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Interlingua Institute
A History
Frank Esterhill
Published by Interlingua Institute
pb c 2000
ISBN 0-917848-02-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-091345
Price: $35.00

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning
of the twentieth century, serious
consideration was given by many
academicians and linguists to the
idea of an international auxiliary language.
The Nobel Laureate, Wilhelm Ostwald, at the
University of Leipzig, interested his student,
the young chemist, Dr. Frederick Gardner Cottrell,
in the idea as early as 1902. After the First World
War, Cottrell, Chairman of the Committee on
International Auxiliary Language (which had
been set up in 1919) of the International
Research Council, persuaded two wealthy and
prominent New Yorkers, Alice Vanderbilt Morris
and Dave Hennen Morris, to found
the International Auxiliary Language
Association [IALA] in 1924, with an illustrious
team of leading academics and business leaders.
For a dozen years, IALA sponsored
linguistic research (under the aegis
of Sapir, Jespersen, and Collinson,
together with Debmnner, Von Wahl, Peano,
and others) and organized meetings dedicated
to the task of effecting conciliation between
the already existing international auxiliary
language systems. Then, in 1937, realizing
that all of the previously elaborated
interlanguages were fundamentally flawed
and that compromise was impossible,
IALA, with a grant from Rockefeller
Foundation, undertook the second stage
of its research, the registration of
the international vocabulary, under
E. Clark Stillman at the University of
Liverpool. With the outbreak of war in
Europe in 1939, IALA's files and records
were safely transferred to New York where
Stillman assembled a new team to continue
the work. He enlisted the support of an
able assistant, Alexander Gode, who
assumed the direction of IALA when
Stillman left on war duty.
By the time WWlI was over, IALA had
completed its basic work and was ready to
offer to the public, in its General Report
1945, three variants of its proposed
interlanguage. In 1946, Andr6 Martinet
joined IALA's staff (full-time for the first
year and part-time in the second), formulating
both a questionnaire and an analysis
of IALA's (now) four variants -- the
Presentation des Variantes. After Martinet's
abrupt departure in 1948 in a dispute
regarding his salary, Alexander Gode once
again assumed the direction of IALA's staff
and brought the work to completion with
the publication of the Interlingua-English
Dictionary and the Interlingua Grammar
in 1951. The application of Interlingua
to the sciences began the next year with
Forrest F. Cleveland's Spectroscopia Molecular,
and it advanced further in 1953 with
the inception of Scientia International,
the monthly abstracts of Science News Letter.
Over the span of almost twenty years, Gode
supplied Interlingua summaries for more
than two dozen medical journals, and he
wrote Interlingua abstracts for 11 world
medical congresses from 1954 to 1962. The
Interlingua translations (Esterhill with
Andersen and Frodelund) in the two volumes
of the Multilingual Compendium of
Plant Diseases (1976 and 1977), published
by the American Phytopathological
Society in cooperation with the United
States Department of Agriculture, marked
the final milestone in the distinguished
history of Interlingua in the service of
science.

Contents

This book, the first to make extensive
use of the Archives of IALA, examines
four pivotal stages in the history of
the international auxiliary language idea:
(1) the Foundation of IALA in 1924 and
early attempts at compromise;
(2) the Formulation of the Interlingua of
IALA after 1937 on the solid basis of the
international vocabulary;
(3) the Publication of the Interlingua-English
Dictionary and the Interlingua Grammar in 1951;
and (4) the Application from 1951 to 1977.
References: an extensive bibliography of
the subject, including still-unpublished
documents found in the Archive of IALA.
Biographical Notes of the most important
figures associated with IALA and with the
Interlingua Institute. List of Directors of
the Interlingua Institute. Representative
Interlingua Texts from (I) Spectroscopia
Molecular, (II) Third World Congress of
Psychiatry, (III) Journal of the American
Medical Association, (IV) Danish Medical
Bulletin, (V) Scientia International, (VI)
New York State Journal of Medicine, (VII
and VIII) Multilingual Compendium of
Plant Diseases ú List of Journals with
Interlingua summaries ú List of World
Medical Congresses which published
Interlingua abstracts. Index of Names.

x & 104 pages
Dimensions: 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches