Interlinguistics
Interlinguistics is the study of various aspects of linguistic communication between people who cannot make themselves understood by means of their different first languages. It is concerned with investigating how ethnic and auxiliary languages (lingua francas) work in such situations and with the possibilities of optimizing interlinguistic communication, for instance by use of international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto. These are languages that are created by an intentional intellectual effort, usually with the aim of facilitating interlinguistic communication, but there are also interlanguages that have arisen spontaneously. These are called pidgin languages.
The term Interlinguistics can be interpreted in at least two ways:
- Study of interlinguas, i.e., of interlanguages that serve for interlinguistic communication.
- Study of phenomena that can be observed inter linguas ‘between languages’.
Among these interpretations, the first one is by far the most well established.
Most publications in the field of interlinguistics are not so constructive, but rather descriptive, comparative, historic, sociolinguistic, or concerned with translation by humans or machines. As for Esperanto, which is the most widely used constructed interlanguage, there is a relatively abundant literature about the language itself and its philology (esperantologio).
Only a few of the many constructed languages have been applied practically to any noteworthy extent. The most prosperous were Volapük (1879 - Johann Martin Schleyer), Esperanto (1887 - Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof), Latino sine flexione (1903 - Giuseppe Peano), Ido (1907 - Louis Couturat), Occidental-Interlingue (1922 - Edgar de Wahl) and Interlingua (1951 - IALA and Alexander Gode).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinguistics
