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/