Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 23:55:04 -0500 (EST)
From: STAN MULAIK <[log in to unmask]>
Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Discussion of Gode with Esperantists
Status: R
 
 
>From: [log in to unmask] (STAN MULAIK)
>Newsgroups:
 alt.uu.lang.misc,sci.lang,alt.language.artificial,soc.culture.europe
>Subject: Re: Naturalismo e schematicismo, un problema in linguas auxiliar
>Date: 15 Jan 1997 23:13:30 -0500
>Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
>Xref: prism sci.lang:65307 soc.culture.europe:90755
 
[log in to unmask] (Don HARLOW) writes:
 
>On 6 Jan 1997 23:04:07 -0500, [log in to unmask] (STAN MULAIK)
>wrote:
 
[deletions]]
 
>>
>PEI, Mario, _One Language for the World_. New York: Devon-Adair, 1958,
>p. 171:
 
>  [Dr. Alexander Gode's] international language, he claims, is meant
>  primarily for use in written form at scientific congresses (indeed,
>  it has already been so used, and with seeming success);...
 
[deletion]
 
>"Written form" is obviously not applicable to point (3), and I do not
>remember hearing of a case in which a paper was orally presented in
>Interlingua, so what we are left with is the impression that Gode
>intended Interlingua _primarily_ for passive reading use, specifically
>on the part of an educated elite population (those who attend
>scientific conferences).
 
O.K., now I see where you are getting these ideas about Gode. Perhaps
you accept them possibly without questioning them because it would be
convenient to see interlingua (from the point of view of an advocate of
esperanto) to be no real threat because, "unlike esperanto, it was
not intended to be spoken actively".
 
But it should be obvious to you that your view of Dr. Gode is second
hand and filtered through the eyes of Mario Pei, further elaborated on
by your own presumptions.  But Pei's statement may be missleading because
it suggests that the intention Gode had for developing Interlingua was
to use it in written form at scientific congresses, whereas all he
may be describing is Gode's personal intention, as a career choice,
to use interlingua for written communications in science, because he
felt there was a need that interlingua was eminently qualified to serve
in that regard. After all, once the dictionary was developed, he was
hired on at Science Service to write "Summarios in Interlingua", and he
began translating thousands and thousands of words in summaries of
scientific and medical papers, not just through Science Service, but
for various medical journals on a fee basis.
 
I would submit to you that the reason Dr. Gode developed interlingua was
"because it was there". Not in his head. But in the languages of
Europe.
 
In a paper Dr. Gode presented to the M.L.A. in 1954 in New York,
titled, "The Problem of Function and Structure in Interlingua", he wrote:
 
"The spell of the idea that interlinguistics is concerned with the
definition of linguistic functions and the subsequent provision of efficient
structural devices for their operation was totally discarded in the theory
of Interlingua...  In methodological terms this signifies that the linguistic
system now in use under the name of Interlingua was codified on the basis
of observed forms and never by a process of supplying forms for functions
previously analyzed and judged to be desirable....
 
"The fundamental work on the theory and methodology of Interlingua is
unfortunately available only in typescript. It is a 500-page tome
written in 1943 in collaboration with the research staff of the
International Auxiliary Language Association by E. Clark Stillman and
A. Gode-von Aesch and bears the significant title, "Interlinguistic
Standardization, An Objective System for the Normalization of
Internationally Current Word-Material Together With a Practical Plan
for Its Elaboration Into a Complete Auxiliary Language."
 
"I think the work keeps the promise of the title. It justifies the
limitation of its field of research to Italian, Spanish-Portuguese,
French and English--with Latin as a binding power in the background
and German and Russian as occasional supplementary sources. It does so
by elaborating the idea that these occidental languages may well be
considered dialects of a common norm which five hundred years ago
might have been identified with medieval Latin and which today must be
precipitated from its half-existence in international terminologies of
often world-wide validity especially in science and technology."
 
    "In this the salient point is the conception that a common standard
is latently present and variously modified in the major languages of
the Western World."
 
   "The task of the interlinguist on this basis turns out to be the
search for an objective methodology whereby a visualized pan-Occidental
Interlingua can be put down on paper.  I may note here in passing that
to my mind it is not possible to doubt the reality of the idea of
Interlingua--if this somewhat paradoxical formulation is permissible. It
is only possible to attack the methodology employed in the codification
of Interlingua and condemn it as inadequate.  In other words: it is
not possible to improve the visualized reality Interlingua by extrinsic
additions; it is only possible to ask and search for more refined devices
which would permit the putting down on paper of a more perfect concrete
likeness of the visualized idea."
 
   "As we look briefly at the methodology employed in the extraction
of Interlingua, we shall find--quite in keeping with the expectations
aroused by the foregoing argumentation--that there is nowhere an instance
of willful or arbitrary juggling of the relation of function and structure.
This is quite apparent in the procedures used to compile a standardized
vocabulary.  Instead of following the interlinguistic tradition of assuming
that it is possible to compile a list of concepts for which an international
vocabulary must provide forms, the theoreticians of Interlingua insisted
that the first step had to be the parallelization--on as complete a scale
as possible--of the vocabularies of the four source-language units. This
was done by an exhaustive study of several thousand etymological families."
 
   "In culling from the enormous files the words justly to be called
international, the purpose of arriving ultimately at a realistic effigy
of the visualized Interlingua was naturally the guiding principle. This
required generally speaking the slighting of whatever could be called an
accidental idiosyncracy in one individual language.  Hence a word was
accepted as international if it occurred in all four language units but
also if it was absent from one of them. The requirement of a word's occurring
in three language units was so construed that either German or Russian
could serve as substitutes....."
 
. . .
 
"Interlingua claims to be a comon denominator among the occidental languages.
As a practical tool in the international dissemination of scientific and
especially medical information it has justified that claim to a rather
impressive extent.  Yet this is only the first -- though probably the
most immediate -- practical application of a common-denominator language."
 
Gode then considers that a second phase in its exploitation could be for
the "purposes of general-language instruction as also in the teaching of
any one of the source languages involved in its extraction.  A third
phase of its exploitation might be to use it as an intermediate language
in machine translation.  He ends the paper with these comments:
 
"And anyway, if and when the time comes when the languages of the Western
World are no longer of prime importance in most international affairs,
Interlingua will no longer be around either.  As a product and physiogno-
monic expression of Western civilization it seems fitting that it
should perish with it--or of course, survive with it and flourish."
 
   At the end of an article "Interlingua" which appeared in The
Journal of Communication (strangely the date does not appear on the
reprint but it is from the 1950's, I'm sure) he says:
 
   "The reality called SAE [Standard Average European] by Whorf and the
reality visualized by us when we first spoke of Interlingua is one and
the same.  The Interlingua we practice in the service of international
communication--today primarily in the fields of science, tomorrow no
doubt in many other fields as well--is the best 'tangibilized' version
of it we know how to get down on paper.
   "Interlingua is not a construction, except possibly in the sense that
construing and constructing will needs enter into the most objective
attempt at standardization of existing variants. Interlingua is standard
pan-Occidental.
   "It is, on the next higher level of abstraction, the literary super-
language in which the languages of the Western world converge in exactly
the way in which each one of them is a convergence of its local dialects.
If the Western world were a nation, Interlingua would be its national
tongue.  Since the Western world is a cultural concept, Interlingua is
the linguistic representation of Western civilization."
 
I think in Dr. Gode's mind, Interlingua existed first as an objective
but somewhat diffused reality, and he was going to bring it into a
focused concrete visualization.  Then once it existed concretely, one
could consider the functions its qualities might then serve, and these
he conceived to be many.
 
Pei's quote seems not to capture this element in Gode's writings very well.
And Pei seems to be caught up in the same conceptual framework that
Gode said he and Stillman left behind, the idea that one must first
conceive a function for a language and then design a language to fulfill
that function.
 
--
Stanley A. Mulaik
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
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--
Stanley A. Mulaik
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
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