Kevin,
   Jay Bowks passed your note to him onto us at the listserv interlng that
we use to practice interlingua at.  He wondered if we could add anything
to what he responded to you with.

   As for sustaining interest, I think this is a question of marketing,
and Interlingua, after initial successes in the 1950's and 1960's, has
since the death of its founder, lost some of the public forums he had
(e.g. _Science News_, translations he did for numerous medical and
scientific journals of abstracts of articles and papers for international
congresses). But the idea of interlingua I think is still potentially
very attractive.

   Set aside for the moment thoughts of constructing an auxiliary language
for international communication, and just focus on the phenomenon of
a common international vocabulary among the European languages, and maybe
other languages as well. Consider English and the thousands of words derived
from Latin and Greek that make up the erudite vocabularies of the well-
educated, many of whom have spent years honing their vocabularies by
courses and books like "Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary", that
emphasize the meanings of roots in these English words that are derived
from languages like Latin and Greek or French, or German.  Frequently these
same words are found in other languages as well. Suppose you could learn
these roots in a more meaningful and "living" way by learning a simple
language having a very simple grammar, which has for its vocabulary
not only the erudite Latin and Greek words of English, but the simpler
verbs from Latin and Greek or the romance languages from which these
words are derived.  For example, you already know words in English like
"audible", "auditorium", "audience", but instead of having an English
verb "audi" = "to hear" to link up to all these words, you have "to hear",
which does not suggest the connection between these other words, because
"to hear" has a Germanic origin.  But the languge I am referring to,
Interlingua, has for the verb corresponding to English "to hear", _audir_,
and the derivatives "audibile", "auditorio", "audientia", "audition",
"auditor", "auditive", "inaudibile", "audibilitate", etc. etc. formed
from affixes that are not found just in this series based on the stem
_audi-_ but in series based on other stems.  And English is not the
only language that displays this same series, or at least parts of it.
You'll find corresponding series in French, Italian, Spanish, and parts of
these series in German and Russian. All of these languages share in a
common linguistic heritage among the European languages. Contributing to
a major part of this common heritage are the languages of Latin and Greek,
but these European languages have themselves also shared terminologies
that have themselves become international in scope.  It's a real, objective
phenomenon among these languages, and taking note of it gives rise to
many possibilities, not the least of which is the possible construction of
an auxiliary language among the European peoples and those peoples that
share in the western civilization they have created. But apart from construct-
ing such a language for that purpose, one could construct it for the purpose
of instructing the European people and those people that speak a European
language about this common linguistic heritage shared by the European
languages, knowledge of which will give increased comprehension to
their use of these other languages.  What I am saying is that interlingua
can have many uses besides just being an auxiliarly language.  Other
uses are, you can use it to communicate with people who speak English or
the Romance languages.  I frequently use it to visit and leave messages
at news groups like soc.culture.catalan, soc.culture.spain, soc.culture.galiza,
or to exchange notes with French Canadians.  I know a computer programmer
who used it on a spoken basis for the first time in his life to
communicate meaningfully with a group of northern Italians when discussing
ways of using computers in their businesses. They understood him with no
trouble.  Interlingua is just another romance language, but with a simpler
grammar than most romance languages.

But the reason it resonates so well with both English and the Romance
languages, and with the Latin and Greek elements in the Germanic and
Russian languages as well, is because not only is it a registration of
the international vocabulary shared across these languages, but a standard-
ization of them based on the prototypic forms, either theoretical or
historical, from which variants in the national languages have been
derived.  This explains, perhaps, why Interlingua of the International
Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) is so similar to Peano's Latino
sine Flexione.  But it also differs from Latin without flexions, i.e.
a simplified Latin, in containing words like "software" that never
existed in Latin, but which are international in use, with English
"software" being the prototype of all the variants borrowed from English
based on this term.  The advantage of standardizing the form of the
international vocabulary on prototypic forms is that their form is
to a high degree an objectively determinable question and not one that
depends entirely on subjective whims of a language inventor. (There is
still some subjectivity when there are needs for words for which there
are no international variants, but there are objectively implemented
principles to guide one in formulating solutions for such words, so
subjectivity is reduced to a minimum).

I am sure that Jay Bowks has already directed you to our web site at
www.interlingua.com

But if you have not visited there, I hope you will.  There is much
material, examples, an English-Interlingua dictionary of 18000 words,
simple grammars, and lists of books you can get to study the language
further.

Stanley Mulaik
Professor of Psychology
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332
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