Edo, et alteros, tu va trovar isto interessante de un littera a
me de Dr. Gode:
Dr. Alexander Gode in letter to Stanley Mulaik, November 27,1961:
In a more serious vein I must add my penny's worth to your
discussion of what you call the "plethora of alternatives offered
by the Dictionary" in the particle compartment. I do not remember
whether I ever explained to you that there was method in this
madness While working on the Dictionary I was not yet completely
disillusioned about interlinguists in general. I considered it
quite possible that a good many Occidentalists, Idists, even
Sumaists and Esperantists, would welcome our Dictionary as an
objectively solid anchoring ground under the unstable waves of
subjective preferences in matters of the international vocabulary.
I was naive enough to foresee that some of these gentlemen would
accept our Dictionary as their lexical Bible, reserving for
themselves merely the right to remain faithful to their past in
terms of grammar. In this daydreaming, I foresaw trouble for my
friends in the matter of grammatical words, which are and are not
vocabulary and which are and are not grammar. I discussed the
problem with Blair and as a result of our discussion, proposed
that he collect from the dozen and two auxiliary language systems
he knows all the grammatical words which would not look too silly
in the neighborhood of Interlingua words and stick them in
brackets in our compilation. I do not believe that I would use the
same procedure today. Let me summarize briefly what my approach has
come to be after these many years of practical trial and error. I
know you can go along with me only part of the way but that is
quite as it should be. (1) There is no question about the
particles that emerge without complication from the prototype
methodology. Examples are: "nos," "que," "con," etc. (2) I refuse
to admit any particle without adequate prototype credentials and
revert instead to straight Latin. "Tamben" looks as Chinese to me
as "ma," "anque" as "ti." I think it is only a slightly
journalesified expression of the essence of Interlingua if we
claim that any Interlingua text must be decipherable without the
help of an Interlingua Dictionary. If I don't know what the
Interlingua word "vison" means, I look it up in Webster, and if I
haven't got a Webster I take the Larousse instead. If I don't know
what "ma" means I also don't know where to look it up. If I do not
know the meaning of "sod" or "etiam" I do recognize at least that
these words are Latin, for I have often been told that Interlingua
is a modern version of Latin. (3) I make extensive use of a
tendency which seems to prevail in all the living languages I know
anything about, to wit, the substitution of descriptive phrases for
crystallized particles. Since I very often substitute "at this
time" for "now", "in all parts of the world" for "everywhere", and
since I do the same in French, in German, and would no doubt in
Spanish and Italian if I were qualified to do anything at all in
those languages, I obviously feel free to say in Interlingua "a
iste tempore "in omne partes del mundo", "in le mesme maniera",
etc. It is quite interesting to note how much can be done by means
of such circumlocutions, which actually enliven one's style rather
than clumsify it.
--Alexander Gode
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