AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Occidental
A little more space must be given to E. de Wahl, who had for many years
given much thought to the problem, which he had followed through all the
phases of Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Reform-Neutral, Ido,
before bringing out his own Occidental in 1922. The name indicates
his principal idea: he wants to make a language for use in the Occidental
world with no immediate thought of catering for the people of the Orient,
and he therefore bases his scheme on the Occidental languages, chiefly the
Romanic ones. This of course is what most recent interlinguists have done,
though perhaps not so consistently and consciously as de Wahl; but what is
in his own eyes the chief merit of Occidental, is the way in which the
formation of words has been built up on the actual use of suffixes, etc.,
used in the existing modern languages. It forms in that respect a
continuation of Neutral and especially of Rosenberger's Reform-Neutral, but
is based on more thorough study. He thus does away with the arbitrary word
elements of the other languages, but in his pronounced endeavour to have
"natural" forms he is obliged largely to abandon ease and regularity of
formation, admitting in many cases two root-forms for the same word to be
used in different derivatives, e.g. vid "see", vis-ion;
curr- "run", curs-iv. It is true that in this way he obtains
not a few words which when framed according to his rules agree with the
forms actually found in many languages; but in spite of the rules being
more complicated than is usual in a constructed language he does not in
every case obtain perfect agreement with the forms in national languages;
in a few pages I find, for instance, the following words: scrition,
analysation, interprension (enterprise), descovrition, which
have no equivalents in existing languages. (Other examples will be
mentioned in the special part.) The countless irregularities in the
word-formation of national languages make it impossible to follow them
through thick and thin in a language whose raison d'être
should be that it is essentially easier than existing languages: perfect
regularity and perfect naturalness cannot possibly be combined, we must
compromise here and there, but as I hope to show in Part II, it is possible
to much more natural forms than those of Ido, and yet at the same time a
much greater regularity than is found in Occidental. Through regularity
of word-formation we take into consideration the interests of those who
know only their own language - but I am afraid that when Occidental is
praised as very easy, it is chiefly by people who are already familiar with
two or three of the great European languages.
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