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 [log in to unmask]