Talk:Interlingue

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Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
May 19, 2019	Peer review	Reviewed
April 13, 2022	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on May 1, 2022.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Interlingue, an international auxiliary language, was released 100 years ago under the name Occidental (advertisement pictured) by a Baltic German from Estonia?

Current status: Good article

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Interlingua

Should mention that Interlingua is a separate tongue. --146.176.2.17

Pronunciation

The pronunciation guide says "th - same as English". But English has both voiced th (as in this) and unvoiced th (as in thin), so it's not clear what is meant here. --Zundark 18:14, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's my fault, I meant the voiceless one.Cameron Nedland 01:41, 8 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Example text

Is there a reason there's no translation given into english of the example text? ACookr (talk) 18:09, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Grammar?

The article needs a section on Occidental's grammar. Also, it might not be out of place to compare it with Esperanto and with Interlingua, its main competitors. --Jim Henry (talk) 19:19, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fourth most popular?

.....it is believed that it was at its height the fourth most popular planned language, after Volapük, Esperanto and perhaps Ido in order of appearance.

That's unclear. It seems to be trying to say two things at once:

Occidental was the fourth auxlang to acquire a speaker community, after Volapük, Esperanto and Ido -- unquestionable.
Occidental was at its peak the fourth most popular auxlang. But in that case it seems silly to list Volapük in this sentence, unless Occidental had a really tiny number of speakers even at its peak. Volapük seems to have been pretty stable at around 20-30 speakers for the last century or so. --Jim Henry (talk) 19:24, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What should this sentence be saying and how could it say it more clearly?

Also: the article in its opening history section speaks several times of "adherents", rarely if ever of "speakers". How many fluent speakers did the language have vs. the number of people who thought it was a good idea but didn't actually learn it? --Jim Henry (talk) 19:24, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the first interpretation works logically, since the sentence is about the language at it's height. If it was the fourth auxlang to gain a speaker community, it would be that at any given time. Volapük had many followers in its day but you seem to be right that it had allready declined a century ago. But still, I'm not certain how many speakers/followers V had in the 20's.

Perhaps the intention is to say that at its peak it was the fourth most popular IAL until todays date (in number of speakers, probably)?

Further down an occidental source says it was the second most popular language after Esperanto, so the article is incoherent. This might be true, but the source is biased and it should probably at least be noted that "according to the Occidental magazine Cosmoglotta". The easiest solution of the above is probably to simply delete the unsourced text.

And you're right that the number of speakers is at least as interesting as the number of "adherents". flinga sv (talk) 14:32, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'll correct myself, you are right. It is unclear, when "in order of appearance" is taken into account. Perhaps "the fourth of the most popular planned languages"? Still, no source. I'm removing it. flinga sv (talk) 15:06, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

qu - same as English. IPA: /qw/

¿No sería /kw/? Creía que /q/ era uvular. TMU (talk) 03:28, 2 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comparison with Interlingua

Did not somebody claim that Occidental is virtually the same language as Interlingua? Personally, I understand much more of Occidental than Interlingua. When I first encountered the text “Li Europan lingues” I could understand almost everything of it despite I did not even know what language it was! I have a similar texts propagating for Interlingua but I understand less than half of it. Does the vocabulary of Occidental contain more words of Germanic origin? Or has it just made an other choice of international words?

2010-06-13 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

I wouldn't put it that way, Lena. The look-and-feel of both languages is quite different, after all. Interlingua, if I've been told correctly, picks its words from English and the four largest Romance languages, but in such way that words occur in most, if not all of them. Because English is a Germanic language with a highly romanized vocabulary already, the Germanic influence on Interlingua is minimal. In Occidental it's quite a different story, because it applies several elements that are distinctively Germanic (auxiliary verbs and the like, IIRC). —IJzeren Jan _Uszkiełtu? 16:55, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of how similar they are, I haven't heard anybody claiming it is the same language, but rather just that they are very similar (as similar as different dialects of one language, some argue).

And from what I've heard I do think that Interlingua takes it vocabulary from the most common romance languages in general, plus Russian and German as control languages. I am a little bit more unceirtan about this, but if I've understood it correctly Occidental (Interlingue) takes (the major part of) its vocabulary from the most common international words, which are often but not always romance. That might be one explaination that Occidental seems to be easier to understand for me as well (a swedish speaker) with words like sam and old. flinga sv (talk) 14:45, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget "flicca" and "strax" in Occidental. ;) --87.123.107.202 (talk) 11:17, 10 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Romance languages

The article says that Occidental is based on European Indo-European languages - but surely it is worth mentioning that it is primarily based on Romance languages? There is very little Germanic influence by comparison, and as far as I know no (or virtually no) direct Slavic, Greek, Baltic etc. influence. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.185.117.127 (talk) 05:17, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, are actually Greek and Latin vowels related with more consonanted languages (unlike some Anatolic and Levantine), or it was a(n) Herculean effort? LOL, "Occidental" for China? There were Ottomans, battles for meters, gunpowder, compass, Andaluzian like (admirals) open sea pioneers, flu epidemics and pirates, what a luck... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.10.158.149 (talk) 15:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation

I have hidden the previous section about pronounciation, which was unsourced and also a bit cluttery. Still, it may contain useful material if it can be verificated with a source, so I let it remain, albeit hidden in the source. It can also be seen in this previous version of the article, for those interested.

I also don't know how good a source the one I used is, with no author name given (and only comparing the pronunciation with English, perhaps giving a false impression that it mostly resembles English). This should perhaps be attended to (preferrably with someone with better knowledge than me), but I don't think the pronunciation part should be overly detailed or taking up a to large part of the article. flinga sv (talk) 15:32, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have now removed the old pronounciation text, it's not really necessary to keep when you also can find it in the history. The current references and Curs de Occidental in Occidental are also good sources for writing such a text.

I also removed a link to Comparison of international auxiliary languages, a deleted article (reguarding a subject that I, and others with me I think, personally would have appreciated to see a good article about, on a side note). flinga sv (talk) 19:49, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Can the pronunciation be clarified with IPA? As is, it is ambiguous due to regional dialectal variations of the English reference words. 107.77.193.199 (talk) 00:03, 18 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

sourcing

"Occidental... faded into insignificance following the appearance in the early 1950s of a competing naturalistic project, Interlingua" The source for this in Googlebooks is by "Wikipedians". I'm not sure if that is an acceptable source but the Googlebook cites another source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Naytz (talk • contribs) 16:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Occidental, later Interlingue"

If the language is officially called Interlingue now, also in Unicode, as well as on Wikipedia itself. Shouldn't Interlingue language be the main page and Occidental language be the redirect? A lot of pages currently links to Occidental over Interlingue due to the infoboxes and navboxes using Occidental over Interlingue at the moment.

Pages where the name of the language is used in an article, outside of infoboxes/navboxes are pages like List of Estonians, De Wahl's rule, Intal language (the two latter mentions Occidental, but only links to Interlingue).
Liggliluff (talk) 16:37, 19 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Referencing Cosmoglotta

The old issues of Cosmoglotta have been available for a number of years now, and after reading through them a number of times I feel like I finally have an understanding of just what Occidental did from its inception until the 1950s. But it would be nice to have them elsewhere besides Scribd and Blogger to reference. I've been considering uploading them to Wikisource. Any thoughts on that? Mithridates (talk) 04:41, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As a general rule, works must be much older to be PD. US is pre-1924, and the EU is life+70 (so nothing from the 1950s for a few years). So they won't be eligible for uploading for a long while.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:20, 20 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Prosfilaes:, thanks for the message, I have good news actually: I received permission from the Interlingue-Union (the organization that still owns and publishes Cosmoglotta) in the meantime to type up any and all issues. Direct quote: "Yes on posse tippar li plu nov nrós de Cosmoglotta por far les trovabil in li internet por quicunc volent vider les" (Yes, you can type the newer issues of Cosmoglotta to make them findable on the internet for anyone who wishes to see them) along with a thanks for the works I've been doing. Now since I've been using the modern orthography and correcting typos if there are any, I have been putting them up on a separate wiki in the meantime. I'll continue to put them up there (easier that way) but the Interlingue-Union is in favour of putting them anywhere and everywhere so others will be able to bring them to Wikisource if they so wish. Mithridates (talk) 09:31, 23 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's great. But for Wikisource, they need to go to Commons:Commons:Email_templates/Consent and fill an appropriate message. Wikimedia needs a clear message that's direct from the owner and with a clear free license; not merely "to make them findable", but to reprint and produce derivative works from them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:34, 23 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I suspected as much (thanks for the info too). That plus wanting to type them all in the modern orthography is why I'm doing them all elsewhere. Mithridates (talk) 13:05, 23 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I noticed the Cosmoglotta texts on the Austrian National Library can also be referenced by page so that solves that problem. Uploading to Wikisource and typing them up would still be nice, however (some of the scans are nearly unreadable). Mithridates (talk) 07:59, 16 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]