Interlingua Institute: A History by Frank Esterhill Published by Interlingua Institute pb (c) 2000 ISBN 0-917848-02-0 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 99-091345 Publication Date: May 2000 x & 106 pages Dimensions: 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches Price: US$35.oo 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 Debrunner, 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 WWII 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, André 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 Présentation des Varientes. 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 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 Dieseases (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. List of Journals with Interlingua summaries. List of World Medical Congresses which published Interlingua abstracts. Index of Names. -- [log in to unmask] http://www.interlingua.org