would rarely if ever give rise to misunderstanding between English-speaking people; and the disadvantages of sacrificing word-economy or economy of space and effort to legislate for so few occasions would out-weigh the benefits.

To some extent, mathematics also relies on context to supply the necessary clue to correct interpretation. For instance, we interpret the cluster d²x both as a differential of the second order in the domain of the infinitesimal calculus and as the product of x and the square of d in the domain of elementary algebra. If we speak here or elsewhere of a couplet or compound as self-explicit, the epithet is therefore shorthand for sufficiently explicit in a context where it will commonly crop up. Context, and context alone, dictates how we interpret the vagaries of the allegedly “possessive” terminal ’s in father’s debts, father’s death and father’s dress-shirt. Context, and context alone, endorses the relationship implicit in churchyard, brickyard, backyard. A little reflection on such illustrations of its role should encourage the fastidious reader to take a tolerant view about the need for hard and fast rules for framing compounds whose meaning is sufficiently suggestive in an appropriate situation. Words are not mere atoms. They are organs of communication. As such, their functions inescapably depend on the whole body of discourse.

Reading and Self-expression

Three classes of difficulties discussed in what has gone before do not exhaust those which confront a person who is learning a language. Language-learning involves four skills as different as arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry. The skills necessary for complete mastery are: (a) auditory recognition; (b) pronunciation and intonation; (c) self-expression in writing; (d) recognition of the written word. Whether one of them is more or less difficult to acquire than another depends partly on personal gifts, such as visual memory and mimetic aptitude. Opportunities for use by reading, by travel or by correspondence play a part, as also intrinsic characteristics of the language itself.

Languages which are relatively holophrastic, such as French, offer greater difficulties for auditory recognition than more staccato languages like German. The syntax of German makes reading difficult, and Hottentot clicks or Chinese tones are hard to mimic without special phonetic training. With due allowance to these considerations, one thing stands out clear. On the whole, most people master reading knowledge with least difficulty, and acquire the trick of auditory recognition last of all. With constant use, the latter comes easily to anyone who has acquired the knack of self-expression in writing. So auditory recognition is of minor interest, if the end in view is to make things easy for the beginner.

What is more important is the difficulty of reading relative to the difficulty of self-expression. A difference between the skill required for reading knowledge and the skill required for self-expression is relevant to a criticism unjustly levelled against Basic English. All of us know the meaning of many native words which we never use in speech or writing, and the gap between the vocabulary of reading and that of self-expression is inevitably greater when our means of Communication is a foreign language. To read a language we need to be able to recognize a relatively large number of words when memory (and ingenuity) is prompted by context. Self-expression involves very ready recollection of a relatively small number of words without extrinsic help. So part of the art of mastering a language is to get a thorough knowledge of a small battery of essential words for self-expression, and a nodding acquaintance with a much larger residual stock for reading.

Since it is much harder to remember words without help from the context than to remember them when the context prompts us, the desirability of designing a language with great potential word-economy is not incompatible with the stylistic advantage of having a copious vocabulary. Ogden has shown us that English has astonishing possibilities of word-economy, and we all know that it has a richer residual battery of synonyms than any other language. This is partly due to its hybrid structure, and Interglossa is also a hybrid. If we want to combine potential word-economy for ready self-expression with what versatility of expression safeguards style against monotony, we can take advantage of this fact. Different roots of international technical terms may have the same semantic content. Hence the problem of choosing word-material is not as difficult as it might seem. We are not forced to undertake a statistical word-count of internationally current roots. Part of our essential word-list offers the beginner a choice of two words. For purposes of self-expression the beginner will naturally choose the one to which he (or she) associates most readily, or can most easily pronounce. For purposes of reading, or communication with others who associate more readily to the alternative form, a cursory study of the word-list will usually suffice.

In this context it is fitting to forestall the intelligible criticism that a page of Interglossa does not look easier than a page of Novial. Anyone who has had a good secondary school education in Britain or America can guess his or her way through a passage of Novial (or other interlanguage of the same type) without the preliminary precaution of consulting a grammar or dictionary. This fact gives anyone who has not thought much about interlinguistic problems an unduly favourable impression of the ease with which it is possible to master Novial. It would not be difficult to construct a highly latinized strip of English through which an otherwise well-educated Frenchman with no knowledge of our language could also guess his way. English of this type would certainly (if only because the acceptable operative constructions on which Basic word-economy depends are Teutonic in origin) be more difficult to learn thoroughly than is Ogden’s Basic.

To an English reader Novial looks more easy than it is for two reasons. It takes over the grammatical pattern common to Aryan languages (with the semantic inconsistencies inherent in it), and it has a large hybrid stock-in-trade of words from the two major sources of our own. One has less formal grammar to learn than one would have if one set out to learn French or German; but, having traversed the first few milestones, one has still to grapple with the semantic difficulties inherent in the pattern of the Aryan group. One has to go on piling up a word-list without information concerning which words are most essential, The fact that Novial looks so easy to read is a feature of high publicity value. It does not signify that it is also easy to master the art of self-expression in Novial.

To cut down the difficulties by judicious word-economy we have to delve more deeply into semantic issues which Jespersen and his predecessors side-stepped. Inevitably, we find our-selves gravitating away from the grammatical pattern of the Aryan family to a more universal idiom with features common to Chinese. The result is that learning a language so designed is a lively training in clear thinking of a kind which anyone can usefully undertake. In fact, the grammar of Interglossa, as is largely true of Basic, is semantics. Its author does not claim that it is easy to read a page of Interglossa at sight without previous information concerning its structure. It is designed with the aim of reducing to a minimum time and effort necessary for complete mastery of self-expression. From that point of view, all that the average intelligent person can achieve by months devoted to the study of E, I, I.N., P or N should be over in the same number of days devoted to Interglossa.

Here, as elsewhere, word-economy means numerical limitation of vocables necessary for unaffected discourse about matters of common interest between people of different nationalities. A stock-in-trade of word-material limited in this way will not necessarily offer a compact means of expressing every fine distinction found in a lexicon. To avoid misunderstanding about claims put forward for our essential word-list, it is well to remind ourselves of what Ogden has stressed in the exposition of his own method for adapting English to international use. Dictionary definitions give a false impression of what precision even well-educated people do—or can—achieve when they discuss matters outside a common domain of specialist knowledge. Part of the job of a dictionary is to divulge what limitations the specialist as such imposes on familiar words in a particular field of technical discourse. Such limitations do not and cannot impose a censorship on everyday speech. English-speaking people who are not biologists use and will go on using the term bug without concern for what limitations biologists impose on it in a discussion at the Royal Society. They use and will continue to use the term adultery with little, if any, regard for its unilateral definition in canon law. Where precision is essential at this level of communication, Interglossa prescribes international technical terms if such are available, local terms for local occurrences, or failing either, small residual batteries drawn up by Specialists concerned by use of internationally current roots in accordance with rules for expansion of vocabulary in Chapter X. Professor Edgar de Wahl, author of a project which he has called Occidental, and Lott, the inventor of Mundolingue, have done the necessary spade work.

Teaching Interglossa

Some linguists will protest that I flatter the public by assuming the widespread existence of a large technical vocabulary. In fact, those who are hostile to plans for a constructed language expect to have it both ways. They underestimate the difficulties which natural languages put in the way of collaboration between ordinary men and women who are not gifted linguists, and they overestimate the difficulties of learning an artificial language, because they are not en rapport with the cultural realities of the modern world. Professors of Greek who do not know what a heterodyne set is would be surprised at the number of such words in any hobbies magazine for schoolboys. It is therefore pertinent to add two comments upon objections of this kind:

(a) The intrusion of international technical terms into daily speech is daily gathering momentum, especially in countries where there is public encouragement for scientific research and its application, or good popular scientific journalism. The spectacular infiltration of such terms into the Russian language since the Revolution is sufficiently evident in place-names alone.¹ Because the tempo of infiltration is increasing we can prospect with tolerable confidence what roots are likely to come into daily speech in the near future.

¹ If pushed to define what is an international root in an age of potential plenty, I would say I mean a root which occurs in: (a) any technical term in a League of Nations Report on agriculture, malnutrition, public health or the drug traffic; (b) any proper name printed with a capital letter in a gardener’s catalogue; (c) most words printed in italics in the index of The Science of Life, Science for the Citizen, The Outline of the Universe or other book of the same genre.

(b) It is not likely that any considerable group of speech-communities will adopt an interlingua unless the forces working for international co-operation are stronger than those which are also working to perpetuate militarism and racialism. To put forward a plan of this sort therefore presupposes confidence in the possibility of a more enlightened world in which the disposition to spread scientific knowledge as a basis of social prosperity and a high standard of communal health prevails. In short, Interglossa, or any other artificial language, is a project for a civilization in which education will deal far more with the realities of health and the productive forces of everyday life, than with the dreary superstitions of the past. Biology is already taking the place of the classics in the school curriculum. A world which can be induced to adopt an auxiliary will be a techno-conscious and a health-conscious world, a world with a much larger common stock of everyday words derived from roots current in modern technology.

Since the word-material of Interglossa is based on roots internationally current in science, every vocable can form the basis of association with familiar words or with new and interesting information about the world we live in. The process of learning the vocabulary can therefore have the excitement of the chase. Thus we track down poly (many) from what is common to polygon and polygamy. From polygon and pentagon the pupil would track down gono (angle), from pentagon and pentameter through gasometer we get penta (five) and metro (measure), thence via cyclometer and bicycle through cycli (circle) via bigamy, giving bi (two) back through polygamy to gameo (marriage). From this we can start in various directions. Anyone who has taken a school course in elementary biology will recognize the last word as the root in gametes (sperm and egg), whose marriage gives rise to the embryo. It turns up again in Phanerogams (conifers and flowering plants) so called because their marital arrangements are manifest (phanero) or clear to the eye in contradistinction to Cryptogams (ferns, mosses, seaweeds and fungi), whose sexual processes are cryptic, i.e. hidden (crypto). Though they are common in international scientific terms, some of the roots employed in what follows are not yet in everyday speech or in school science instruction. Admittedly, copa (oar), which occurs in international zoological names for many swimming animals with oar-like limbs, is not an ingredient of daily conversation; but since the Copepoda (a tribe of small shrimps so called for the reason stated) constitute the majority of animal species in the surface layers of the sea and are the chief food of herrings, the act of learning the meaning of copa need not be as lifeless as that of learning the equivalent Finnish word airo.

With the help of the teacher the beginner should thus be able to associate the meaning of each new vocable with a word already familiar or with some new and arresting piece of information about the modern world. Since this draft is for the English-speaking reader, it is sufficient to show how to do so if the beginner speaks English. Chapter IV and the Mnemotechnic notes on pp. 256-282, give appropriate examples for every vocable listed. The claim of Interglossa is that if it contains no psychologically inert word-material such as lapin or Knabe. At the school stage learning Interglossa would be learning semantics, everyday science and comparative etymology hand-in-hand.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I

WORD-MATERIAL OF ESPERANTO AND INTERGLOSSA

Many readers may be unfamiliar with Esperanto except by hearsay. So it is pertinent to set forth, in tabular form, representative specimens of its word-material side by side with the Interglossa equivalents. It would obviously be easy to exaggerate the shortcomings of Esperanto by choosing a small battery of samples from a large class of vocables such as nouns or adjectives. Since space does not permit the author to give the Esperanto equivalent of every vocable of Interglossa, the only just way of bringing out the eclecticism of Esperanto and the international currency of the word-stock of the present project is to give a fairly complete exposition of certain small classes of words which are of particular interest from the standpoint of syntax. We shall therefore list side by side the personal pronouns, numerals, chief prepositions and conjunctions of Esperanto with their Interglossa substitutes. The right-hand column gives an Anglo-American key-word to aid recognition of the Interglossa equivalent; and the reader who has any doubts about the mnemotechnic credentials of the latter can refer to the notes in Chapter XI, where each vocable hits a reference number, indicated in parenthesis.

¹ Kepler’s epoch-making work.
² Famous mediaeval work on mining technology translated into Anglo-American by Hoover.

CHAPTER II

THE ESSENTIAL GRAMMAR OF INTERGLOSSA

Since Interglossa is an isolating (analytical) language, learning Interglossa involves learning merely: (a) its etymology, i.e. mnemonic association of each vocable to an internationally current root (Chapter XI); (b) its semantics, i.e. analysis of the meaningful content of the vocables; (c) its word-order; (d) its phonetics and typography. Some preliminary, and at this stage very tentative, remarks about phonetics and typography, together with a fuller discussion of the word-order pattern, are the topic of what follows:

(a) Phonetics

The vowel symbols have the following values: a as in father; e or ae as in fête; i as in élite; o as in open; and u as in rule: y is equivalent to i. With the following exceptions, consonant symbols have their characteristic values in accordance with those of the international phonetic symbols:

• c, ch and q have the value k
• ph has the value f
• th has the value t
• Initial x is z, otherwise ks.

In the following initial consonant combinations the first element is silent; ct-, gn-, mn-, pn-, ps-, pt-. Thus ps- in pseudo is equivalent to s, as in Anglo-American. The h in the combination rh is also silent. These rules admit of no inconsistencies. The inconvenience of having a few anomalies which go into a dozen lines of print is far less than the disadvantage which would result from mutilating roots beyond visual recognition. Non-Aryan-speaking people who find difficulty with compound consonants and closed syllables (as in blinding or trumpet) will find that some pigeon-holes of the semantic schema offer alternatives of the Yo-ko-ha-ma or To-ky-o type (cf. itinero travel, nesia island). All polysyllables end with a vowel. Unless the last two syllables are both vowels (-io, -ia, etc.), the stress is on the penultimate one, e.g. billEta, permIto. If the word ends with two vowels, the stress is on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g. nEsia and orientAtio.

(b) Word-material

With a few exceptions the vocables of Interglossa are based on unmutilated roots of words which now belong to the vocabulary of all countries where modern technology and hygiene have penetrated. The meaning ascribed to anyone of them does not necessarily tally with the one given in a Latin or a Greek lexicon. It is the meaning suggested by the internationally current words in which it occurs. Less than a dozen are abbreviations. The origin of abbreviated ones comes in the text to assist the beginner to memorize them.

Partly for the reason stated in the last paragraph, and partly because of the principle of word-economy inherent in its design, Interglossa has a peculiarity which distinguishes it from other constructed languages and from many natural ones. Because they are explicit in the sense defined above, particles are relatively long words, while nouns and verbs, relieved of their former flexional accretions, are relatively short ones.¹ Strictly speaking, the terms noun, adjective and verb are not applicable to any words of Interglossa. It is a completely isolating language. So no words have flexions characteristic of such classes in Aryan languages. If we apply the epithet verb or adjective to a word in Interglossa, we mean an invariable word (i.e. particle) which corresponds in a particular context to a particular verb or adjective in French, German or Russian. With few exceptions the same vocable also corresponds to several grammatical homosemes of any Aryan language.

¹ In natural languages, which are not highly inflected, prepositional and conjunctive particles, denoting relations for which clear reasoning prescribes clear-cut fields of reference, are peculiarly liable to semantic erosion; and the same is true, perhaps even more true, of the flexional appendages to which grammatical paradigms ascribe their functions. This is an inescapable limitation of Basic, or of any other form of simplified, English consonant with accepted standards. As an analytical language Basic English has to exploit the use of such particles to the utmost. Hence the words on which it relies so much for sharpness of logical definition are the words most prone to idiomatic use. Peano’s Interlingua suffers from a further defect. Though an isolating language, it derives its battery of directives from Latin, a language somewhat poor in its native outfit of such vocables. A constructed language of the isolating type should be especially richly equipped with directives; and its design should discourage degradation of meaning through overwork of words belonging to this class. Possibly one of several reasons for the degradation of meaning mentioned above as a universal feature of natural languages is that conjunctive and prepositional particles are usually short words. Because they are short, like flexions, we easily slur them in speech. Hence we are apt to rely on context to do their work; and by doing so, become careless about their use. If there is a grain of truth in this supposition, the moral is clear. Such words should stand out boldly in the sentence-matrix. Each should be a challenge to the choice of the speaker and to the attention of the audience. Thus the feature mentioned above is beneficial. A long word with rich associations in a domain of exact discourse, as has (119) postulo for the if of the rejected condition, fulfils the desideratum stated. A short word, like the equivalent se of Esperanto, does not do so. It has no associations of this sort.

(c) Parts of Speech

In all this there is nothing new to the Chinese nor to the Malay speech-community. There is scarcely anything new to anyone who speaks the Anglo-American language. A classification of parts of speech relevant to an isolating language will not follow the categories appropriate to the flexional system of the Aryan group. It will reflect the function of individual vocables in the sentence-landscape: From that point of view we can classify the vocables of Interglossa as follows:

(a) Pseudonyms (11). Four of these (mi, tu, na, mu) are pure pronoun-equivalents divested of any flexions. The remaining seven are of wider range vis-à-vis the practice of Aryan languages. They function both as pronouns and as equivalents for nouns or for corresponding adjectives. This will offer no difficulty to Scandinavians (see p. 82), nor to English-speaking people who customarily refer to a he-goat, and do not hesitate to answer the question: is it a he or a she?

(b) Interrogative, Imperative, Negative and Comparative Particles (6), two of which allow for question, request or command without deviation from the invariant word-pattern. Such particles are common to many languages, and we can find many corresponding periphrases in the Aryan group (e.g. French n’est-ce pas? and Swedish eller hur?)

(c) Substantives (Jespersen uses the term substantive in this sense of noun-adjective) (396). These are names for concrete things or classes of concrete things. As is increasingly true of Anglo-American (queen mother, water power, trade cycle), any one of them can replace an adjectival word-form.

(d) Verboids (20). These are names of processes and states. Like many so-called English verbs, any one verboid may replace a finite verb form, the corresponding abstract noun, and the appropriate epithet, i.e. adjective (cf. we love, the love of God, a love story.) This class is small. Needless to say, all verboids are invariant, but this need not surprise an Anglo-American. Our own verb must is as inflexible as a Chinese verb-equivalent.

(e) Articles (29). These are general words and numerals which have the function of predicating plurality or otherwise in relation to noun-equivalents, all of which are invariant like sheep.

(f) Amplifiers (417). The largest single class of words are abstractions, anyone of which can take the place of a noun, adjective or corresponding adverb. They form natural combinations with operative verboids analogous to such Basic constructions as make clean your hearts, get wise to this, make trouble for them, give attention to me. The corresponding English word may be: (a) a directive (preposition) such as up in he went up the hill = he ascended the hill; (b) an adjectival complement, such as clean in make clean (= purify) your hearts; (c) an abstract noun, such as trouble in make trouble for others = pester or interfere with others. The student of Basic will be familiar with this class, and will not ask why some of them are equally appropriate as substitutes for abstract nouns, adverbial particles, prepositions or adjectives.

The increasing use of the rhetorical present is common to many Aryan languages, when the context or an accompanying adverb suffices to date the occurrence; and a considerable class of English verbs such as hurt, shut, put, have no past flexion. So there should be no inherent difficulty connected with an idiom in which appropriate adverb-equivalents replace the entire flexional system of the verb. As adverb-equivalents, abstract words which are also amplifiers do: (a) all the work of the verb flexions classified as tense, aspect or mood; (b) all the work of modal auxiliaries. There are seventeen amplifiers which do the work of Anglo-American auxiliaries (verboid qualifiers) and as such come before the verboid.

Interglossa has no special class of prepositions. The equivalent for a preposition is an amplifier which can also do the work of an adjective, adverb and, sometimes also, of an abstract noun. The justification for the large-scale word-economy which this makes possible will come up for later discussion. A separate chapter (Chapter VI) deals with those amplifiers which can do the work of link-words (conjunctions) or preposition-equivalents if they have the appropriate (p. 109) locus in the sentence-matrix.

(d) Word-order

Word-order circumscribes the essential syntax of an isolating language such as Interglossa. The following English sentence will provide a pattern to prepare the way for what follows, and to clarify the terms used, viz., verboid, verboid qualifier, amplifier, and substantive cluster. Items (3), (4), (5), together make up the verboid cluster:

“ The retiring president of the society will make clear to us his reasons for resignation.”

The parts are:

This paradigm illustrates Anglo-American word-order in an affirmative simple statement or principal clause. It also reproduces the essential pattern of Interglossa in any sentence or clause. The word-order of Interglossa does not change in questions, requests, commands and relative clauses. For adequate instruction concerning its word-order we have therefore to be more explicit about class (b) in the preceding section, and to say something about the relative clause.

In spoken English we often express interrogation, without change of word-order, by tone of voice or by tacking on eh? In some languages the use of an interrogative particle (e.g. Finnish ko) is the ordinary method of indicating interrogation, in writing as well as in speech. The English modal auxiliaries do (do you think so?) or will (will you give me some more?) respectively, have the same function in a question or in a request. In the same way, initial interrogative or imperative particles of Interglossa indicate that what follows is a question, request, or command, without change of the invariable word-pattern. This fixed pattern is equally characteristic of subordinate clauses and simple sentences, whether affirmative, interrogative or imperative.

The beginner has to get accustomed to the trick of preserving the word-order of an equivalent simple sentence in a relative clause. This will offer no difficulty to anyone who is familiar with colloquial Anglo-American. There is a single relative pronoun su for the subject. Like the English that it can stand for person or thing, singular or plural:

• U domi; su pre gene gravito; habe mega palaeo = The house that fell down was very old
• Un anthropi; su pre dicte re; non habe bio = The man who said so is dead

The relative pronoun su cannot be the object of the verb, nor can it follow a preposition-equivalent. When the relative pronoun is not the subject, no equivalent takes its place. We proceed precisely as in conversational English:

• Un anthropi; mi pre vise; non habe bio = The man I saw is dead
• Un anthropi; na pre dicte de; non habe bio = The man we were talking about is dead

A general formula for all types of sentence or clause is as follows:

(1) Vocative cluster (if present) followed by a colon, e.g.:

• Na parenta in urani: = Our father (which art) in heaven
• Pan proletari de geo: = Workers of the world

(2) Interrogative particle or imperative particle or link-word (if present).

(3) Subject cluster.

(4) Verboid cluster.

(5) Direct and Indirect Object clusters with accompanying qualifying clusters.

The rule of precedence with reference to the Direct and Indirect or Instrumental Object clusters is that the shorter of the two (with due regard to accompanying qualifying clusters) comes first, e.g.:

• Fe pre dicte a mi mega longo historo = She told (to) me a very long story
• Mi date credito de bibli pan amico-pe de mi = I am lending the book to all (of) my friends

The formula given above takes no stock of the internal pattern of the clusters specified, or of qualifying expressions. The rule for phrases which qualify a substantive, whether themselves substantive clusters beginning with a preposition or clusters equivalent to a participial phrase, is the same as in Anglo-American. Unlike single words which do so, each follows the substantive it qualifies, e.g.:

• U palaeo gyna in horta = The old woman in the garden
• U gyna, mega tem apo auto anthropi = A woman, separated a long while from her husband

A substantive cluster may be made up of the following elements in the order stated, only (2) being an obligatory constituent common to all clusters:

(1) Directive (i.e. preposition-equivalent).

(2) One of the following: (a) pronoun-equivalent; (b) general article; (c) numeral.

(3) A qualifier of (4), i.e. an adverb-equivalent.

(4) A qualifier of (5), i.e. an adjective-equivalent.

(5) A noun-equivalent, usually a substantive as defined above.

There is no formal distinction between adjective and adverb or adjective and abstract noun. Nearly all epithets (i.e. words which can replace an Aryan adjective) can also serve as qualifiers of other epithets (cf. fast in English), or as verbal qualifiers, and as the nominal equivalent of the attribute (cf. the True and the Beautiful); but no epithet can be a pronoun, as in the construction: the good (= good people) die young. The epithet as qualifier of another epithet precedes the word it qualifies as the epithet which qualifies the noun precedes the final substantive of the subject cluster. Where ambiguity might arise owing to absence of formal distinction between adverb and adjective, we resort to the use of plus or syn (and) as in the English model (fast and sinking ship). Here the link and shows that the two adjectives qualify ship. We thus get the following rule. If two epithets occur in juxtaposition the first is the qualifier of the second (cf. a fast sinking ship = a ship fast sinking); but if two epithets independently qualify the same nounequivalent, syn (123) separates them.

The verboid qualifier may consist of three elements: (a) the negative particle non; (b) one of the three temporal particles pre, nun, post; (c) an amplifier which does the work of a modal auxiliary. The last (c) comes next to the key verboid, the first next to the subject cluster, e.g.:

• Mi no pre poto acte re = I could not do so

The general rule that any single qualifying word must immediately precede the word it qualifies admits of one exception to allow for afterthought. Words or expressions which qualify a sentence or clause as a whole may come at the beginning of it or at the end, as do surely and a long while in the English sentences: (a) surely you don’t mean that; (b) he has been staying there a long while. The rules for clause-order are as in English, viz.:

(a) A noun clause follows the principal without a conjunction equivalent to that;

(b) An adverbial clause preferably precedes the principal;

(c) A relative clause immediately follows the substantive which it qualifies.

Since there is no flexion of the verboid, there is no need for special rules about the use of the verb-equivalent in oratio obliqua. There is no periphrastic passive—except in so far as verboid clusters formed with the operator gene (become, get) and an amplifier (e.g. gene thermo = become hot = get heat) are passive equivalents of verbs formed in the same way with date (give, confer) and are therefore causative (e.g. date thermo = confer heat or heat). The only permissible impersonal expressions are those in which it (re) refers to the whole situation (e.g. re habe thermo = it is hot, or literally it has heat).

(e) Sentence-landscape

For ready recognition of the written word a language purged of flexional impedimenta can still benefit from two devices which bring into relief the component clusters of the fixed word-order pattern of Interglossa. These signposts of sentence-landscape are: (a) articles (p. 33); (b) terminals. The system of terminals is as follows:

(a) All verboids end in -e. The only other words that do so are the pseudonyms fe, pe and re (p. 82), the interrogative particle que (42) and the four prepositional amplifiers pre (72), tele (99), de (109) and vice (127).

(b) Substantives (as defined above) end in -a or -i. Exceptions are: geo (645) for earth; cardo (740) the international term for a hinge; acu (733) for nail or pin; occlu (765) for bolt or nut, and bureau (816) for a public office.

(c) Amplifiers end in -o. Among vocables given first choice, the exceptions to this rule are the time units (anni, di, hora, etc.) and some amplifiers with prepositional values, viz.: post (71), pre (72), tem (74), ad (75), contra (78), epi (81), ex (82), extra (83), in (85), inter (86), para (94), littora (95), peri (96), tele (99), trans (101), anti (103), de (109), minus (115), per (117), plus (118), syn (123), vice (127). As with geo, etc. above, the disadvantage of mutilating a familiar international stem or of unduly lengthening the word outweighs the objection to 32 exceptions in all out of a total of 404.

Both amplifiers and verboids may be elements of a substantive cluster equivalent to an adjective or to an abstract noun. We then recognize them as such by the possessive pseudonym or the article which labels the substantive cluster as such. In accordance with the word-order rules, we have

• U phobo de theo = (The) fear of God
• U tene de infanti = The custody of the child

Here the empty singular article u or un (before a vowel) shows that phobo is not the complement of a verb, and that tene is not equivalent to a verb finite. On the other hand, the combination stimule phobo could only mean terrify or frighten. In ninety-nine out of a hundred situations, a construction in which an -e word immediately precedes an -o word is an operative construction. These hints illustrate one class of safeguards which make it possible to slide the same semantic element from one grammatical category to another without undue embarrassment to the learner who is steeped in the morphological pattern of a particular language group.

Thus the word-order pattern leaves no room for doubt about whether the word mi means I, me, my. If it replaces I it must come near and before the key verboid, i.e. an -e word. The only words which can separate it from the latter are verboid qualifiers. If it means me it must come after the key verboid, and since most verb-equivalents involve an amplifier it will generally follow an -o word. If it means my it will replace the article of a substantive cluster of which one element is nearly always a common name, i.e. an -a or -i word.

The presence of an -o word next to the verboid (i.e. a combination of an -e word with an -o word which follows immediately after it) makes explicit the literal and metaphorical meaning of the latter. For illustrative purposes it suffices to take the triad habe, date and gene. Habe means have or possess something tangible (habe u domi = have a house) or some abstract property (habe credito ex = have credit from or owe). Date means confer or give something tangible (date u bibli = give the book) or some abstract property, in which capacity it does most of the work of the Basic operator make as well as that of give. Thus date masso = load is equivalent to confer weight or make heavy, and date digito = imply is equivalent to give indication of. Gene means get or acquire something tangible (gene u gyna = get a wife or marry) or an abstract property, hence to become (gene melano = get blackness, i.e. blacken or become black). The article of the direct object substantive cluster following one of these three operative verboids shows that we must interpret it in the literal sense.

(f) Alternative Words

The amplifiers make up the largest class of words in the essential vocabulary. For some of them and for some substantives alternative international roots are available, and the beginner can choose the one more familiar or more easy to pronounce. The word-list of succeeding chapters offers no alternatives for pronoun-equivalents (pseudonyms) or for certain common words which most conspicuously cut across the Aryan parts of speech. The total number of these is about a hundred, and it should be the business of the beginner to memorize them first. A few, namely uN, aD, noN, nuN, eX, drop the final consonant if the next word begins with one.

(g) Punctuation and Typography

In continuous prose—though not in our short examples cited for illustration—the substantive element of a substantive cluster begins with a capital letter, as in Danish and German print. So does a pronoun subject (e.g. mi = I), or the pronoun object of a verb or prepositional equivalent (e.g. mi = me). A pronoun used in its possessive (e.g. mi = my) sense without de (cf. de mi = my) does not begin with a capital letter. In relation to sentence structure, conventions of punctuation are specially important. The full-stop and inverted commas conform to the usual conventions. The comma marks off items of a catalogue, or participial expressions. The colon introduces a catalogue coming at the end of a sentence, or an introductory vocative expression (see p. 35). The two outstanding idiosyncrasies of Interglossa punctuation are:

(a) The end of every clause, with its own subject-“verb” complex, whether principal, subordinate or co-ordinate, is marked off from a succeeding clause of the same sentence by a semi-colon. In script the semi-colon takes the place of a conjunction equivalent to that at the beginning of a noun clause.

• Causo mi volo date prospecto u gene logo de interglossa pro tu; mi pre acte grapho u bibli; plus mi esthe espero; plu pe acte lecto re.
= Because I want to show you the way to learn Interglossa, I have written this book, and I hope (that) some people will read it.

(b) The hyphen binds together as units certain compounds made up of independent particles.

International Shorthand

From the time of Dalgarno and Wilkins in the seventeenth century, pioneers of language-planning have paid attention to the need for rapid transcription, and have taken a hand in shorthand projects of one sort or another. This is as it should be. Rapid transcription and economy of space or type are admittedly desiderata of an ideally designed language, though of secondary importance vis-à-vis ease of learning. It is therefore fitting to add a few words on devices which make for economical typography and copying.

Critics of Basic English make much of the fact that it is long-winded. The criticism has a measure of truth, but much less than appears from illustrations divorced from a real context. The fact is that any analytical language designed like Basic (or Interglossa) eliminates redundancies of language which do not show up in a dictionary definition. A dictionary definition of the verb swim in Basic or Interglossa has to specify the fact that the activity takes place in water. Since the Channel is a stretch of water, this part of the definition disappears when we translate the sentence: he swam the Channel yesterday. Consequently a dictionary gives a quite distorted idea of the space which a Basic or Interglossa translation takes up. By comparing the translations in Chapter XI with the originals, the reader can verify the claim that Interglossa is not more space-consuming than everyday English.

The inherent antinomy between word-economy in the interests of the beginner and space-economy in the interests of those who pay for the cost of printing prompts a suggestion that those who write Interglossa should freely use internationally current ideograms, such as £, $, + (plus), ̵ (without), ♀ (female or Venus) for she, her, ♂ (male or Mars) for he, him, his, ☿ (hermaphrodite or Mercury) for one, one’s, ☽ (moon), ? put at the beginning of a sentence or clause for the interrogative particle que, & amp; (syn), etc. (see p. 123), as also all international abbreviations, e.g. g (gram), 1 (litre), m (metre), etc. We can also economize space by breaking away from the humanistic tradition which prescribes the formula one hundred and sixty-three thousand nine hundred and seventy-two for the compact ideogram 163972, and by using 0 and 1 respectively for the articles zero (no) and un (a, the).

One advantage of a language designed to achieve maximum word-economy in Ogden’s sense recalls R. J. G. Dutton’s Speedwords, an ingenious system of international shorthand which makes use of monosyllables in Roman script, thus cutting out the effort of learning a new and esoteric system of symbols. With 5 vowel and 20 consonant symbols we can build 100 open syllables like to or be, and 100 open monosyllables like at or up, making 205 pronounceable elements, if we add simple vowels to the list. Closed monosyllables like pat or top containing no consonant clusters add another 2,000 possibilities. Since Basic English gets along with a word-list of 850 essential items, it is clearly possible to design a language of which all the root words would be monosyllabic, like the root words of a Chinese language. A language so designed need not be compromised by a superfoetation of homophones, as in Chinese; but it could not be a language based exclusively on current international roots, many of which are polysyllables.

It follows that a language designed on the speedword principle would not be as easy to learn for purposes of reading, writing or speaking as a language built up of unmutilated internationally current word-material. For that reason Interglossa eschews contracted forms except for 5 essential pronouns, the 2 interrogative and imperative particles, and a special class of 13 generic substantives or amplifiers (pp. 97-105) which enter into large groups of compounds. The last-named have alternative full forms. At the same time, a language of which all the essential vocables do not exceed 900 is well adapted to make use of the Dutton principle for note-taking and other purposes for which economy of space and speed of transcription are specially important. It is possible to represent each vocable of Interglossa by a distinct monosyllable based on the initial letters or bisyllable made up of not more than four letters, keeping the average length of a word to 2·6 letters. It would not be possible to do the same thing with a natural language—other than Basic English—because too many of the combinations of less than 4 initial letters would have to be the same. A casual glance at any page of a dictionary suffices to prove this.

Since each pigeon-hole in the 880-item semantic schema has its appropriate number, it is possible to communicate with a code of ten symbols, i.e. the Arabic numerals, without using more than three consecutive symbols for each word. Thus, dispatched fifty kilograms wheat last month is: 464. 31.26.38. 717. 625. 72. 68. This involves recourse to half as many symbols from a keyboard with less than half as many items.

THE SYSTEM OF OPERATORS

Subject and Object

To define rules of word-order (p. 34) we need reference points. Two reference points in what has gone before have been subject and object. The use of these terms calls for comment to forestall a charge of inconsistency. Some people still cherish the delusion that subject and object are categories of semantic relations in contradistinction to categories of flexional change. For instance, Esperantists¹ tell us that we need an accusative terminal to distinguish the object, as if a generic conception of object could arise in a language free from case-flexion or case-postpositions like those of Japanese. This is a legacy of classical misconceptions concerning the semantic credentials of grammatical habits of particular—more especially Aryan—speech-communities.

¹ The resistance some people put up against lucid discussion concerning the semantic credentials of nineteenth-century grammatical “rules” is hardly surprising, when we recall how many generations of schoolboys have been caned into acquiescence with their patent absurdities. It is a little humiliating for people past forty to discover in later life that the rigours of the school climate have left them with a weakened constitution. Modern educational practice has abandoned the pretence that the grammar of the grammar school has much relevance to English in its present form, still less to international syntax; and Esperantists are now among the last supporters of pedagogic superstitions which still flourished in the naughty ’nineties.

What state we can legitimately predicate as a property of a given subject and what process can have a given substantive as its proper agent or as its rightful goal depend on the particular state or process under discussion. In other words, what we call subject and what we call object depend on the meaning of the particular verb with which two given substantives (or their pronoun substitutes) labelled as such are associated. The highest common factor of semantic content in appropriate subjects of all verbs is zero; and the same is true of all objects of all verbs.

Partisans assert that the flexions of Esperanto permit members of different speech-communities to communicate without departure from native word-order. It is difficult to reconcile this pretension with the difficulties of translating a long German sentence when the meaning of the words is apparent. German should be an easy language for an Englishman or American to learn, because of the large stock of roots it shares with our own language. The fact is that English-speaking people learn German with difficulty. Its wealth of flexions certainly does not make the task of the beginner easier; but the most formidable obstacle is unfamiliarity with the arrangement of words.

If anyone who reads these pages is not clear about the issue stated in the preceding paragraphs, a few examples should suffice to dispel the belief that any common thread of meaning runs through the subject-object distinction. That nothing of the sort exists is sufficiently evident if we consider verb-couplets which have a reciprocal relation, e.g. stimulate and respond. Thus X (subject) reacts to Y, means the same as Y (subject) stimulates X. In fact the logical, as distinct from the grammatical, status of the subject depends on the progress of knowledge. If the eye emits light, as Plato taught, the logical relations of subject and object are the same in the two following statements: (a) I see the flash, (b) I strike the table. In both of them the speaker-subject is the Platonic agent, and the so-called object is the goal or victim of the process. The fact that photography is possible shows that Plato was wrong. So it is clear that the flash (grammatical object) is the agent (logical subject) of the first statement. This is not an isolated case. Whether we identify the grammatical subject of affective verbs such as love or wish with the agent of the process described by these words depends on whether we cling to traditional idealistic views about cognition and sentiment or whether we prefer to anticipate a more strictly behaviourist attitude. If we define the logical subject as the agent of a process, a solipsist view of the world prescribes that the logical is also the grammatical subject of: I remember, I remember the house where I was born. The behaviourist view, which is also that of the practical man or woman, prescribes that the house is the agent which initiates the type of cerebral activity called memory.

What we choose to call subject and object from a grammatical point of view thus depends on the grammatical apparatus of the language under discussion. In our own, we can use they and them as litmus paper. That is to say, the category of words which they can replace defines the subject class. In the sentence they respond to them, they can refer only to the things or persons stimulated, never to the stimulus. We have thus a class of verbs in which the grammatical subject of a process or action is what gets the stimulus. We also have a class of verbs (e.g. excite, stimulate) of which the grammatical subject is the stimulus itself, a class of verbs of which the grammatical subject is the person who applies the stimulus (whip, cut), and a class of verbs of which the grammatical subject may be either stimulus or person who applies it (prick, sting). Such verbs stand for processes; and if we include verbs which stand for states we can distinguish many other categories by what classes of substantives can play the role of grammatical subject.

It is not justifiable to use the terms subject and object as reference points of international syntax unless we can define them without recourse to grammatical tricks peculiar to particular languages. Happily, as Ogden has seen, we can sidestep the difficulty by keeping down the number of verb-equivalents; and it is the object of this chapter to clarify the rules of word-order given on p. 35 by making the meaning of subject and object explicit with reference to each verboid. Interglossa has 20 verboids of which one, ge, is an operative particle based on gene (473), and one eque (469) stands for the so-called verb be when be links what follows with the subject and an identity or a specification of the class to which it belongs (Roosevelt is the right man; Victoria was then Queen of England; elephants are mammals). Otherwise habe (have) does the work of be; and is the universal copula connecting subject (i.e. Topic) and its attribute (he has strength = he is strong).

We have already examined the meaning of habe (474), gene (473) and date (466) in outline. Two operators, (477) (481) perde (lose) and tracte ... apo (take ... away), in combination with an amplifier respectively do the work of gene and date in combination with its opposite. We have seen that date thermo and gene thermo respectively mean to heat or warm in a transitive (confer heat on) and intransitive or reflexive (get heat) sense. Similarly tracte thermo apo (take heat away from) and perde thermo (lose heat) respectively mean to cool in a transitive or intransitive (reflexive) sense. Negative opposites such as no-thermo also have their own type of comparison. Thus we have thermo—major thermo (hot—hotter) and no-thermo—minor thermo (cool—cooler). From one amplifier we can thus build up a double series of verbal and adjectival forms; such as:

Thus gene and perde form with amplifiers intransitive equivalents of causative verbs based on date and tracte ... apo. The intransitive equivalent may correspond to a single English verb form, or merely to a passive construction. Thus with rugo (rough, coarse) we have:

• date rugo X = roughen X, coarsen X (tr.)
• tracte rugo apo X = smooth X
• gene rugo = get rough, coarsen (intr.)
• perde rugo = get smooth

When we resolve the verbal system of an Aryan language into a system of operators and complementary abstractions, as in Basic English, the conventional distinction between transitive and intransitive wears thin. According to text-book definitions, the room is the object of the “transitive” verb leave in he leaves the room, but the object of the preposition outside when we substitute the “intransitive” verb go in the semantic identity he goes outside the room. Thus what we call transitive or intransitive merely depends on whether we have to insert a preposition between a verb and a substantive cluster which follows it. By this token we can speak of the construction make clean in make clean your hearts as transitive, and give trouble in give trouble to others as intransitive. In what follows we shall speak of: (a) a transitive verboid, if it does not require an amplifier equivalent to a preposition to link it to a substantive cluster which comes immediately after it; (b) a transitive operator when the combination of verboid and postposited amplifier does not require the insertion of a preposition-equivalent in the same position. In this sense perde and gene are transitive verboids but intransitive operators. They cannot take an object without intervention of a preposition-equivalent; but the triple combination may do the work of a simple English verb form. Thus from credito (loan) we have:

• date credito Y de X = lend Y (some) Z
• habe credito ex Y = owe Y (= have a loan from Y)
• gene credito ex Y = borrow (= get a loan from Y)

To state that date is a transitive operator is therefore another way of saying that we do not translate on in the construction: the subject (X) confers the abstract property denoted by the amplifier on the object (Y), i.e. we interpret date thermo X as confer heat on X. The territory of date as an operator is reserved for verb-equivalents which signify conferring a state or passive attribute. When an amplifier implies execution of a process, including performance of a human action, acte (do, perform, carry out) usually takes its place as a transitive operator; and either gene or habe do for the passive construction. Thus with scholo (instruction) we have:

• acte scholo Y de Z = teach Y about Z
• gene scholo de Z = learn Z, study Z (= get instruction about Z)
• gene scholo ex Y = be taught by Y (= get instruction from Y)

Thus the formula for acte couplets is: X performs the action on Y. If an amplifier stands for an action (see p. 19) and its product, we can use either date or acte; e.g. with vesto (covering) we can use:

• acte vesto Y = cover Y
• date vesto Y = cover Y

For the special class of verbs which signify acts of human communication, we can always replace (464) acte by (468) dicte (say, tell, express) as a transitive operator in the sense defined above. The formula is: X communicates the message to Y. Thus with monito (counsel, advice, warning) we have:

• dicte monito Y = warn Y, advise Y
• habe (or gene) monito ex Y = be warned by Y, be advised by Y

In conformity with the rule of priority (p. 36) the analytical resolution of verbs prescribed above involves a departure from the customary English word-order, as illustrated by the use of the qualifier mega (much, big):

• gene mega credito ex Y = borrow heavily from Y (i.e. get a big loan from Y)
• date mega credito Y = lend Y a lot

In the last it would be equally consistent with the transitive use of date as an operator—though longer—to say:

• date credito Y de mega re = give a loan of much to Y

This would be the normal construction when there are two objects:

• date credito Y de Z = lend Z to Y

In an operative construction (480) tene (keep, conserve) is also transitive, i.e. a tene amplifier couplet signifies conserving the state specified by the amplifier on behalf of Y (the object which follows):

• tene immuno Y = guard Y, protect Y (keep Y safe)

The domain of the transitive operator detecte (find, discover) is investigatory operations. If A stands for an abstract noun-equivalent of an amplifier, a (467) detecte couplet has the meaning: discover the A of Y (the object), e.g.:

• detecte fabrico Y = analyse Y (find the composition of Y)
• detecte sequo Y = deduce from Y (find the result of Y)

The formula for the transitive operator (479) stimule (excite, evoke, stimulate, call forth) is: evoke the reaction A from Y. Thus with philo (love) and cholo (anger) we have:

• stimule philo Y = endear oneself to Y
• stimule mega cholo Y = infuriate Y

When the accompanying amplifier signifies a physical process or reaction, the corresponding intransitive construction is an acte couplet. The transitive operator (470) esthe (feel, experience) combines with amplifiers which signify sentiment or personal states, and the appropriate formula is feel A towards Y, e.g.:

• esthe philo Y = love Y
• esthe penito Y = regret Y
• esthe cholo Y = be angry with Y

The operator (478) reacte (react to, respond to) forms transitive couplets for which the formula is respond to the A of Y, e.g.:

• reacte flavoro Y = taste Y
• reacte impero Y = obey Y
• reacte odoro Y = smell Y
• reacte questio Y = answer Y

Three motive operators, with tracte, form a class apart. Kine (475), which is intransitive, means move, go, come, and is the basis of a large class of verbs such as ascend, enter, mount, depart. Mote (476) is its transitive counterpart signifying shift, move and put. Balle (465) signifies dispatch, send, cast, throw. All these are verb coenosemes of which the complementary coenosemes are equivalent to adverbial prepositions. Thus with extra (outside) and apo (away) we get:

• balle Y extra = eject Y, extrude Y
• mote Y in = insert Y
• tracte Y apo Z = extract Y from Z

The remaining verboids (471) facte (make, construct); (463) acouste (hear); (482) vise (see) form only a few amplifier couplets. Facte requires a material thing or collective as its object and is not at all comparable to the Basic English operator make. Constructions with facte and its material object do, however, cover the meaning of many Aryan verbs:

• facte u texti = weave (make a fabric)
• facte u domi = build (make a house)

From what has gone before it follows that the meaning we give the terms direct and indirect object depends on whether we are using a verboid literally (without an amplifier) or operatively (with a postposited amplifier). As used literally, we may summarise our use of the terms subject and object as in the table below. The particle a(d) always precedes the indirect object.

Operative couplets as listed below do not take an indirect object preceded by a(d). The indirect object of the equivalent Aryan verb is a word preceded by pro (on behalf of), anti (against), or the empty particle de (with respect to). The following table, in which X is subject and Y object, summarizes operative constructions with amplifiers

This pattern is generally applicable, but gene may take anti for ex before the object, e.g.:

• gene victo anti Y = conquer Y, vanquish Y (get victory against Y)

Tense

Like other words of Interglossa, verboids have no flexions. Independently mobile vocables do the work of tense flexion, where necessary. The equivalence of temporal auxiliaries and adverbial particles is evident if we compare the English sentences: (i) I have hurt myself; (ii) I did hurt myself; (iii) I previously hurt myself. The usage of Interglossa follows the last plan. The essential rules are as follows:

(i) If the context does not sufficiently date the occurrence or condition as before (pre), now (nun), or afterwards (post), the particles pre, nu(n), and post, placed immediately in front of the key verboid, label the time as past, present, or future respectively, e.g.:

• Mi no nun acte re = I am not doing so (at present)
• Mi no pre acte re = I did not do so. I have not done so
• Mi no post acte re = I shall not do so. I am not going to do

(ii) If the context sufficiently dates the occurrence or state, no preposited particle is necessary. Any other time-indicator takes up the usual position of a particle which qualifies the sentence or clause as a whole, i.e. at the beginning or end of it, e.g.:

• Mi non acte re post-di = I shall not do so to-morrow
• Mi non acte re pre-mensi = I did not do so last month

(iii) If we want to indicate what was over at some past date (perfected action or state), we use pre before the key verboid in addition to the other temporal qualifier, e.g.:

• Mi no pre acte re pre-di = I had not done so yesterday

(iv) If we want to indicate action or state completed before some future date, we put pre in front of the qualifier:

• Mi non acte re pre post-di = I shall not have done so to-morrow (i.e. I do not do so before to-morrow)

Thus post (72) before the key verboid does the work of shall, will, be going to. Pre (73) does the work of have or did (or of the simple past flexion) when the sentence contains no other qualifier to date the occurrence as past. If such a qualifier is present, it has the force of had. Either way, its presence in front of the key verboid makes the action or state antecedent to the implicit present or explicit past.

Constructions Equivalent to the Infinitive

Since all verboids of Interglossa are also abstract nouns, all infinitive constructions other than those which involve an auxiliary (e.g. shall, will, should, would, let, may, must, can) are nominal constructions, and the accompanying article labels them as such. Three situations arise:

(i) The simple gerund or verb-noun is straightforward because the infinitive (or the -ing derivative) of the English verb is always a homoseme of the corresponding noun-abstract. Accordingly its equivalent has the article u(n) or the empty associative particle de as signpost of sentence-landscape:

• U facte u satio eu inter-natio glossa non habe facilo = It is not easy to construct a satisfactory international language
• Mi esthe espero de vise tu = I hope to see you

(ii) The purposive infinitive, i.e. when to signifies in order to, involves tendo u(n) (with a view to a), for to in this context, e.g.:

• Mi pre kine topo tendo un acte re = I went there in order to do so

(iii) Either tendo u(n) alone or (u methodo) de (a method for) may mean the same as how to, and we have the analogous constructions chron u when to, and loco u or topo u where to:

• An dicte a mi u methodo de facte re = He told me how to make it
• An dicte a mi chron u facte re = He told me when to make it

(iv) The so-called accusative-infinitive construction means the same as a construction involving the possessive pronoun and the gerund (-ing form). The pronoun-equivalent replaces the article of (i) and (ii) above and is “possessive” by juxtaposition:

• Mi dicte petitio an acte re = I asked him to do it (I requested his doing it)

Briefly, the rule is that u(n) or de before an operator is equivalent to the empty word to (German zu, Swedish att, French a), and tendo u is equivalent to in order to (German um zu, Swedish för att). As above, a pronoun in its possessive sense may replace the article u(n). Hence the possessive gerund construction and the accusative-infinitive are both indistinguishable from a noun clause, as when we say in English:

• I saw he did it = I saw him doing it
• I know he is right = I know him to be right

Participial Usage

Since a verboid has no flexion, date means give, gives, or giving, and we can use it (or any other verboid) as an adjective-equivalent, i.e. as the present active participle.

• U geo, kine peri heli = The earth, moving round the sun¹

¹ Without a pause in speech or a comma to mark it in print, un avi, kine in aero might mean a bird, moving in air (a bird in flight) or bird motion in air (the flight of a bird). We can sharpen the distinction beyond possibility of doubt. Thus un avi; su kine in aero (a bird which is moving in air) can mean only a bird in flight, and u kine de avi in aero (motion of a bird in air) can mean only the flight of a bird.

In contradistinction to participial expressions, including operative constructions with an amplifier, the simple verboid as epithet takes the usual position:

• U kine dactyli acte grapho = The moving finger writes

Unlike Russian and the Scandinavian languages, English, German and French have no separate active and passive participial forms for the past. As adjectives, the present and past participles are respectively active and passive. In fact, the so-called past (more properly, passive) participle need not have a past meaning (cf. it is easily broken). Thus pre date (gave) does not mean given. As a postposited epithet pre date could mean having given, which is the correct equivalent of a true active past participle, e.g.:

• Un avi, pre kine apo = The bird, having moved away

Passive constructions of Interglossa involve the operator gene (get, become), and the literal equivalent of an English past participle used as an adjective is usually the combination pre gene with an amplifier. Pre date thermo means has heated, having heated, or simply heated as finite verb-equivalent; and pre gene thermo means was heated, has been heated, or simply heated as a postposited adjectival participle equivalent to a relative clause beginning with su (su pre gene thermo = that was heated). To avoid periphrasis and to provide for occasional constructions involving a simple verboid as a passive participle, Interglossa has a passive particle: (472) ge = that has got.

Ge is equivalent to su pre gene. Placed in front of an amplifier, the couplet has the force of a passive participle or equivalent relative clause. Being relatively short, a ge- couplet can take the initial position:

• u ge baro gasi = a compressed gas
• u ge stereo haema = clotted blood
• u ge dicte verba = the spoken word

The first two have the same meaning as:

• u gasi, (su) pre gene baro
• un haema, (su) pre gene stereo

Comparison of Basic and Interglossa Operators

The range and use of some of the operators of Basic and Interglossa agree closely. Acte, gene, tene, correspond to do, get, keep. The transitive mote is roughly the same as put. The English verb take can mean to carry (acte phoro), but otherwise corresponds closely to tracte. The idiomatic vagaries of give and make as alternative causative operators (cf. give X trouble and make X cold) disappear, because facte means make only when equivalent to construct or manufacture. Similarly, the redundant or meaningless distinction between come and go disappears. Both merge in kine. The inconsistencies due to overlap of the territories of have and be do not crop up, because eque expresses nothing more than identity or class membership in contradistinction to existence (habe accido), living (habe bio) or the possession of any other abstract property (e.g. habe thermo).

Of operators which have no prototype in Basic, esthe, stimule, reacte and perde correspond closely to the usage of English verbs (experience, evoke, heed, lose) with extensive operative value. Thus dying is losing one’s life; fading is losing colour; wilting is losing moisture; leaking (of a tyre) is losing air, being discouraged is losing hope. In short, the idiom of the operative system, while free from inevitable ambiguities and redundancies of accepted English usage, is in step with the evolution of the Aryan verb pattern.

The Next Step. By now the reader has all rules essential for writing and speaking Interglossa, or for translating Interglossa into the home language. If prepared to make the effort of being quite clear about the meaning of what he or she has to say, all that remains for the beginner is to master the list of essential vocables alphabetically arranged on pp. 249—256. Our next chapter is a heuristic intermission. It will show how anyone who has reached the Higher School certificate level in England, or has graduated from a junior college in America, can get over this hurdle in a few days, or at worst a fortnight. In an explanatory context, a single continuous narrative introduces Anglo-American or internationally current words containing one or other of each root used as a basis for word-material, with an appropriate reference number directing the reader to the corresponding vocable in Part 11.¹

¹ Twenty supplementary items (861-880), added during completion of the last draft of the 8,000-word dictionary to avoid recourse to long-winded constructions, do not appear in this chapter; but relevant associations occur in the mnemotechnic notes on pp. 256—282.)

The qualification in the last paragraph calls for comment as a prelude to later chapters. In America, where Ogden’s work has borne abundant fruit, the culture value of semantics is widely recognized. That one might be clear about what one means before one says or writes it, is a suggestion which will not necessarily offend the susceptibilities of the American reader. Before a British audience, an author needs to be more wary. Those who advocate linguistic education as a training for the mind have taken every possible precaution to prevent their pupils from thinking about what they do. A tradition of language-teaching which derives from medieval primers of Latin and Greek has perfected a system which every well-bred Briton expects to do its duty in a language text-book for which he pays cash down on the counter.

It first presents the purchaser with a prospectus of grammatical paradigms as a prophylactic against the shock which the nervous system would sustain if we had to face at the outset the all-pervading verbal irregularities and ubiquitous semantic inconsistencies inherent in the structure of any natural language. After a protracted period of immunization by this technique, we are permitted to learn that there are regrettable anomalies in the otherwise orderly pattern of natural discourse. We are then invited to commit to memory a prescribed number of admittedly untidy odds and ends, called idioms. We note with a little pang that we cannot pair off all the bits and pieces in the semantic and morphological rag-bag called the verb to be with all the bits and pieces in the morphological and semantic rag-bag spelt as être. Happily, the discovery does not undermine the discipline of our sturdy island race. Having learned to label tricks of discourse with unitary epithets, such as the subjunctive mood or the accusative case, we are confirmed in the delusion that verbal collocations so described necessarily have a one-to-one congruence of meaning in two different languages. The naked truth is that one and the same interjection of this species may describe a dozen or more semantic entities in either of them.

Once indoctrinated with this nonsense, we cannot hope to learn any language designed in conformity with consistent semantic principles, unless we are willing to relearn the language or languages we already speak, and to unlearn everything that the old-school-tie masters have taught us. At some stage or other most potential readers of this book have been more or less permanently disabled by the nonsense taught as grammar in all British schools and many American ones. So it is not possible to justify the credentials of Interglossa to any considerable public without filling up many pages with an autopsy on grammatical misconceptions we embraced in our youth or adolescence. That is why Part II has to be long. That is why it is inevitably a little forbidding. An author who hopes to win recognition for new principles of language design has to overcome the superstitions of the sophisticated before he can hope to cash in on the common-sense of the common man.

That the treatment of the semantics of the vocables in Part II has to be long, and has to be a little forbidding, does not mean that Interglossa demands intellectual exploits of which only highly educated people are capable. The very opposite is true. Simple people who have never been initiated into the idiocies of grammatical classifications current in college text-books have nothing to unlearn. If this book were written for children, or exclusively for adults who have never studied a foreign language in the usual way, the plan of it would be entirely different. As it is, the author has to state his case to an audience with preconceptions that few adults have yet outgrown. It is true that Jespersen’s teaching and Ogden’s writings have begun to bear fruit in a younger generation fresh from English and American, though not as yet from Scottish, schools and colleges. It is true that some schools have replaced a method of language-teaching which led to confused thinking by the direct method which prohibits any sort of thinking whatever. Still, people under thirty years of age who have not grown up to identify the Aryan tenses with scientific chronometry are not so numerous as to encourage a businesslike publisher to put a popular price on a brochure for their benefit. The fanaticism with which Esperantists cling to grammatical thaumaturgies, of which the semantic pretensions were long ago debunked by comparatively conservative philologists, shows that few, even among those in the forefront of the international auxiliary language movement, are yet abreast of the new semantic ideas which Ogden and others have contributed to contemporary enlightenment.

HEURISTIC INTERMISSION

Interglossa (87) (509) is not for misanthropes (306) (810) and misogynists (306) (834), nor for plutocrats (367) (826) and zoophilists (630) (355), who have more concern for the comfort of marsupials (684) than for mortality (312) among miners’ (651) babies. Its function (111) is to lubricate (166) pacific (340) intercourse (87) (204) between democratic (198) (826) nations (317), to catalyse (166) and stimulate (479) communal (180) action (464) for a higher norm (325) of sanitation (405), to arm (811) us for a militant (303) and energetic (214) campaign against pauperism in an age of potential (137) plenitude (365). Its use would help to immunise (264) us against that unnatural fear of aliens (149) which Mr. Wells calls xenophobia (149) (356); and to canalise (636) the impulse to persecute (332) into planning (363) plenty (365) on a planetary scale.

Assuredly (155), we must first remove the causes (104) of war. We have to put human need above the claims of capitalistic (817) investment (270) and in front of the pecuniary (348) privileges (372) of particular persons (7) or classes (821) of persons. Along with the old system (433) of private profit (374), imperial (836) arrogance (154) must make way for more liberal (282) esteem of the potentialities (137) of oppressed (332) colonial (822) peoples. Freely elected (210) assemblies will take over the authority (153) of viceroys (127) (849), and monopolistic (27) companies (825) will make way for public (380) committees (824) with commissaries (823) responsible to the people. When we are morally (132) mature (299) enough to adopt or to adapt (108) Interglossa to this end, free insurance (269) premiums (371) will be the birthright of every infant (835). There will be no rentier (850) and no proletariat (845). University (858) education will be free to all. An international (87) (317) police (843) system (433) will seem as natural as our international postal (844) service with its world-wide distribution of telegrams (856) and trans-maritime (101) (650) telephone (855) connexions. A world ripe for use of a constructed auxiliary would regard cleptomania (176) as a euphemism (218) for the banking (813) system of to-day; and would tolerate (438) any creed (187) which is not antagonistic (103) to amicable (151) relations between world citizens.

Propaganda (846) against the credit (186) system as it now is has certainly (155) no connexion with our main task. The latter is no sinecure (193). Let us forget the turbulent (443) times ahead, and stick to our agenda (809). A satisfactory (25) (471) world-auxiliary cannot limit (286) its appeal to the confines of christendom (820). It must not frustrate (241) the hopes of myriads (39) in the Orient (94) by perpetuating local (53) and unnecessary (133) intricacies of Occidental (93) accidence. More reciprocity (10) between east and west is imperative (266). So the grammar of Interglossa is as elementary (212) as possible (136). Separate words mark what many languages express by a multitude (8) of final (229) syllables. Thus no endings distinguish the noun-equivalent (469) (449) as subject (11), accusative or dative (466) case-forms, nor the verb as past or present. We distinguish unity (12) and plurality (13) of the former or the temporal (75) relations—predated (73) or postdated (72)—of the latter by words which, like all words of Interglossa (87) (509), are immutable (314) and invariant (314). Thus learning Interglossa is merely learning the use of each item of its verbal (860) stock-in-trade.

What most facilitates (224) learning is the source of its word-material (54). Interglossa profits (374) by the impact (265) of science on daily speech during the half-century (37) since Zamenhof put forward Esperanto (130). Every vocable (459) of Interglossa is a brick taken from some internationally current word such as periscope (96) (411), chronometer (62) (114), megaphone (22) (357), telegram (99) (833), micrometer (23) (114), ballistics (465), autocracy (9) (826), kinema (475) or photo (359). Thus the meanings of microscope (23) (411), micrometer (23) (114), microphone (23) (357) and microbe (23) tell us that micro means small(ness). So learning Interglossa is learning semantics (412) and etymology (289) hand-in-hand. Where the beginner cannot detect (467) the semantic (412) value (449) of an item, the pedagogue (349) can bring school (409) biology (161) (289), geography (645) (250), geometry (645) (114) and chemistry or names of inventions and proprietary (847) products to his aid. In this way, learning its vocabulary (459) is getting more familiar with an existing international language of navigation (764), horticulture (647) (192), agriculture (631) (192), astronomy (633) (324), meteorology (638) (289), and manufacture (471).

The source of these words makes things as easy for an older generation with a classical orientation (334) as for the adolescent imbibing (160) the scientific attitude (334). The nonagenarian (35) has the consolation (184) of knowing that he was flagellated (233) through the mazes of Mediterranean grammar to some purpose; and the modern child with no pretensions to humane (262) learning will be none the worse for meeting a few old tags such as quo vadis? (24), pro bono publico (120) (380), mutatis mutandis (314), in camera (86) (47), habeas corpus (474) (440), vice versa (127) (126), in vino veritas (702) (452), lapsus linguae (276) and per ardua ad astra (1l7) (76) (633). The claim that it is possible (136) to plan (363) a language of which we do not need to learn the vocabulary (459) has the flavour (234) of thaumaturgy (305) (214); and would have provoked the derision (400) of Zamenhof’s first disciples (828), at a time when Esperanto (130) was a truly hopeful venture. Yet cursory (206) perusal of these pages furnishes satisfactory (25) (471) and ocular (526) evidence (158) for its verity (452) at the risk of a little reiteration (272). The author petitions (41) the reader to be his jury (275), and to award a verdict after critical (188) examination (219) of the data (827).

On pp. 56-62 italics distinguish words built out of good international (87) (317) bricks. By comparison (106) of words which share the same international roots, we can detect (467) the semantic (413) value (449) of the vocables (459) of Interglossa; and every necessary (133) vocable of Interglossa comes in some word included within the limits (286) of this chapter (818). If you take the trouble to dissect (412) them, you will make a more noteworthy discovery than that of the Bourgeois Gentil-homme (589). You have been talking good Interglossa (87) (509) prose (848) since you reached years of maturity (299). With a little cerebration (492) you may even become one of the pioneer poets (841) of the new language. Still, you need not dissipate (202) effort on mere artistry (8I2), if your aim is to be expert (222) in a communal (181) medium for technical (222) or political (842) communication (181). You can get an easy victory (454) over all too frequent (238) inhibitions (268) by sticking to the elementary (212) formula (831) which follows. With the help of Webster’s or the Concise Oxford Dictionary (468) and some technical glossary such as Beadnall’s Dictionary of Scientific Terms in the Thinker’s Library, fill up the fugitive (242) moments of your leisure by tracking down the source and meaning of every italicized word in this chapter (818). You can get as much sport (425) out of a dictionary (468) as you can extract (83) (480) from fiction about espionage (217) in the dark epochs of military (303) violence (455) before instruments (51) of pacific (340) intercourse (87) (206) paved the way for an international (87) (317) auxiliary.

This is the strategy (430). From what is common to communal (181) and communication (181) in the last paragraph (94) (250), you get the notion of community (181) of intercourse, sentiment or property (847) in the word communo with the terminal -O common to all abstract words of Interglossa.

But if you can do this with communication or communal, you can do the same with aerodrome (146) (206), dromedary (206) and hippodrome (206). The first is the house and runway of an aeroplane (146) or dirigible (185), i.e. controlled (185) airship with gas (796) bag, usually filled with helium (646), an element first known to exist because of its lines in the sun’s spectrum (662). A dromedary (206) is a first-rate runner. A hippodrome is a place where horses run around for the diversion of harassed hedonists (131). Hippo- is not on the word-list. We use the Latin root of the zoological (630) (289) genus (18) present in equine (578), or (even worse) equitation (578); but since we have now tamed hippo- we may as well use it for the next stage of our itinerary (273). This is a visit (457) to Mesopotamia (92) (659) by way of Hippopotamus (659). Thence we can proceed with a confessedly (183) anterior (77) motive, but retrogressive (97) motion (476), to the Mesozoic (92) (630) age. Our course (206) is then clear. Here are specimens (424) to demonstrate (199) how we can pair off words with common international roots:

protozoa (139) (650), protogynous (139) (834), misogynist (306) (834), misanthrope (306) (810), philanthropy (355) (810), anemophilous (152) (355), anemometer (152) (114) , hydrometer (263) (114), hydrography (263) (250), photography (359) (250), photometer (359) (114), cyclometer (712) (114), bicycle (28) (712), bigamy (28) (244), monogamy (27) (244), monogram (27) (833), telegram (99) (833), telescope (99) (411), periscope (96) (411), perimeter (96) (114), micrometer (23) (114), microphone (23) (357), megaphone (22) (357), megalith (22) (52), palaeolithic (341) (52), palaeography (341) (250), heliography (646) (250), heliotropism (646) (442), geotropism (645) (442), geometry (645) (114), octameter (34) (114), octagon (34) (248), pentagon (31) (248), orthogonal (336) (248), orthography (336) (250), lithography (52) (250), neolithic (321) (52), neophyte (321) (604), zoophyte (630) (604), zoophilist (630) (355), bibliophile (814) (355), bibliography (814) (250), demography (198) (250), democratic (198) (826), autocratic (9) (826), autarchy (9) (153), oligarchy (14) (153), oligophrenia (14) (360), schizophrenia (408) (360), schizocarpous (408) (566), syncarpous (123) (566), syndactylism (123) (500), polydactyly (16) (500), Polynesia (16) (654), Micronesia (23) (654), microscope (23) (411), bioscope (161) (411), biology (161) (289), cytology (499) (289), phagocyte (353) (499), phytophagous (604) (353), epiphyte (82) (604), epigynous (82) (834), polygyny (16) (834), polymerism (16) (19), isomerism (44) (19), stereoisomerism (428) (44) (19), stereoscopic (427) (411) …

To get the best out of the detective (467) method (302), we can put everyday words in contraposition (80) to more exotic ones with a common root, e.g. neuralgia (525) (148) and analgesic (525). Among everyday words which are self-explicit, we have: solitude (20), zero (26), question (42 and 24), non-aggression (43) (455), textile (57), vase (58), vesture or divest (59), duration (64), extradition (81), condition (107), indicate (11O), harmony (1l2), plus (118) and minus (115), proximity (121), contact and tactile (124), invert and reversal (126), volition (128), debit (129), permit (134), preparedness (138), tentative (140), accident (141), acute (144 and 733), adhesive (145), attendant (156), bathos (159), explosion (163), captive (165), cavity (167), certificate (170), choleric or irate (172),chorus (173) girls, incline (177), defective (197), disputatious(201), residence (208), excess (220), fame (225), feral (227) swans and fiscal (230) policy, fissure (231), fixed (232), fortune and fortuitous (236), fracture (237), friction (239), fumes (243), gratitude (251), grave and gravamen (253), gregarious insects and party (254) politicians, sacred (256), spiral (257), horizontal (261), inflation and deflation (267), judicial, judiciary and adjudicate (274), applaud and laudatory (277), lave and lavatory (278), lecture and lectern (279), legal (280), liberate (283), libidinous (284), ligate and ligature (285), liquid (288), long and longitude (290), magic (294), dilute (297), commerce and mercantile (301), miracle (305), mix (307), admonition and monitory (309), mordant (310), narcotic (316), negotiations (320), innocuous and nocuous (322), nomination (323), nullify and acquit, quittance (326), odour and aromatic (329), offer (330), ordinal rank (333), papilla and projection (342), parallel (343), paralyse (344), penitence (350), penal (351), pneumonia, pneumatic and respiration (369), proposal (376), protest (378), perforate (383), quality (385), rape and rapacious (386), razor, erase and talon (388), reflect (391), religion (392), reparations and repair (393), idolatry and mariolatry (396), which we can pair off with hagiolatry (256) (396) and hagiography (256) (250) to break the monotony (27) (439) of so many commonplace words in a line (287), rigidity and rigor mortis (399), sadism (402), salutation (404), serial and series (415), severe (416), signify (417), society and social (419), solemn (422), sophistication, sophistry and philosophy (422) (355), soporific and insomnia (423), symptomatic (432), testimony (435), sepsis, septicaemia and antiseptic (440), antitoxin (103) (440), typography and typewriter (444), umbrage and penumbra (445), uniformity (446), reunion (447), vacuum and vacant (448), vapour (450), vendor (451), virus and virulent (456), vivacious and vivisection (458) (412), vulnerable (461), anaesthesia and aesthete (470), genesis (472 and 473), perdition (477), tenure and tenacious (479), proprietor and proprioceptive (847).

It would be an error (215) of teaching technique to concentrate on easy words. A little excogitation (178) is an aid to memory (308), and our job will be less dreary if we tempt fortune (236) by deliberate divination (203). So the reader should not protest (378) if some of our italicized words are unusual, like cynosure (548) or callisthenics (196), archaic like clavichord (742), or technical (222) like the cleidoic ovum (743) (532). The quaint connexion between the caudal (548) appendage of the constellation and the cynosure (548) of every eye in the theatre firmly fixes (232) ura (547) for future reference. The link between the verb to be as copula (746) and the process of coitus (179) will be self-evident when sex education is more general. The new book of genesis (473) inverts (126) the story of the Fall. When land began to rise, a cleidoic (743) egg was necessary to forestall desiccation (200). Fertilization (228) had to predate (73) deposition of a protective shell. External insemination was no longer possible, and sex dimorphism (311) became a necessary (133) precondition (73) (107) of parental (840) recognition.

The discussion of such themes (857) is still apt to evoke generalized cyanosis (195) among our male Blimps, and facial (504) erythaema (216) among our more elderly female (5) relatives; but we shall soon learn to talk about the inconvenience of the menses (67), the problems of the menopause, and the secretion of the luteal (292) cells of the ovary (533), as we now talk about any other sanitary (405) issue. Coito (179) and feci (505) are essential words of Interglossa, because coitus (179) and defecation (505) are inescapable events of human existence. Oddly enough, we can discuss the totally unnecessary diversion of osculation (337) without traumatic (441) consequences (122) to our neighbours. We can expel mucus (653) from the nares (522) without offence, if we produce the prescribed scrap of nasal (522) linen (595). With or without a pocket handkerchief, lacrimal (516) secretion is permissible (134), alike in the pulpit and in the boudoir.

The technician (222) will have the key to most essential words; but politics (842) contributes to the common pool. When the Duce (207) chose the Roman fasces (49) as ensign (774) of the fascist (49) movement, his followers stood self-confessed (183) as a bunch of thugs. Goebbel’s gangsters and Mussolini’s gladiators (755) first familiarized decent people with the meaning of coprophilia (505) (355). Travelling has its own repertoire—via (668), Cook’s wagons lits (781), taxis (779), museums (838), helicopters (755) (537), and valuta (859) are words in world-wide use. The same is very nearly true of billet (815), the French word for ticket. Commerce (301) has distributed cigars (789), cigarettes (790), petroleum (801), razor blades (738), bombs (739), spirits (692), canned soups (694), coffee (674), cacao beans (673), coconuts, (572), herrings (588),sardines (615), tobacco (623), daffodil bulbs (560), leguminous (592) crops and apiary (555) appliances on all five continents (639). From music (313) we get fortissimo (235) as a signal of intensity; from the stage proscenium (724) and recess (727); from poetry the lyric (759)—no longer for the harp—and Hesper (66) for the evening star; from the modern novel ectogenesis (81) (473) or extra-uterine (81) (473) development of the embryo; from sculpture the Roman toga (699) and the crucifixion (710); from military jargon the pontoon (722); from architecture (731) we get portals (722), balconies (705), columns (708), Acropolis (142) and viaduct (668); from shop windows tunics (701) and lamps (718); from engineering, tubes (732), piston (768), and axis (736); from hospital reports we get dental (501) caries, clinicians (679) with the bedside manner, and cranial (497) surgery. From almost any newspaper we can cull something about pulmonary (538) tuberculosis, secretarial (853) appointments and other jobs for sedentary (691) workers.

It would be a facile (224) task to design a game like dominoes, each counter a keyword, having two internationally current roots. We can make a start by assembling a battery of vocables (459) in groups which share one or other of certain highly fertile (228) roots, e.g:

Memorizing (308) derivations of disconnected words is not a stimulating (478) pursuit. We can break down a pardonable (346) resistance (395) to any such prospect (377) by capitalizing (817) the residues (394) of our scholastic (409) exploits. Here are a few specimens (424) of the way in which we can make mnemonics (308), i.e. aids to memory (308). From school mathematics we have all learned the meaning of plus (118) and minus (115), of summation (431) and division (204), of product (373) and ratio (389), of minutes (69) and seconds (74) of a degree. We get our numerals (327) from bisection (28) (412), triangle (29), tetrahedron (30), pentagon (31) (248), hexagon (32) (248), heptagon (33) (248), octagon (34) (248), decametre (36) (791), centimetre (37) (719), kilometre (38) (719). We have all learned to balance equations (212). We have all met pyramids (725), cylinders (713), cones (709), prisms (723), cubes (711), quadrilaterals (726) (89), trapezia (700), and other solid (429) or plane, curvilinear (193) (287) or rectilinear (390) (287) figures. We have all traced the locus (53) of a point rotating (770) about a centre (706) like a speck on the periphery (96) of a wheel. We all know that equiangular (468) triangles (29) are not necessarily (133) congruent (108). If we have gone a little way with co-ordinate geometry, we know that the catenary (741) is the curve of a chain attached loosely by each end at the same level.

High-school (409) chemistry introduces us to crystalline (793) and amorphous (703) (311) types of materials (54), to isomorphic (44) (311) and to heteromorphic (259) (311) crystals (793). We learn that the graphite (250) of our pencils and diamonds of our cutting tools are allotropic (101) (442) forms of the same element (212), carbon (788). We get a nodding acquaintance with hydrogen (263), oxygen (144), with the halogens (797), chlorine (171) and iodine (271), with the metallic (799) elements (112) whose symbols Ag (786), Au (787), Sn (806), Pb (803), are speedwords for their Interglossa equivalents (469) (450). We meet a host of pure (382) compounds, alkalis, acids (784), and such salts as cupric sulphate (794) (807), sodium citrate (570), which stops the curdling of milk, and prussian blue which is a ferricyanide (795) (195). As we all know, rust is simply formation of ferric (795) oxide (338). Another oxidation (338) compound is silica (661). The last named has a crystalline (793) allotrope, (102) (442) abundant in nature as quartz, the chief ingredient of sand. Its natural amorphous (703) allotrope (102) (442) is opal. When heated to a suitable temperature, which we can measure with a pyrometer (384) (114), silica undergoes vitrification (808). Vitreous (808) silica is the quartz glass, used for manufacture (471) of lenses. Silicates (661), such as water glass, yield a colloidal (791) solution (421) of silicic acid (784), when treated with stronger acids, and subsequently separated from the latter by dialysis (293). If sufficiently concentrated, the dialysed (293) solution is liable (332) to turn into a gel (683).

Dialysis (293), which means separation by diffusion through a membrane, recalls hydrolysis (263) (293) or separation of parts by action (464) of water in presence of a catalyst (166) to lubricate (166) or assist the reaction (478). Hydrolysis itself recalls dehydration (263) or chemical desiccation (200). If we do not go deeply into physical (361) chemistry, which deals with states of matter, we shall give the cryohydric (189) (263) point the go-by. Even so, we come across the snow-white mineral cryolite (189) in connexion with the manufacture (471) of aluminium. In any high-school course, we are also sure to get the low-down on soft and hard water. That means getting to know a little about saponification (804)—a long word for soap-making—and hence about such soap fats as stearin (520) of lard or olein (686) of olive oil.

The odds are we pick up a few crumbs about optically active (143) substances such as sugars, e.g. dextrose (81) or glucose (247), the laevose (88) in honey and the lactose (517) in milk. The principle of the saccharimeter (690) (114) depends on the rotation (770) of polarized light rightwards by dextro-rotary (81) (770) or leftwards by laevo-rotary (88) (770) sugars. If we get so far with the study of stereoisomerism (428) (44) (19) we cannot miss a few words about Pasteur’s pioneer work on sarcolactic (539) (517) acid (784). Pasteur also elucidated the work of the saprophytic (407) (604) yeast fungi and the role of the vinegar (702) bacillus (737). Production of butyric (672) acid (784) in rancid butter is also due to bacteria or, as some biologists (161) (289) call them, schizomycetes (408). The lipoid (520) butyrin (672) and the protein caseinogen (677) are the two chief solid (428) constituents of milk. Casein (677) derived from the second is now the basis of a well-known plastic (802), but most plastics are polymers (16) (19) of much simpler ingredients such as urea (549) present in urine (549).

We now meet such words as lipoids (520) in articles about dietetics (354) in women’s gazettes (832) and housekeeping journals (832). Even the culinary (191) art has taken the same road as chemistry. The modern kitchen has thermostatic (437) (427) controls (185); and we make our confectionery (680) in vessels of aluminium or pyrex (384), i.e. fireproof, glass. We cook to the music (313) of the radio (386), or to its meteorological (638) (289) forecasts which have tuned our ears to cyclones (712) and anticyclones (103) (712). Isotherms (44) (437) and isobars (44) (157) are no longer formidable names for lines joining places with the same thermometer (437) (114) and barometer (157) (114) readings. Television (99) (482) sets will soon be as commonplace in the kitchen as cauliflowers (567), potatoes (608), tomatoes (624), oranges (598) and tea (696) caddies. More science (852) rightly applied means less fatigue (226) for the domestic (48) worker.

In short, machinery (760) leaves more time for philoprogenitive (120) (355) (245) pursuits. To be forewarned against poliomyelitis (246) is to be forearmed; but infant (835) welfare now (71) embraces more than pediatrics (349). The new (321) parent (840) will welcome the hour (67) of homework as an occasion (328) for self-improvement by co-operation with the family (829). If the theme (857) is physics (361), there are many verbal (860) pitfalls to avoid. We have to be clear about what is grocer’s weight or mass (297) as opposed to the pull of a weight on an elastic (751) filament (50), such as the helicoid (258) spring of a spring balance, because of the tension (434) exerted by bodies falling under gravity (252), the earth’s attraction (481). Another semantic (413) source of trouble is the distinction between displacement speed or velocity (169) and ordinary speed relative to the path traversed. Acceleration (169) is increased velocity (169).

With Science for the Citizen as her ally, the history-conscious (260) parent (840) can help the child to picture (362) the beginnings of kinematics (475) by lively illustrations from ballistics (464) when artillery (735) was in its infancy (835), or from horology (67) (289) when the pendulum (116) was a novelty. From school physics, our international (87) (317) units (12) of work, the erg (214); of force, the dyne (208); of volume (460) or capacity (460), the litre (718); of length, the metre (719); and of mass (298), the gram (716), help us out with some more items of our word-list. In hydro-mechanics (263) (55) we learn about the siphon. (418) and about the manometer (297) (114) or pressure-gauge for measuring the rarefaction of gases (796). In acoustics (463) we hear about audible (463) vibrations (453) and pure tones (439). In optics we use the photometer (359) (114). We meet photosensitive (359) (414) substances for the manufacture (471) of panchromatic (15) (174) plates. We learn about the infra-red (85) and ultra-violet (99) radiations (386) beyond the visible (482) spectrum (662). In electromagnetism (211) (295) we use the rheostat (397) (427) to stabilize (232) the resistance (395) of a circuit and condensers to produce oscillatory (453) discharges.

Electrical discharge recalls the Aurora Borealis (787) (79), or northern lights. Geography (645) (250) is the softest job for the normal (325) parent (840) who wishes to stimulate (478) filial (830) reverence (396). Valley (667), tunnel (664), channel (636), plateau (364), continent (639) and bay (635) are words of daily speech, like the less translucently (101) (291) international (87) (317) couplet mountain (652)—fountain (644); and a harbour is an asylum (634) for ships. No one forgets the frigid (240) and the torrid zones (60) of the hemispheres (40) (730); nor that Micronesia (23) (654), Melanesia (300) (654), Polynesia (16) (654) are island groups in the ocean (657) comically (180) miscalled Pacific (340). And here we may remind ourselves that punning is the art (812) of extracting (83) (481) humour from homophones (113) (357). But we have not finished with geography (645) (250) if we leave out climate (638) and instruments (51) for measuring it, thermometer (437) (114) or heat-gauge, barometer (157) (114) or pressure-gauge, and nephelometer (656) (114) or cloud-gauge, bathometer (159) or oceanic bathos (159) gauge, pluviometer (368) (114) or rain-gauge, and anemometer (152) (114) or wind-gauge. Nor should we neglect demography (198) (250) in these days of declining fertility (228) in rural (660) as well as urban (666) localities (53).

Geography (645) (250) is not mere topography (100) (250). It is the offspring of cartography (637) (250) and geodesy (645). These in turn are children of astronomy (633) (324). The zodiacal constellations which lie about the plane of the ecliptic inclined (177) at about 23½ º to that of the equinoctial (469) (70) are a happy hunting-ground for our tendentious (125) narrative. We take over Gemini, Scorpio, Leo, Virgo and Libra as they stand, and adapt (108) Pisces (605), Cancer (562), Sagittarius (771) in conformity with our rules. The constellations of URSA Major (45) and URSA Minor (46) also come in handy for grammatical comparison (106). We get our latitude from the altitude (150) of a star at what the mariner (650) calls its southing, i.e. transit (101) across the celestial meridian (91). We are all familiar with the Galilean drama (205) of the competing (182) geocentric (645) (706) and heliocentric (646) (706) cosmogonies (640). So the modern parent (840) knows that the earth is supposed to be a gyroscope (255) (411) with a diurnal (63) cycle (712), flattened at the poles by its own centrifugal (706) (242) action (463). Too many of us are a little nebulous (655) about the pros (120) and cons for our credo (187); and far too few of us know how Huygens first inferred it from the retardation (156) of the pendulum (116), as set forth in his famous (225) book, the Horologium oscillatorium (67) (453).

Publication of the last named antedated by nearly two centuries detection (467) of the annual (61) parallax (95) of any star, and hence also the final (229) demonstration (199) of the second Copernican postulate (119). At this point, the bibliophile (814) (355) has a look in. Such landmarks of the history (259) of science (852) as Huygens’ book are vocal (459). De Re Metallica (109) (6) (799) of Agricola, De Revolutionibus (109) of Copernicus, De Fabrica Humani Corporis (109) (223) (540) of Vesalius, De Motibus Stella Martis (109) of Kepler, furnish us with an arsenal of verbal (860) missiles (763).

The pacifically (340) minded parent (840) will not treat homework on history (260) as a national (317) affair. We have to teach our children to envisage (482) history as a cosmic (640) sequence (122), the scala (729) naturae or ladder of nature. Like Mr. Wells, we should therefore begin with the strata (693) which form successive shelves of the earth’s laminated (757) crust. The beginning is then a story (260) of erosion and flooding, of banked-up detritus (642) and alluvial (632) deposits. We see life emerging on land in the steaming swamps of the Carboniferous (788), leaving its indelible footprints on the anthracite (785) slabs we burn for fuel. Reptiles such as the wedge-toothed lizard Sphenodon (776), now the lone New Zealand survivor of its group, supplant the salamanders. In the Cretaceous (792) or chalk age, life takes to the air. Already there are creatures of a truly Avine (557) pattern alongside the Pterodactyls (537) (500). Contemporary (75) with them are small plantigrade (249) mammals; but the great bipedal (28) (533) reptiles still held hegemony (206) on the dry surface of the earth, when the thunder lizard Brontosaurus (163) was alive. Came the Eocene (65), dawn of modern mammals: small pachyderms (339) (502), digitigrade (110) ungulates (547), tree-shrew forbears of our Simian (618) grandparents. The Pliocene signalizes (774) the arrival of the ape-man Pithecanthropus (810) and Sinanthropus (819). True Hominidae (600), including Eoanthropus (65) (810), the Piltdown Man, are a Pleistocene by-product. Human beings emerge, talkative creatures with tools; but there is little promise (375) of machinery (760) in their first instruments (51), the eoliths (65) (52).

Palaeolithic (341) (52) man is already an artist (812). He has left behind the orifice (528) of his cave residences (205) immortal mural (721) pictures, mostly of animals, his ovine (599), bovine (558), feline (580) and canine (564) victims and friends; but he has not turned his back on food-gathering and hunting. Cultivation (192) of arable (734) areas is the achievement of the Neolithic (321) (52) revolution. The woman now plasters a reticulum (769) of sticks with clay. She shapes a vessel. She fashions bricks and weaves fabrics. The ceramic (707) and textile (57) industries (837) have begun. Homo sapiens (590) (406) is no more a migrant, but a creature with a fixed (232) domicile (48), master species (424) of an ecological (205) (289) system (433) unique in the record of living beings. With more stabilized (232) seasonal mores (132), grain-growing man adapts (108) a makeshift calendar of lunations (649) to the exigencies of settled agriculture (631) (192). He has to record events. Out of a medley of calendrical logograms (289) (833) and pictograms (362) (833) the craft of writing comes to birth. The natal (318) hour of human history (260) is the beginning of an annual (61) timetable based (158) on the heliacal (646) rising of the dog star. It is now (71) a short step to the sun calendar of the heliolithic (646) (52) culture (192) and the ceremonial (168) incantations (164) with which its priestly custodians drill the cultivators (192) of the soil into acquiescence.

The Megaliths (22) (52) were observation posts of the priestly astrologers (633) (289) and monuments of tribal celebration (168). Then as now, myth-making (315) and praxis (370) strove for mastery; as strive they must till experiment (219) becomes the arbiter (274) of fantasy (314) and its minister (304). The myth-makers (315) made themselves a hierarchy (153), the bureaucrats (816) (826) of a theocracy (436) (826), which reduced their fellows to servitude (258); and helots (258) toil in the sun to fashion the ornate (335) sarcophagus (539) (353) of a regal (849) corpse or to decorate (193) the limbs of his uranian (665) consort. While the medicine men trepanned (749) the skull to make a port-hole for the spirits and embalmed the body in a futile attempt to forestall necrosis (319), myriads (39) of common people rotted with parasitic (345) diseases which modern science (852) has eliminated.

We need not traverse a dreary record of coronations (681) inscribed on tombstones and papyri (800). Let us cull some items from school biology (161) (289). From what we learn about the circulation of the blood, we know that the venous (p, 219) flow from the lungs enters the left auricle and passes out by the great arterial (p. 219) trunk called the aorta, to the rest of the body. To do so, it has to traverse the two flaps of the ventricular septum (721), called the mitral (685) valve on account of their likeness to a bishop’s hat. We also learn that the blood is not a homogeneous (113) (18) fluid. It contains red corpuscles, the erythrocytes (216) (499) which hold the haemoglobin (512), in contradistinction to the white corpuscles or leucocytes (281) (499). Some of the latter, the phagocytes (353) (499) can eat up bacteria. They grasp them by means of pseudopodia (379) (435), like the pond animalcule Amoeba.

The human ear is a gold mine (651). In part, it is a geotactic (645), in part an acoustical (463) receptor (414). The former consists of the utriculus with its three semicircular canals at right angles, each with a flask-like ampulla (669) at one end. The utricular sac contains a calcareous statolith (427) (52), the displacement of which from its position of rest stimulates (479) different receptive (414) cells, and semaphores (413) (358) our space relations to the brain. The essential part of the auditory (463) organ is the sacculus (671). The sacculus of mammals has a coiled portion, the cochlea (570), reminiscent of a snail’s shell. It contains a membrane sensitive to acoustic (463) oscillations (453). The auditory and utricular sacs (671) are embedded in a bony capsule (819), the periotic (96) (531). The fluid of its cavity (167) has two membranous windows, the fenestra rotunda (714) and the fenestra ovale (714). Into the latter fits the stirrup bone or stapes (777), innermost of three ear ossicles which transmit (101) to it vibrations (452) from the ear-drum or tympanum (780), when sounds impinge on the latter. The other two ear ossicles are the median anvil bone or incus (756) and the outermost hammer-bone, or malleus (761).

Elementary (212) study of heredity introduces us to phenotypes (135) or genetically different individuals which seem alike, as opposed to genotypes (18) which are genetically (215) similar, i.e. have the same hereditary make-up. From elementary genetics (215) we learn that gametes (244) have the haploid (212) as opposed to the diploid number of chromosomes in the fertilized (228) egg or zygote (462) formed from their union. In genetics we meet homozygotes (113) (462), or pure-bred individuals formed from union of like gametes, and heterozygotes (259) (462), or hybrids formed from union of dissimilar ones. The old Teutonic word sib (854) is now the international term for brothers or sisters without discrimination with respect to sex. Plants and some animals which can propagate by gemmation (162) or budding are not dependent on sexual reproduction. The other root for a bud comes into many embryological terms, e.g. the blastoderm (162) (502) or plate-like embryonic area we see as a pink spot on the yolk of a fertile egg, when we crack one for frying.

Most terms for parts of the body correspond to adjectival forms we meet in any elementary text-book of human anatomy or animal biology, e.g. abdominal (483), brachial (485), buccal (486), epicanthial (488)—see p. 270, cardiac (489), carpal (490), cephalic (491), costal (496), cervical (493), glandular (496), gastric (506), glenoid (508), gluteal or pygeal (510), haemal (511), hepatic (513), labial (515), renal (524), oesophageal (527), pelvic or coxal (534), sudorific (542), tarsal (543), thoracic (545), villi (544). Two names are based on corresponding bones, the calcaneum (487) or heel-bone, and the scapula (535) or shoulder-blade. One occurs in the myoneural (539) (525) junction, where the terminal dendrites (576) of the nerve axon (736) branch like a tree trunk in the muscle fibre. The old term vermes for worm-like animals contributes a root to the vermiform (626) appendix, more shortly (and usually) the appendix of appendicitis. The capillomotor (546) (476) nerves to the muscle-fibres of a cat’s hair come into action when there is a dog about. Capillomotor shares the same root as capillary (546) tubes with a hair-like bore. Somatic (541) is the technical equivalent of bodily, and turns up in chromosome (174) (541), the name for cell bodies which stain deeply with basic dyes. Keratin (514) or horn protein is present in the epidermal (82) (502) cells of our own skin, and forms a waterproof layer, like the waxy substance suberin (620) of cork and of the epidermal cells of leaves. After removal of the natural fat lanolin (518), sheep’s wool is almost pure keratin (514). Trichina (546), the hair-like thread-worm which produces muscle trichinosis, shares the same root as atrichous (545), i.e. bald. The chondrocranium (495) (497) is the cartilaginous skull of the embryo or new-born babe. Thelin (544) is the name of the female hormone which brings about growth of the nipples; and a bicornuate (28) (514) uterus (550) is a two-horned womb, such as that of a cow, a cat or a cart-horse.

Both plant and animal anatomy introduce us to many descriptive epithets for shapes and textures. Such are: glaucous (250) for stem or leaf surfaces with a greyish bloom, criophyllous (518) (603) and laniferous (518) for woolliness of leaf or stem, rugose (401) for roughness or coarseness to the touch, campanulate (676) for bell-shaped petals, plicate (366) for folded parts, pinnate (535) or feathery leaves like those of the mimosa, lanceolate (758) or spear-like ones, spatulate (775) like a spoon or spatula of the chemical balance, and sagittate (771) like an arrow. We meet falciform (752) processes, hook-shaped like a falcon’s beak, and pyriform (610) projections (342), shaped like a pear.

The flower with its calyx (675), often cup-like, its corolla, its andrecium (4) or male parts and its gynecium (834) (205), i.e. pistil or female (5) residence (205), furnish a fresh set. The ovule (532) has a minute hole, the micropyle (23) (383), in its seed-coat or testa (697). Through it the pollen tube makes its way to the ovum (532) contained in the megaspore (22). Some ovules are orthotropous (336) (442), with the micropyle (23) (383) turned vertically above the stalk. More usually they are anatropous (442), with the micropyle (23) (383) beside the stalk. Some flowers, like the lily, are hypogynous (85) (834), with the corolla below the womanly part. Others, like the daffodil, are epigynous (82) (834), having the petals on and apparently supported by the ovary. Some flowers, like delphiniums, have apocarpous (78) (566) pistils with carpals (566) apart from one another. Others, like the narcissus, are syncarpous (123) (566), having the fruit parts fused together. Of such, some may be schizocarpous (408) (566), like the geranium, of which the carpals split apart when the fruit is mature (299).

Nutrition may be holozoic (21) (630) if wholly dependent on fresh organic material, saprophytic (407) (604) if the diet is decaying organic matter, and holophytic (21) (604) if wholly peculiar to green plants, which alone are capable of photosynthesis (359). Mosses absorb water necessary for photosynthesis (359) by means of their rhizoids (613), i.e. roodets. Photosynthesis depends on the absorption of light by the green leaf pigment chlorophyll (171) (603) which occurs along with a yellow colouring matter, xanthophyll (292) (603), mainly in the middle part of the leaf, or mesophyll (91) (603). Chlorophyll uses light to manufacture carbohydrate (788) (262) from water and carbon dioxide in the air. In daylight the mesophyll (91) (603) is rich in starch grains, broken down into sugar during darkness by an enzyme called amylase. Saliva also contains an amylolytic (670) (293) enzyme, i.e. one separating starch into sugar. The insalivated and juicy food in the stomach itself is called chyme (569), based on a root which occurs in parenchyma, the juicy pith of a plant. Animals have no pigments which they can use, as plants use chlorophyll (171) (603) for photosynthesis (359); but many animals have pigment cells with ramifying (611) processes in the skin, and the migration of colouring matter in these branching processes brings about the colour changes for which the chameleon is proverbial. Such pigment cells may carry black pigment, as do the melanophores (300) (358), yellow pigment as do the xanthophores (292) (358), and red pigments as do the erythrophores (216) (358).

We can work in a host of items by means of a short synopsis of living creatures containing no terms outside a high-school biology syllabus. Before we put the modem systema (434) naturae on the tapis (695) or magic (294) carpet of our mnemotechnic (308) (222) ingenuity, let us sidestep any occasion (328) for disputatious (201) persons (7) to question (42 and 24) the credibility (187) of our claims or to charge us with a pseudo-simplicity (379) which would leave a stigma (429) on an otherwise spotless record. The onus (331) of convincing critics (188) is on ourselves, and we concede a few items, admittedly based on association. Thus a doll is a three-dimensional example of mimicry (762); and the words “each” and “every” are singular (17) substitutes for “all.” A saw has teeth but needs no dentist (cf. 749 and 501) to extract them. The business of a burr (Amer.) or nut (Brit.) is to get its hole occluded (765) by the screw it fixes (232); and a bill is a note (839) of our computed (839) expenses. Plates are usually disc-like (750). An oath in court is a legal sacrament (851); and the skeleton (729) is the framework which gives the body of a vertebrate its characteristic form. When man first dug ditches to drain the fields, he became a fossoriai (715) mammal, but by that time he had learned two tricks no other mammals can perform. He could cover the pudenda (381) with a loin-cloth, and could construct the sort of mobile (22) property we call furniture.

Our pronouns mi (1), tu (2) and na (3) are frankly based on Aryan models (pp. 81-82); but the first two will offer no difficulty to a Finn, and the third will get by with anyone who speaks Tamil. Mi (1) also happens to mean me and my in the Yoruba language of Western Nigeria, where the preposited present particle n’ does the same job as our Own pan-Aryan (15) word now (71) and its Interglossa equivalent. Our pen (767) or pencil has next to cope with an unlucky thirteen based on international roots outside the scope of high-school teaching; and the author would accept any offers (330) of substitutes with gratitude (251).

Fortunately three of the thirteen have synonyms with which the Anglo-American will find no difficulty. We have no good international roots for bread or cake. Though the placenta (688) or afterbirth comes from the Latin word for a cake, its associations are not tasty; and though the Concise Oxford and Webster’s both give panification (687) for bread-making, no normally (322) constituted person uses such a word. Only a pedant would say veliferous (783) for sail-bearing; but this root is common in names for floating animals with sail-like devices, e.g. the widely distributed pelagic hydrozoon (263) (630) velella (783), and the veliger larva of many molluscs. The word for a well is based on a root which occurs in names of animals which live in wells, e.g. the aberrant shrimp phreatocus (658), but few of them get into school text-books. The word for a club comes from a root present in names of animals with club-like tentacles, including a family of polyps, the Corynidae (747) with many genera whose names, e.g. Syncoryne (123) (747), also share it. Psammophilous (661) (355) plants prefer sandy soil, and the root occurs in names of denizens of the sand dunes. Tyroglyphe (664) is the generic name for the mites which tunnel (664) in cheese. It has a root common to the siphonoglyph (418) (664), or ciliated tunnel on either side of the gullet of a sea-anemone or coral.

An adolescent who has made a hobby of entomology will have met scute (772) as the name for the dorsal shield of chitin on the segments of an insect’s body, and furca (753) for the forked tails of some insects, e.g. earwigs. In medical terminology a bursa (671) is a little purse of liquid under the skin and capsella bursa pastoris (671) is the international name for shepherd’s purse. Rhabdites (612), rhabdoliths (612) (52) and rhabdoms (612) are names for little glassy sticks in the epidermal (82) (502) cells of free-living Platyhelminthes (364) (626), i.e. flat worms, or the outer wall of sponges. Thecodont (619) teeth are teeth, like our own, with roots in a bony box or socket. Thecate (620) is a descriptive term for animals with a box-like covering, and the hydrotheca (263) (620) is the little box which protects the aquatic zooid (630) of a colonial polyp. A pulvillus or pulvinus (689) is a little cushion often found at the base of the leaf stalk of plants. Vecti (782) is the least happy choice in our word-list; and the best mnemonic (308) the author can offer is that a lever is a device for getting displacement differences through the same vectorial (782) angle.

We shall now show where Homo sapiens (590) (406) stands in the scala naturae (729) by finishing a discursive (206) narrative with a table of international technical terms for the common classes (821) and orders of living creatures. All these terms, being truly international, are assimilable with or without change in conformity with the rules given on pp. 238—241.

A. Protista—micro-organisms (23).

• I. CYANOphycea (194), (blue algae).
• II. SCHIZOmycetes (410), (bacteria or microbes).
• III. SporoZOA (630), parasitic forms including the malarial organism.
• IV. Ciliata or Infusoria, ciliated motile forms—the largest micro-organisms. e.g. Paramoecium.
• V. FLAGELLata (233), so-called because they move by a whip-like flagellum (233), includes the sleeping-sickness parasite Trypanosoma, and the free-living CHOANOflagellata (678) with collar of cuticle round base of flagellum.
• VI. RHIZOPODA (613) (536), moving by root-like processes of body. e.g. Amoeba.

Note.—The usual name for III-VI inclusive is: Protozoa (139) (630).

B. Plants or PHYTA (604).

(i) CRYPTOGAMS (190) (244), flowerless plants.

• I. ALGAe-seaweeds.
  • (a) CHLOROphyceae (171), green algae of pond water.
  • (b) RHODOphyceae (398), pink algae.
  • (c) PHAEOphyceae (352) brown algae, e.g. bladderwrack.
• II. Fungi.
  • (a) ASCOmycetes (669), with flask-like spore vessels, e.g. witches’ broom and ergot or rye.
  • (b) Phycomycetes, moulds.
  • (c) Basidiomycetes, mushrooms.
• III. BRYOPHYTA (559) (604), mosses and liverworts.
• IV. PteridoPHYTA, (604).
  • (a) EQUIsetales (578), horse tails.
  • (b) FILICales (579), ferns.
  • (c) Lycopodiales, club mosses.

(ii) PHANEROGAMS (354) (244) or SPERMAPHYTA (619) (604)—seed-bearing plants with manifest sexual process.

• V. GymnoSPERMS (619), cycads and conifers (573).
• VI. ANGIOSPERMS (175) (619), flowering plants with closed seed vessels.

Note.—All our edible plants, as also Nicotiana (623) the tobacco plant, are Angiosperms. Flowering plants are likewise the source of our plant foods and plant filaments (50) used for textiles (57). Thus the Graminaceae (587) or grass family includes all our cereals, the names of which are based on the international generic (18) terms, e.g. zea (maize), oryza (rice), hordeum (591), triticum (625), secale (616), panica (600), and avena (oats). After separation of the seed from the glume (585) by winnowing, we grind the grain to make the flour of our farinaceous (645) foods. Our legumes, based either on the generic name as with pisum (605) or on the full binomial epithet as with vicia faba (579). The squash family Cucurbitaceae (574) is the basis of another item. The names of the three filaments of importance are based on the generic terms gossypium (586), linum (595) and cannabis (562). The pome (607) is the botanical name for an apple-like fruit. Other fruit names depend on generic or binomial epithets: to be found in the international flora (582). Amygdalus (552) is the almond genus, and Amygdalus persica is the specific name of the peach (601) assigned to this genus. Phoenix (602), Prunus (609) and Pyrus (610) are generic names, as are vitis (629) and ficus (622). The synonym of the last name is (622) based on the Greek root in sycophant(see p. 274).

C. Animals or Zoa (630).

• I. Porifera, sponges.
• II. Coelenterata (167) (503), so-called because the single body cavity is also the gut.
• (a) HYDROZOA (263) (630), polyps, hydroids, zoophytes (630) (604).
• (b) ScyphoZOA, jelly fishes.
• (c) ActinoZOA, sea-anemones, corals.
• (d) CTENOPHORA (748) (358), comb jellies, so-called from comb-like bands of ciliated cells they carry.
• III. Echinodermata (551) (502).
• (a) ASTEROIDEA (633), star fishes.
• (b) ECHINOidea (551), sea-urchins, so-called because of their spines.
• IV. ROTIfera (770), wheel animalcules of pond-water.
• V. NematHELMINTHES (626).
• (a) Nematoda, thread-worms.
• (b) Acanthocephala (551) (491), hook-headed parasitic (345) worms.
• VI. PLATYHELMINTHES (364) (626).
• (a) Turbellaria, non-parasitic (43) (345), flat worms.
• (b) Trematoda, flukes.
• (c) Cestoda, tape-worms.
• VII. Molluscoidea.
• (a) POLYZOA (16) (630), or BRYOZOA (559) (630), sea-mats, called the first because colonial, the second because the colonies may look moss-like.
• (b) BRACHIOPODA (485) (536), lamp shells.
• VIII. Annelida.
• (a) OLIGOchaeta (14), earthworms—with few bristles of setae (773).
• (b) Hirudinea, leeches, segmented worms with no setae (773).
• (c) POLYchaeta (16), marine bristle-worms with brush-like tufts of setae (773) for swimming.
• IX. Mollusca.
• (a) CEPHALOPODA (491) (536), with limb around the head, e.g. Octopus (34) (536), and the cuttlefish Sepia (805), which shoots out ink when disturbed.
• (b) GASTROPODA (506) (536), littoral (95) forms such as limpets or whelks, and terrestrial forms such as snails and slugs.
• (c) PELECYPODA (766) (536), clams, so-called because of the axe-like shape of the “foot.” Here come the pearl oyster, ostrea margarifera (798), and the scallop pecten (748), so-called because of the comb-like ridges on its shell. All Pelecypods are bivalves. The two parts of the shell have a leathery hinge called the cardo (740).
• X. ARTHROPODA (483) (536).
• (a) MYRIAPODA (39) (536), centipedes (37) (533) and millipedes (533), so-called because of their many feet.
• (b) Arachnida:
• (i) ARANEIDA, spiders.
• (ii) SCORPIONIDA, scorpions.
• (iii) ACARINA, ticks and mites.
• (c) HEXAPODA (32) (536) or INSECTA, insects.
• (i) ORTHOPTERA (336) (537), cockroach, locust, cricket, grasshopper.
• (ii) DIPTERA (537), flies, mosquitoes.
• (iii) LEPIDOPTERA (519) (537), moths and butterflies, whose wings have coloured scales, hence so-called.
• (iv) PEDICULINA, lice.
• (v) SIPHONAPTERA (418) (537), fleas—literally, wingless suckers.
• (vi) COLEOPTERA (744) (537), beetles—so-called because of their wing sheaths.
• (vii) HymenoPTERA (537), including the bees or Apidae (554), the wasp family or Vespidae (627) and the ants, of which one genus, Formica (582), furnishes the painful root in formic acid, and hence formaldehyde of plastics.
• (d) Crustacea, the shrimp tribe.
• (i) CONCHOSTRACA (530), Daphnids and other pond-water shrimps with a bivalve shell.
• (ii) OSTRACoda (530), Cyprids, so-called for same reason.
• (iii) CirriPEDIA (533), barnacles.
• (iv) COPEPODA (745) (536), see note on p. 26.
• (e) PeraCARIDA (565), wood-lice and sand-hoppers.
• (f) DECAPODA (32) (536), lobsters of which one much-eaten genus is Homarus (589), and crabs of which the chief edible genus is Cancer (563).
• XI. Prochordata, near-vertebrates with a skeletal axis corresponding to the embryonic backbone (notochord) of vertebrates, and gill slits. In general the gill slits do not open directly to the exterior. They extrude water into a sort of courtyard or atrium (704), which opens to the exterior by the atriopore (704).
• (a) HEMIchorda (40), acorn worms.
• (b) TUNICAta (701) or UROCHORDA (548), sea squirts, with a gelatinous tunic and a tadpole-like larva with notochord confined to tail.
• (c) CEPHALOchorda (491) or ACRANIA (497), Amphioxus (144), so-called because pointed at both ends, the most fish-like of the prochordates. The notochord is continuous in the head region, hence first name, and it has no skull like a true vertebrate, hence the alternative.
• XII. Vertebrata.
• (a) CYCLOSTOMATA (712) (528), lampreys and hags, with round suctorial jawless mouths, and no paired fins, are survivors of the most ancient group of Vertebrates, represented in the rocks by such fossils as CEPHALASPIS (491) (773), so-called because of its broad head-shield.
• In contradistinction, the remaining forms with mouths furnished with jaws are GNATHOSTOMATA (511) (528):
• (b) PISCES (605), fishes with paired fins.
• (i) Selachii (617), sharks and skates.
• (ii) Teleostei (529), fishes with true bone, e.g. salmon (Salmo salar—614), herring (Clupea harengus—588), and sardine (Clupea sardinus—615).
• (c) AmphiBIA (161).
• (i) URODELA (548), tailed amphibians such as newts arid salamanders.
• (ii) ANURA (548), tailless forms with saltatory (403) hind limbs, frogs and toads.
• (d) REPTILIA, unlike foregoing, have a cleidoic (743) egg, and no aquatic larva.
• (i) CHELONIA, tortoises, turtles.
• (ii) OPHIDIA, snakes.
• (iii) LACERTILIA, lizards.
• (iv) CROCODILIA, crocodiles and alligators.
• (e) AVES (555), birds, including the Jurassic bird lizard Archaeopteryx (537).
• (i) RATITAE, flat-breasted running birds such as ostrich, with a reptilian type of palate called dromeognathous (206) (510), because the sort of jaws running-birds have.
• (ii) CARINATAE, flying birds with fluted palate, breast-bone with deep keel or carina for attachment of wing muscles. Many sing by means of reed-like voicebox, the syrinx (778), where the trachea (wind-pipe) divides to form the bronchi. Here comes the swan genus Cygnus, which we recognize in cygnet (575), the duck family or Anatidae (553), of which the geese form the sub-family Anserinae (554). The most useful bird is Gallus (584) domesticus, the domestic fowl.
• (f) Mammalia.
• (i) MARSUPIalia (684), kangaroos and other mammals with pocket for young.
• (ii) XENARTHRA (149) (484), sloths, armadillos and ant-eaters, so-called because of unusual joints of vertebrae.
• (iii) RODENTIA, including the mouse and rat family Muridae (597), the Leporidae (594) or rabbits and hares, also squirrels.
• (iv) CHIROPTERA (594) (537), bats, so-called because the hand modified to form a wing.
• (v) CETACEA, whales, dolphins.
• (vi) PINNIPEDIA, seals, walruses.
• (vii) CARNIvora (682), the flesh-eating mammals such as bears or Ursidae, the cat family or Felidae (580), which includes Felis tigris, and the dogs or Canidae (564), including the wolf, Canis lupus (596), and Canis vulpus (629), the fox. Their immediate ancestors were the Creodonts (682), such as the sabre-toothed tiger. The root crea- occurs in various compounds extracted from meat, e.g. creatine, excreted in the urine if the diet is meaty.
• (viii) PROBOSCIDEA or PACHYDERMATA (339) (502), the Elephantidae or elephants (577).
• (ix) UNGULATA (547), hoofed mammals, including the Equidae or horse family, to which belongs Equus asinus (557), the donkey; the Bovidae (557) or cattle; Ovidae (601), or sheep family, which also includes the goat genus capra; the Cervidae (567) or deer, the Camelidae (561), including camels and dromedaries (206), and the Suidae (621) or pigs. With the exception of the pig tribe, ungulates are herbivorous, and like rodents have crested or lophodont (420) molar teeth with which to crush their food.
• (x) PRIMATES, monkeys, Simiidae (618), or apes, and Hominidae (590), human beings.

THE SEMANTICS OF INTERGLOSSA

The next five chapters set forth the use of all the essential vocables of Interglossa with special reference to the semantic obscurities of English usage. Their completion awaited the preparation of a glossary of Interglossa equivalents for 10,000 most common Anglo-American words with their several meanings and idioms in which they occur. The English-Interglossa dictionary, compiled by Mrs. Dorothy Baker in consultation with the writer, appears as a companion volume. What follows does not attempt to duplicate its entire contents. We here confine ourselves to constructions likely to make demands on the ingenuity of the reader, especially the reader who is not as yet alert to the semantic pitfalls of the English—including and more especially Basic English—language.

The reader who is accustomed to the method of teaching a language by pairing off each of its vocables with that of another may be at first surprised by the number of equivalent Anglo-American words cited against each of the items which follow; and may get the impression that the meaning of an Interglossa vocable is proportionately diffuse. This is the reverse of the truth. The diffuseness of meaning which almost any Anglo-American vocable has acquired by metaphor, transferred epithet (e.g. fortunate), metonymy, synecdoche, litotes, or even oxymoron (condescend), makes it impossible to render the exact delimitation of a well-delimited vocable without the device of listing a constellation of near-synonyms and leaving the reader to extract its essential meaning from what is common to all of them.

PSEUDONYMS (PROnounS), ARTICLES AND INTERROGATIVE OR IMPERATIVE PARTICLES (60)

Class I. The Eleven Pseudonyms

Of the eleven items in this class, five are contractions of international roots. The first three are not truly international in the sense defined on p. 13, but they have a wide range. The Gaelic mi is the universal Aryan first person pronoun (French me, Russian dative mne, Swedish mig, Persian man, etc.), and outside the Aryan group we have the Finnish mina. Tu is Persian in form and range, and is the universal Aryan singular form (French tu, English thou, Russian te), It also recalls the Finnish plural te. A satisfactory choice for the first person plural is more difficult. Aryan languages offer alternative forms (M-form plural, and N-form primitively dual). The Greek dual which recalls the N-form of Romance languages, suggests nam of Tamil. The Russian dative is also nam. Admittedly an N-form is confusing for the Chinese or for Swedes. Alternatives worth considering for (1) and (2) are: (1) wo (Pekingese wo, Cantonese go, Ital. io, Span. yo), (2) ni (Pekingese ni, Cantonese ne, Swedish Ni).

(1) mi, I, me, my

(2) tu, thou, thee, you, thy, your

(3) na, we, us, our

  Members of this class, other than (8), can be substantive- or adjective-equivalents:

(4) an, he, him, for male human beings is for mnemotechnic purposes chosen as abbreviation for andros (in polyandry, gynandromorph) and can, mean male(s) as noun or adjective (cf. Scand. hanlig) if preceded by an article:

(5) fe, she, her, for female human being (short for femina in feminism), can also mean female(s) after an article.

(6) re, it, its, something, anything, is short for res (see p. 256). With an article it can mean thing(s) in the most general sense (topic).

(7) pe, one, one’s, is an abbreviation of:
(7a) persona. It stands for a human being of indefinite sex when we should say “he or she,” “him or her,” “his or hers,” one, someone, anyone. The full form means person(-al), (s), if preceded by an article. Pe is analogous to the Scandinavian common gender pronoun den.

(8) mu, they, them, is the plural pronoun of the third person, short for the internationally current root multi- of multitude, multiply, etc., and has no other use except in so far as it appropriately takes the place of the pronouns these and those:

(9) auto is the reflexive pronoun equivalent to myself, yourself, ourselves, himself, itself, herself, oneself, and themselves. As such it takes its proper place as direct object after the verb. Its compounds with the above (mi-auto, etc.) are corresponding emphatic pronouns. Like (1-3) and (8), it is possessive by juxtaposition and as such refers back to the subject like the Danish sin, sit, sine. It is then equivalent to my own, your own, etc. Its adjectival value is self or personal (private), and with this meaning occurs in compounds, e.g. auto-aetio (shame = self-blame):

(10) recipro means one another or each other, and as adjective or noun it is equivalent to reciprocal and reciprocity respectively. As adverb-equivalent, it means each to each

(11) su, short for subject (French sujet, Swedish subjekt, Spanish sujeto), is the relative pronoun subject corresponding to the single English that for who or which (see p. 35). Like other pseudonyms (see below), it is possessive (= whose) by juxtaposition, provided that it goes with the subject of the relative clause:

The following rules are essential:

(a) Mu is, like the French on, Teutonic man, useful to short-circuit passive expression:

(b) The possessive construction for substantives (p. 120) also holds good for pseudonyms, i.e. we express my, her, etc., by the postposited constructions de mi, de fe, etc. Thus we have

Recourse to the shorter device of mere juxtaposition is a legitimate way of expressing my, your, our or their, but only when the possessive replaces the empty singular article u(n), or when the latter is unnecessary (see below). The roundabout construction is the only one appropriate when there is an accompanying plural article:

For his or her before a substantive in contradistinction to a verboid (p. 51), we must always use de an or de fe because the preposited pseudonym signifies male or female:

(c) Pe is the common element of occupational compounds analogous to man in postman, hangman, etc., e.g. scholo-pe = teacher (pp. 98-99). It is therefore equivalent to the agent suffix -er. Where necessary, we can use -fe in the same way, e.g. dramo-fe = actress.

(d) In the same way -re makes compounds which signify the material thing associated with an abstract property. Thus with the amplifier clepto (theft) we can make clepto-re (booty, spoils); or with the verboid tene (hold, keep) we have tene-re = prop, holder, support.

(e) All pronoun-equivalents other than those mentioned are constructions involving pe, re or mu, e.g.:

Class II. The Fourteen General Articles

A group of fourteen words has the double function of (a) indicating number (sing.-plur.); (b) acting as signposts of sentence-landscape by labelling a noun cluster as such. With two classes of exceptions, every substantive which does not follow one of the pronouns mi, tu, na, mu and su in its possessive sense must accompany one of these fourteen articles or a numeral. The exceptions are: (a) names of places, folk and persons; (b) singular substantive clusters introduced by the place markers in, extra, etc. (76-99) and (101), and associative particles anti (103), de (109), homo (113), minus (115), per (117), plus (118), post (72), pre (73), pro (120), syn (123), which have no nominal equivalents listed below.

These are empty words with no function other than as number-markers. The corresponding pronouns are pe or re for u(n) (short for Lat. unus in unify), and mu for plu(short for Lat. plures in plural). The singular empty article can replace a, an. Either of them can replace the non-demonstrative articles the, some, any. U(n) is the usual article for use with an abstract or group (un espero = hope), plu marks the plurality of a noun which need have no article in English (plu gyna = women, some women, the women). The corresponding demonstratives are formed with (95) para (here), and (78) apo (away), cf. Swedish det här and det där):

The corresponding pronouns are:

The objection that the demonstrative articles and corresponding pronouns are unwieldy is not a formidable one. The history of language shows the constant degradation of demonstratives through overwork. Long ones are less likely to obtrude into situations where the context is sufficiently demonstrative.

Note.—U(n) means any unless we want to emphasize a choice of possibilities, i.e. unless any means each. We then use singulo (17). Plu means some unless we want to emphasize its partitive meaning. We can then use u mero de plu (19).

The next three are purely plural:

(14) oligo, few, a few
Corresponding pronouns:

(15) pan, all
Note.—Pan does not mean each (17) or the whole of (21)
Corresponding pronouns with pe and re as above.

(16) poly, many, numerous
Corresponding pronouns with pe and re as above.

The next three are purely singular and, like the remainder, have substantival equivalents given in parenthesis:

(17) singulo, each, every
Means the same as all with the additional qualification that any statement made about the group applies to the individual members separately, and not to the group as a whole. It may precede a numeral, if what follows is a single group within a larger group:

The pronouns are:

(18) geno, a sort of, the kind of, such a (kind, sort, class)
As article it is short for u geno de:

As substantive:

We can often render such more appropriately by un homo or plu homo (113) = the like, (a) similar.

(19) mero, a bit of, a piece of, a part of (part), partly
As article it is short for u mero de:

The substantive construction u mero de plu does for some (of the):

u mero de plu gyna   = some (of the) women

The corresponding pronouns are:

The compounds u mero-pe (person) or u mero-re (thing) mean a member (of a group).

(20) solo, the sole, a solitary, singly, exclusively one, alone
This means only or single when only and single are interchangeable, and is equivalent to only in two situations: (a) when it follows a or the; (b) when it precedes a pronoun. It is not equivalent to only as qualifier of an attribute or numeral (p. 119):

When only follows the article the and precedes a plural noun, it is equivalent to the only sort of (solo geno):

solo geno equi; su acte re   = the only horses which do so

To preserve the word-order of Interglossa we may have to use the corresponding pseudonym:

The next four are singular articles, but can qualify a plural noun if preceded by plu, oligo, pan or poly:

(21) holo, the whole, complete, completely (completeness)
As an article, adjective-equivalent and substantive in:

Corresponding pronoun holo re = the whole (of it) or all.

(22) mega, much, a big, large, great(ness)
The following are illustrative:

Before an amplifier mega can have the force of very, for which it is better to use (233) forto (intensely), especially before mega, micro, major, minor, e.g.:

forto micro pani   = very little bread

(23) micro, a little, small(ness)

Note that micro re is not partitive. We often say a little, where mero is more appropriate.

(24) quo, which? what?

Quo is purely interrogative, never relative (see pp. 34-35). The corresponding pronouns are:

(25) satio, enough, sufficient(ly), (sufficiency)
This article is singular or plural as the context dictates. It appears as an article because it qualifies the substantive cluster as a unit.

Unlike its equivalent sufficiently, the English enough follows an adjective it qualifies. Satio takes up the usual position:

The following couplet is useful:

satio eu   = adequate, good enough

All the preceding form demonstratives with para and apo:

Class III. Numeral Articles

A cardinal numeral of Interglossa is an article, i.e. if it stands for a number alone it requires no article of Class II. The numeral vocabulary of natural languages antedates either: (a) the principle of arithmetical position, (b) the algebraic conventions for multiplication (a beside b = a times b), and division (a over b = a divided by b). In view of (a) we need only nine ordinary numerals, supplemented by zero:

(26) zero, zero, no
It is also the emphatic negative particle (by no means, certainly not), and as such can replace no or non (96) before the verb or in answer to a question:

An zero pre date re a mi   = He certainly did not give me it

The couplets zero pe and zero re stand for nobody, none, not … anybody, and nothing, no one, not … anything. Never use no … pe, no … re for not … anyone, not ... anything (see note after (7)).

Zero pe (or re) de bi X means neither X, if we need to be explicit, but zero does for neither as adjective or (with pe or re) as pronoun.

Four other cardinals are useful to specify decimal magnitudes:

The following fraction is useful:

(40) hemi, half

Enumeration follows mathematical usage:

Mono bi hexa tri zero penta   = One hundred and twenty-six thousand three hundred and five

Each of the above forms pronouns and demonstratives of the type prescribed:

For numeral multiples and fractions we follow algebraic conventions, using latero (89) and supero (98), i.e. X times Y is X beside Y (X latero Y) and X/Yths of Z is X over Y beside Z (X supero Y latero Z):

By analogy we may legitimately extend the same practice to metrical multiples:

For ordinal relations we may take advantage of a trick of wide currency, illustrated in English by psalm twenty-three, room number four, part III, chapter 6. That is to say, we post-posit the numeral, e.g.:

For so many times in a temporal sense, and for so many apiece, we use respectively chron (62) meaning occasion (definite time), and singulo pe (or re), each:
Accordingly we have:

Class IV. Interrogative, Imperative, Negative and Comparative Particles

As stated (p. 34), the word-order of statements, questions and commands is unchangeable in Interglossa. Appropriate particles at the beginning of a statement give it the sense of a request, a command or a question.

(41) peti for polite imperative is short for:
(41a) petitio = request, e.g.:

By itself peti does service for please. For no thanks use peti no. The full form petitio is an amplifier. Thus we have:

Like all amplifiers it may slide into a substantive cluster, and we recognize it as a noun-equivalent by the accompanying article, e.g. plu proximo peti(tio) = some recent requests.

For the impolite imperative we can simply drop out peti tu without change of word-order. We may then say:

Kine antero   = Go in front

The need for the strong imperative will be rare, except in history books. An international auxiliary of peaceful communication is not for generals or for conversation with the cat.

Note.—Needless to say, the peti construction, and the contracted form given above, is not co-extensive with all situations involving the so-called imperative of an Aryan verb. The Aryan imperative may merely express a pious hope, aspiration, yearning or desire, which we make explicit as such, e.g.:

Semantics of Interrogation

We may regard any question as a statement accompanied by a request to elicit either:

(a) Confirmation or denial of the statement as a whole, e.g.:

• Is this your book?   = This is your book: state if true or false

(b) Additional information not explicitly contained in the statement itself, e.g.:

• Whose book is this?   = This is someone’s book: state owner’s name
• When did you do this ?   = You did this: state time

For simple questions, i.e. for questions of class (a) above, we have recourse to the preposited interrogative particle:

(42) que, short for:
(42a) questio = interrogative or question

Que takes the initial position like peti. The full form (42a), like petitio, is an amplifier:

As an amplifier it may take the place of an epithet or noun-equivalent in a substantive cluster:

The following illustrate the use of que as signpost of the simple question:

The second class of questions, i.e. (b) above, includes those which begin with who, whom, whose, which, what, where, when, why, how. The equivalent for all of these involves quo (24).

For questions involving who, which, what, as subject, the word-order of English and Interglossa is the same, e.g.:

Quo pe habe re   = Who has it?

When the topic of interrogation is not the subject, the word-order of Interglossa remains as in the equivalent affirmative statement:

Questions which begin with an interrogative adverb reduce to the same general type. Thus:

• where? = at what place? or in what position?
• when? = at what time? on what occasion? or during what interval?
• why? = to what end? with what aim? or for what reason?

The prepositions in the equivalent English substantival phrases are redundant. Accordingly we have:

Such expressions as the above are interrogative qualifiers of what would otherwise be a plain statement. As such they may come at the beginning or at the end (p. 36) of it:

The uses of how are various. For how soon? or how recently? we can use quo chron or quo proximo (121) to elicit the appropriate response. Otherwise we may distinguish between the following situations:

(i) When how signifies by what means? the appropriate construction is quo methodo (302):

Quo methodo tu acte re = How do you do it?

(ii) When how precedes a metrical abstract it is equivalent to quo alone:

(iii) How often? is quo frequo (238) = with what frequency? e.g.:

Tu pre acte re quo frequo   = How often did you do so?

(iv) When how precedes a numeral qualifier such as few, many, or when it precedes much and little applied to enumerable objects, we use quo numero (327), e.g.:

(v) When how precedes much, little, or any abstract which is implicitly metrical, it is equivalent to in what measure? or to what extent? For this we have quo metro (114):

The periphrastic interrogative adverbs quo loco, quo causo, etc., can introduce either a noun-clause or a phrase involving an English infinitive-equivalent with an interrogative flavour:

What, which, or whom may also introduce a noun-clause with an interrogative flavour, e.g.:

The interrogative article is not redundant in the preceding examples. Thus:

Mi pre dicte questio; que tu esthe volo re   = I asked whether you wanted it

As the object of a noun-clause whom, which, what may mean the person or the thing which is the implicit object of the principal, and it is sometimes more appropriate to translate it by means of a relative construction:

Negation

The negative particle is:

(43) no(n), not or no!

The exclamation mark after no signifies that no(n) corresponds to no when the latter is the answer to a question or a signal of denial. It is not the negative article (see zero). It cannot precede a substantive cluster; but it may precede an adverbial particle like the English no in no more than (no major de) or no less than (no minor de). In compounds it is equivalent to in- of incomplete (non-holo), etc., or un- of unequal (non-iso), etc. No(n) can combine with any amplifier to form negative compounds of this type, e.g. no-preparo = unready (138), no-volo = unwilling (128), etc.; and this is the general recipe for making opposites. Admittedly a negative is not necessarily an opposite; but it is the idiom of Interglossa to leave as much as possible to context. If we call a shallow hole a hole that is not deep (no-batho), the assumption is that we should not go out of our way to deny its depth for any other reason. We can always indicate that it is neither one nor the other by saying that it is not very deep (no mega batho).

No uncertainty arises when the notion involved is purely qualitative, e.g. puro—no-puro (clean—dirty), and we can make medium intensity of a metrical amplifier explicit by recourse to meso (91), e.g.:

The usual rule that an amplifier is both an abstract noun and an adjective-equivalent does not hold for the metrical amplifiers alto (150), batho (159) and longo (290), meaning respectively high, deep and long. The corresponding nouns height or level, depth and length or distance convey no information about whether the dimension specified is great or small. Accordingly, we express them by recourse to the construction metro de (extent of), e.g. u metro de alto de Y = the height of Y; u metro de longo trans Y = the width of Y, the breadth of Y.

The idiom of Interglossa prescribes zero constructions wherever the implication is a comprehensive or exclusive negative. Hence the rule: never use no(n) to translate not … one, not … a single, not … anything, not … either. Adherence to this rule prevents ambiguities that constantly arise in English, e.g.:

(a) Does I have not a single thing mean I have more than one thing (mi habe major de mono re), or I have none (mi habe zero re)?

(b) What does I don’t want either a book or a pen mean? If the function of either ... or, like that of allo in Interglossa, is to prescribe the acceptance of one alternative and the rejection of the other, the statement is consistent with the meaning of I want both a book and a pen or nothing at all. Interglossa prohibits allo in a negative statement involving not, and the correct translation for neither … nor is zero … zero, e.g. mi esthe volo zero bibli zero penna.

From a semantic point of view it might seem an advantage to have one form of negative construction (i.e. to use no(n) alone), because no X (zero X) cannot have a logical predicate. A logically self-denying ordinance to prohibit the use of nothing, nobody, etc., would admittedly be a safeguard against such traps as: nothing is better than wisdom; dry bread is better than nothing; therefore dry bread is better than wisdom. Still, syllogistic reasoning is equally inappropriate to other situations involving metrical comparison, e.g. a young elephant is a small elephant; an elephant is an animal; therefore a young elephant is a small animal.We do not deprive ourselves of the immense economy of operating with 0 as a number, because 0 has peculiar logical properties, such as the fact that the ratio of two zeros is not necessarily unity. It would be just as foolish to rule out the highly economical use of nothing and nobody as to put the clock back to the time before arithmetic took advantage of operations with the number 0.

Comparison

There are three comparative articles:

(44) iso, equal(ly); equality; identical(ly); identity

We use this with the empty particle of general relationship (109) de (= in relation to, with reference to) for the construction so ... as or as ... as (= equally ... in relation to), e.g.:

iso poly domi de   = as many houses as

When the word which follows as or so in a construction of this sort is not explicitly metrical, we can also use (113) homo ... de (= similarly ... , in relation to), e.g.:

homo chloro de   = as green as

Homo is the usual equivalent of as or like, but if like has the force of equally or just as much as, we can use iso, e.g.:

epi geo iso in urani   = on earth as it is in heaven

The usual meaning of even is including (see 105) when it precedes a qualitative attribute; but when even precedes an enumerative, it signifies an equality (as many as) for which we can put iso poly de:

Mi non habe iso poly de tri re   = I have not even three (of them)

From iso we have the couplets:

(45) major, more; greater; bigger; larger

major de   = bigger than; larger than; more than

(46) minor, less; smaller

minor de   = smaller than; less than

Major and minor are comparative particles. They are not articles, nor pronouns. As they stand they do not therefore tally with the various elliptical uses of more and less; nor do they necessarily occupy the same position in the sentence matrix. More may mean extra or additional, an extra number of them, or an additional quantity of it (see 118 below). We rely on context to supply the standard of comparison. Similar remarks apply mutatis mutandis to less. In Interglossa we can make quantity and number explicit by recourse to metro (114) and numero (327). The following paradigms illustrate different types of comparison:

The combinations major de and minor de can qualify an article or numeral, as in:

The following illustrate the uses of major and minor as qualifiers of an adjective-equivalent:

No special form is necessary to do the work of most, nor one for least. We can make the superlative explicit by making the standard of comparison exclusive with residuo (394), i.e.:

We have also at our disposal two equivalent vocables of wide international currency both in statistics and in physical science. Their plural forms are consonant with the phonetic pattern of Interglossa without change; and we may assimilate them, as we can assimilate (p. 239) without change the plural form of any internationally current technical term of which the singular has the ending -um. It is therefore unnecessary to list them by number as items of our essential list of constructed vocables. They appear in the supplementary list of 68 international words taken over as they stand (p. 256), viz.:

An important function of minor is that it provides a convenient form of comparison for opposites, already illustrated on p. 44. Thus with (395) resisto (strong, strength, of materials or aim as opposed to bodily power or intensity) we have:

Class V. Generic Substantives

A limitation to word-economy in most natural languages is paucity of generic terms from which it is possible to build up self-explicit compounds of the type mentioned on p. 17. A constructed language is free from this limitation. We can therefore extend our battery of common nouns beyond the narrow scope of the Basic English equipment without adding to our stock of essential vocables. Many common nouns are word-forms differentiated from others in virtue of human associations which always or almost always appear sufficiently in the context. Though we make a distinction between sheep in the field and sheep on the table by having a separate word mutton, we do not repine lack of a separate word for fish in the sea and fish on the plate.¹ We have separate words for flax, thread and linen, though the single vocable cotton suffices for the plant, the spun filament and the material woven from it. The context sufficiently indicates the distinction between beef and cattle or between flax and linen without recourse to separate words. In the same way many class words used in technical discussion sufficiently indicate an object in the context in which it occurs. The single word filament for thread, cotton, string, rope, cord, wire, fishing-line, is explicit enough in most ordinary situations. The fact that we can always use the generic name unless the context fails to divulge the specification, overrides the objection that more explicit compounds may be unwieldy.

Interglossa has no lifeless affixes. With few exceptions the vocables are based on intact roots, but four foregoing words (an, fe, pe, mu) are truncated, and two (peti, que) are optional truncated forms. For equivalents of many substantives we can rely extensively on compounds involving one or other generic terms, which have alternative truncated forms for optional use to short-circuit prolixity. One of these is the “occupational” class (p. 84) based on -pe. This is much more comprehensive than the corresponding -man class of English, including all occupational and personal terms except discipuli (828) (scholar, pupil, student), polizi (843) and secretari (853). Thus we have (inter alia):

¹ For cattle, English has in all ten words—ox for transport, cow for milk, bull for breeding, bullock for fattening, calf new-born, heifer young cow, steer young bull, beef cooked adult, veal cooked young.

The reader may ask how we distinguish such a spoken couplet from the corresponding compound, labelled in print as such by a hyphen. The following comments should suffice to dispel this difficulty:

(i) Juxtaposition of an adjective and a noun in an Aryan language is not, as school text-books lead us to believe, the logical operation of limiting a class of things, notions or persons sufficiently labelled by the latter to those of its members who share the common property uniquely specified by the former. An adjective-noun couplet is a semantic unit which we have to interpret in the light of custom and context as we interpret the meaning of a compound. Without the clue which one or the other supplies, what precise meaning we attach to the couplet social worker has as much and as little to do with dictionary definitions of social and worker as has the meaning of brickyard with dictionary definitions of brick and yard.

(ii) Where confusion might arise, we can fall back on any one of three devices:

(a) Since it is always redundant to use the word person in a predicative expression, we need not, and should not, use pe in this situation. We do not say: fe eque u forto religio pe (she is a deeply religious person). We say: fe habe mega religio (she is very religious).

(b) Otherwise we can make use of the full form persona (individual), as in: u forto religio persona habe eco proximo (a very religious person lives hard by).

(c) A high proportion of occupational terms have a special local flavour. For all such, Interglossa prescribes (p. 20) the local name. This is en rapport with educated speech everywhere. Thus the English translation of a French novel takes over curé, which has no precise equivalent within the framework of Anglo-American social custom, without mutilating its meaning by recourse to the equivalent word listed in a pocket dictionary. Since the word religion refers to a great diversity of social habits, and the word priest to officials with a great variety of social functions, we can always sidestep any ambiguity arising from use of the compound religio-pe by using the correct local term.

As stated on p. 84, we can make an analogous class of -re compounds, e.g.:

The following generic substantives or amplifiers likewise form compounds. They come at the head of our list partly for this reason, and partly because they are based on truncated roots or have shortened forms for use in compounds:

(47) cameri or -ca, room, chamber, cabin, hall, compartment

All names of rooms are -ca compounds. With the exception of the first, the antecedent element of such compounds is an amplifier signifying the function or situation of the room:

(48) domi or -do, building; house; erection

As all names of rooms are -ca compounds, all names of man-made buildings are -do compounds, of which the antecedent points to the function or to the location, e.g.:

Since -do compounds are man-made erections, and the antecedent never specifies the material used for making it, we have the full forms.:

(49) fascio or -fa, group, set, bunch, batch, heap, collection

No special rule is necessary for such self-explicit compounds as:

(50) fi, cord, filament, line, rope, string, thread, wire

This is a contraction of the international root fila- of filament. The full form would be a homophone of phylla (602), and is therefore unsuitable. In most situations its generic meaning sufficiently distinguishes the mere specific terms listed above, but we can make such distinctions explicit by compounds or couplets, as under. We list those with a material antecedent with a hyphen, e.g.:

We drop the hyphen in functional couplets such as:

(51)instrumenti or -ru, tool, instrument

The antecedent of a -ru compound always points to its function:

(52) lithi or -li, stone, rock

There are four basic compounds of -li other than precious stones, as below:

Since the popular names of jewels have little relation to their chemical composition, great precision is not essential. We use -li compounds for all translucent jewels:

For non-translucent, ornamental stones we use the full form lithi, e.g.:

(53) loco or -lo, place, region, territory, domain, locality

Important compounds are:

(54) materia or -ma, material, stuff, substance

The antecedent of -ma compounds is an amplifier which denotes its characteristic property, e.g.:

(55) mechani or -me, machine, apparatus, device, engine, mechanism

The antecedent points to the function or the source of power:

(56) mobili or -mo, furniture, movables

From this we can get functional compounds, such as:

(57) texti or -te, fabric, cloth, textile, woven material, tissue, canvas, muslin, etc.

Like others of this class, texti usually suffices for any of the more specific words listed above unless the context demands a more explicit term. We can then make compounds based on (a) material source; (b) usage; (c) any characteristic quality, e.g.:

(58) vasa or -va, vessel, container, jug, mug, cup, bowl, pitcher, etc.

We can make the meaning of vasa more explicit by use of an antecedent pointing to a sufficiently suggestive characteristic, other than the material of which it is composed:

We can use va- for tinned, canned or bottled fruit, etc., e.g.:

(59) vesto or -ve, covering, clothes, vesture, costume, -wear, suit, dress

As an amplifier vesto means the act of covering or the result of the act, in accordance with remarks on p. 19.

(60) zona or -zo, ring, belt, hoop, zone, band

Where the context supplies no clue to a more precise meaning, we can make such compounds as:

Note on SOME, ANY and WHATEVER

We have had occasion (pp. 18-19 and footnote on p. 31) to note that the small number of items essential to acceptable discourse in the Basic English word-list depends far more than most enthusiasts realize on inclusion of highly polyvalent words comparable to the Chinese homophones. This is conspicuously true of prepositions and of other particles which make up the grammatical matrix. Four small words which are pitfalls to the beginner call for special treatment. These are: any, some, only and even together with the periphrasis at all (= whatever). Only and even, come up for discussion under (105) on p. l19.