Word: interlingua
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With such progress, Gode is convinced Interlingua will succeed where other universal languages have failed. Connected with its development ever since the early beginnings in the 1920's, he insists that Interlingua, unlike Esperanto, is not artificially constructed, which accounts for a good deal of its success. No words have been invented or constructed; they were all extracted from a common European base including the Romance tongues, English, German, and, to a degree, Russian. Gode claims the language is simultaneously French, English, Spanish, and so on. Each language is streamlined by elimination of idiosyncratically distinctive features...
This derivation of Interlingua makes it particularly appealing for Westerners, who can understand virtually every word without any previous knowledge of the language. Such is not the case with Esperanto, the grotesqueness of which illustrated in the sentence, "La gepatroj amas siajn bonajn kaj fidelajn knabinojn." In Interlingua, it reads, "Le parentes ama lor bon e fidel pueras" (Parents love their good and faithful children...
...despite such case of comprehension, there are still many opponents to Interlingua. One of them is Joshua Whatmough, chairman of the Harvard Linguistics Department. "We won't teach that language here, unless it's over my dead body," he says. And, like the Faculty with its Esperanto decision, he may have a point...
Whatmough further asserts that the language barrier is not removed by Interlingua in any case, since it would be completely unintelligible to the average man in the Orient. Even educated Asiatics acquainted with Western culture, would not find Interlingua more international than English or French...
...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...