Interlingua Institute: A History (New Book)

[Jay Bowks]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
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.
--
administrator at interlingua.org
http://www.interlingua.org