Adriana Abdenur ha scripte:

> Dear friends,
>
> I am a writer at iAgora, a webzine on international culture.  I am
> currently working on an article on "the Internet as a venue for
> communities based on constructed languages" and I am looking for native
> speakers of Interlingua for electronic interviews.  I would appreciate
> hearing from/about anyone who has grown up (or, alternatively, who is
> raising children) speaking Interlingua or any other conlang except for
> Esperanto.  Any tips and comments regarding the topic are likewise most
> welcome.
Hello, Adriana.

First of all, have in mind that I'm Brazilian (Portuguese speaker) so my
English may look weird to you sometimes.

I've been using Interlingua since 1996(5?), I'm almost 26 and I don't have
children yet. Though I can't talk about raising children speaking
Interlingua, I can tell my impressions about the topic.

There's a difference in "ideology" between Interlingua and Esperanto.
Esperanto was constructed by Zamenhof, dreaming that a neutral common
language would bring peace to humanity. Because of this, it's clad with a
"semi-religious aura", and having friends and children learning the
language is in a certain way part of the "sacred mission" towards what is
called "la fina venko" ("the final victory"), when Esperanto would be
officially adopted as the world's rightful second language. The language is
indeed quite easy, and it's funny to join small root words to coin the
words you need. (Yeah, I've had my Esperanto days.) But these words were
taken at random from natural languages, and were re-written in its
totally-phonetical alphabet, damaging the graphical recognizability of many
words ("fajro" = "fire"), and most compound words, though easily parsable
by the initiated, are totally undecipherable by the uninitiated ("lernejo"
= "school", lit. "place to learn") and replace largely international words
(Eng. "school", Fre. "école", Port. "escola", Ita. "scuola", etc.) As a
result, Esperanto can practically only be used to talk to its users.

Interlingua, on the other hand, was developed by an association of
linguists (called IALA) with a well-defined methodology (described in
details in English at http://www.interlingua.org): Realizing that in a
certain sense there is already a basis for an international language in the
international vocabulary of science and technology, and that this
vocabulary is mostly originated in the sphere of the Anglo-Romance
languages, IALA defined a set of source languages (English, French, Italian
and "Iberic" (Portuguese+Spanish taken as a unity); German and Russian if
needed) in which words are searched that exist in at least 3 of these
languages, then rendered to their "prototypical" shape ("schola" is the
common ancestor of all the "school" words above). This allows some "natural
irregularities" to come in ("viDer" ("to see") => "viSion"), but these
"irregularities" are much more international than the "artificial
regularities" ("viDition" instead of "viSion"). Along with a simplified
grammar, what arises is a kind of Romance language readable with little (to
different extents) effort by educated speakers of European languages.

I believe that most Interlingua users, because of this "utilitary"
character of Interlingua contrasted to the "missionary" character of
Esperanto, are not as prone to raise their children as "native" speakers of
the language as Esperanto users are. Parents will, of course, try to teach
it to the children, but probably not with the same intensity. So, I believe
that a "native" speaker of Interlingua is a quite rare specimen today.
However, chances exist. I'm marrying soon, so don't lose your hopes and
stay tuned! ;-)

As for Internet, I can speak out of experience. I learned about Interlingua
some years before 1996, on a book I found at my University's library. It
was about auxiliary languages, and the little sample of Interlingua text
"caught my eye", but I had no idea where to get more info about it. When I
finally got my Internet account, I searched for "Interlingua" in
www.AltaVista.com and found a webpage on it. Soon later, the list INTERLNG
was created (http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/interlng.html), and we
started communicating daily. I myself have dedicated a large section of my
personal website to Interlingua, and some people have come through it. The
UMI (Union Mundial pro Interlingua) has also established its website
(http://www.interlingua.com) in 1997. There we concentrate news, info and
electronic publications.

Friendly,
Ensjo.