Word: interlingua
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...West, Whatmough believes the eventual answer to the problems of language barriers lies with electronic machines. As he puts it, "In this age it is by no means inconceivable to have electronic symbols which would transcend all linguistic symbols." Whatmough asserts such a system would eliminate the need for Interlingua...
...person sharing Whatmough's views concerning the eventual use of machines in translations is Y. Bar-Hillel, a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unlike Whatmough, however, Bar-Hillel believes ther is a real place for Interlingua in such a system. After two years of work on this subject, he is convinced that the only real problem confronting an electronic system of translation is syntax...
...varying sentence structures of languages would be much harder for a machine to handle than the obvious vocabularly differences. But by using Interlingua, with its relatively simple sentence structure, he believes, as an intermediary, the machine could be perfected much sooner. If, for instance, a person wanted to translate, electronically, Russian into English, it would be simplest, cheapest, and best to feed the machine an Interlingua translation of the Russian, which would then be electronically changed into English. Such a system would make Interlingua and Electronics complementary to each other, rather than in opposition...
...this very special application of an international language, Bar-Hillel admits he would rather use Esperanto, which has an even simpler syntax than Interlingua and is thus "closer to the heart of the logician." Its superficial construction, however, considerably weakens Esperanto's position, since it is not the type of language which many people could be persuaded to learn. Most educated people would on the other hand have an immediate common meeting ground in Interlingua, provided they had some knowledge of a western language. Bar-Hillel's hobby is international language, he admits his views are highly subjective; he nevertheless...
Unfortunately, neither Bar-Hillel nor Gode are linguists in the same sense as Whatmough. And when Gode gives a more detailed analysis of Interlingua, he cannot really challenge Whatmough's logic...