Synopsis
Learn the international vocabulary while learning a language based on it with a simple English-like grammar and vocabulary, Interlingua. The international vocabulary consists of the thousands of words with similar forms and the same meanings shared by the major European languages due to the influence of Latin (both Classical and Vulgar) and the Romance languages, which descended from Latin. It represents the objective rendition of the major common lexical heritage of the European languages. It could be an auxiliary language of the European Union, the Western Hemisphere, and other nations speaking English or the Romance languages. This book is a complete treatment of Interlingua, from grammar, vocabulary, word formation and analysis, to a detailed treatment of the objective methods used by professional linguists to extract and standardize the international vocabulary as an objective, external reality. Numerous texts in Interlingua are included along with a translation from the Italian of a segment of Boccaccio’s account of the Black Plague in his Decamerone. Examples are given how the objective methodology can correct some errors of earlier linguists who worked on Interlingua’s development. The book also uses that objective methodology to solve the problem of the grammatical particles produced when the original developers used a flawed study to find them and then abandoned that methodology altogether in providing a complete list of Latin particles and a potpourri of particles taken from previously constructed languages, leaving users of interlingua to their own subjective devices to choose from. The book provides an appendix of a complete list of over 185 particles and their objective grounding in the Romance languages, which are the only possible source for a set of particles methodologically coherent with the rest of the vocabulary. Because Interlingua is a simplified Romance language, which includes English, you will be able to write in Interlingua in the Web and most speakers of Romance languages will understand you. And you will discover that, knowing Interlingua, you can also read books, newspaper articles, and blogs in the Romance languages with often very good comprehension. So, learn Interlingua and increase your word power! The book includes two glossaries of 3,248 words, along with a complete table of contents and an exhaustive index. This edition also includes references supporting various assertions throughout the text.
About the Author
Stanley A. Mulaik, Ph.D., is a retired Emeritus Professor of Quantitative Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. While an undergraduate at the University of Utah he discovered Interlingua and began a serious study of it. An article he wrote in the University's student literary magazine on Interlingua led to a request for the article by Dr. Alexander Gode, who directed the linguistic research at the International Auxiliary Language Association, the developer of Interlingua. That led to a fruitful correspondence between Gode and Mulaik until 1970. In 1961 while training to become a clinical psychologist at the VA Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, on a six-month assignment at the Brooklyn VA Hospital, Dr. Mulaik visited frequently with Dr. Gode at his office in Manhattan, during which they had many discussions about Interlingua. Among these was the problem of the Latin grammatical particles that Dr. Gode and E. Clark Stillman, chose after a study conducted by Gode in 1939 using just the three major Romance languages, failed to yield more than 73 eligible particles with three variants from the three languages. Many Interlinguaists did not like the Latin particles and chose others haphazardly from a potpouri of particles available from other auxiliary languages in the Interlingua English Dictionary (IED). Mulaik thought that by repeating the study with at least two additional minor romance languages a result would be a full list of grammatical particles. Gode gave Mulaik a packet of index cards with results of his 1939 study to begin such a study. In 1963 he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. It was not until 1998 that Mulaik was able to complete such a study with 183 particles after reading extensively on the history and philology of the Romance languages and the development of the Romance particles. Meanwhile Mulaik switched careers to quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina, and then moved in 1970 to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, from which he retired as a Professor Emeritus in 2000. He is the author of three texts in his field, editor of several others, and former editor of Multivariate Behavioral Research. He has been an editor of several monthly periodicals in Interlingua, being author of numerous translations into Interlingua therein. He lives with his wife, a retired psychiatric nursing professor, in Marietta, Georgia. They have two adult children and 4 grandchildren.
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