Salivanto wrote:

"A teacher must be credible.  A course with blatant
anglicisms lowers its own credibility.  A reader will
come across expressions such as "omne le" (as in
"She thanks him for ALL THE help") and assume that
this
is just another anglicism.  (As I myself did at
first.)
The reader will fail to learn the very structure of
Interlingua that the course is supposed to teach."

---

Interlingua is a planned language, and despite "the
rule of three" its planning is very loose.  That is
why there are all sorts of ways of writing it
correctly and understandably.

To say "but" in Interlingua, for example, you can use
the Latin "sed," the French "mais," or the Italian
"ma."  If enough people started to use the Spanish
"pero," you could use that too.

The debates about the "correct" or "pure" forms that
people should use in writing Interlingua do not
involve considerations that impede the understanding
of Interlingua by careful writers and reasonably
competent readers.  They are on the order of whether
it is correct in English to say "the man who I talked
to" versus "the man whom I talked to."

The current drift in English is to eliminate the -m
from "whom" because all other similar words have no
nominative/nonnominative forms.  It seems likely that
within 300 years only the form "who" will survive and
"whom" will be as archaic as "thou."

In using languages, people innovate spontaneously all
the time.  Some years ago, for example, Steve Allen
coined the word "dumbth" and used it as the title of a
book he published.  While this word is well formed, I
myself find it clumsy.  Most other native speakers of
English apparently agree with me, because the word
hasn't caught on.

On the other hand the verb "to rip off" (along with
the noun "ripoff") for "to rob/steal," which was
coined in the 1960s, is widely used.

Many innovations in all languages come about by
individual speakers coining new forms.  Generally
speaking, if they fill a need to describe new concepts
in a language, they are adopted.  If, however, they
are merely stylistic variants of other terms that are
commonly used, they may or may not come into generally
accepted use.

Decisions of this sort are collectively made by the
speech community of the language.  There is no way
that grammarians or language academies can control
speech communities in their ongoing use of a language.
 Ultimately, all they can do is describe the
collective decisions of these speech communities.
Right now, Interlingua is really up for grabs, because
it doesn't have any speech community of native
speakers.

If Interlingua should become fairly widely used by the
European Union in its publications, the editors of
these publications will pick and choose from the way
current Interlinguists use the language.

It may very well be that these editors, if Interlingua
becomes widely used in European Union publications,
will have a significant influence on developing a more
stable, standardized form of Interlingua.  In the
meantime, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with
the picks and choices of individual Interlinguists.





__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/