Probably the best English-language introduction to interlinguistics is the volume Interlinguistics: Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages , ed. Klaus Schubert, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989. Trends in Linguistics 42. Eighteen contributions are divided among the following sections:
Here, with permission of the publishers, is an excerpt from Schubert's introductory essay.
First of all, what are planned languages? I have used a large part of section 1, to argue that there is no sharp borderline between planned and ethnic languages. Rather, all human languages can be imagined on a scale between naturalness and artificiality. But although there may be doubts about one or the other language as to its status as either an ethnic or a planned language, there are of course names of languages which are without hesitation associated with the realm of planned languages. How many are there? I do not know the answer, and if I did, it would be incorrect by the time the book is printed. There are hundreds of projects, maybe a thousand, most of them published since the middle of the 19th century (see Dulicenko's statistics, in this volume). I am not aware of any exhaustive list, but there are quite sizeable overviews, provided by Louis Couturat and Leopold Leau (1903/1907a), Monnerot-Dumaine (1960: 163ff), Detlev Blanke (1985: 99ff.; cf. in this volume), and Evgenij Bokarev (1987), among others. The most complete record is probably Dulicenko's 916-entry list (Dulicenko 1988). The number of projects is ultimately also a matter of definition. How complete must the language design and the dictionary be to qualify as a project rather than a sketch? How much must it differ from existing projects to count as a reform project rather than a modification proposal?
The second question, which is often asked (and unfortunately often answered without a thorough knowledge of the facts), is whether planned languages really are languages, and consequently, whether they are worth linguists' attention. I shall not summarize the discussions devoted to this question in the pages of linguistic books and journals during the last hundred years. I only give an answer, which I cannot prove in this paper, but which the reader will find substantiated throughout this book.
The question is this: Can something as artificial as a planned language be a full-fledged human language? A language - to take an abstract, but uncontroversial starting point for the argument - is a system of signs for human communication, whose meaning is fixed and maintained by convention in a language community. Is it possible to replace this process of conventional definition by artificial language design? Most linguists deny this, and I think they are right. Indeed, a planned language is not a "real" language in the moment when its grammar is published in a brochure. Many planned languages have never gone further than this. Sometimes a project was published, but only a handful of people started using it, and often not even this many. All these projects are not languages. In a few cases, however, a proposed planned language was more widely accepted and learned by many people with different native languages - an essential feature. Slowly the language acquired a language community (more precisely: a second-language community), in which, finally, after decades of development, the linguistic signs were indeed fixed and maintained by convention.
When reading or quoting linguists' discussions of planned languages from several decades ago, one should be aware of this development in some of the projects, above all in Esperanto. The Esperanto which Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, Hugo Schuchardt, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and their contemporaries were discussing at the beginning of this century was still in many features a project, while we today can observe a language. Their arguments may not pertain to today's object of interlinguistics. Our evidence differs from theirs.
Detlev Blanke (1985: 105ff. and Tabelle 2; also in this volume) has investigated planned languages from this point of view and arranged them on a scale of progression on their way towards real-language status. Blanke divides his scale into three major groups and says that the overwhelming majority of planned languages have remained projects, some have become semi-languages, and, for the time being, only a single one can be considered to be a full language: Esperanto. It is merely for the ease of the reader when the authors of this volume mostly speak of planned languages , not distinguishing between a language, a semi-language, or a project. And of course Blanke's classification is not a law which all other interlinguists would agree with (for criticism cf. Sakaguchi 1987: 188). But whatever one feels about Blanke's account, I think it is uncontroversial to say that a language project is not a language from the very beginning, but can only become a language through a relatively slow and unconscious development. I have elsewhere described this view in more detail, especially with artificial symbol systems in mind that are not and cannot become languages, such as programming languages, predicate-logical notations etc. (Schubert 1988). My paper on word grammar (Schubert, this volume) is also concerned with the development of a project towards a real language.
These differences in development also explain why in most of the contributions to this book Esperanto plays a role, although other planned languages are dealt with as well: Esperanto is the most developed of all the planned languages; it has the largest language community, the largest literature, and so on. As early as 1947, Henry Jacob, a prominent adept of Ido, one of Esperanto's competitors, frankly admits that "Esperanto is today the only artificial language which has been able to form and maintain a mass movement" (Jacob 1947: 39). This implies that of all planned languages, Esperanto is the one in which research best can be based on observation of actual phenomena, rather than on speculation about eventual possibilities. Antoine Meillet's famous remark "Toute discussion est vaine: l'esperanto a fonctionne" (Meillet 1928: 278) is a paraphrase of this fact. Andre Martinet (in this volume) cites a similar opinion.
One of the most exciting objects of interlinguistics, which characterizes the whole discipline and distinguishes it from neighbouring fields, is the development of a language project towards a full human language. In step with this development of the object of study, also interlinguistics itself has grown and changed. Many interlinguists define their science as an applied, active effort of design. This is the more understandable, if one considers the roots of interlinguistics. It derives from attempts to obtain recognition from the side of "official" language science for the language projects launched during the last decades of the 19th century. In the beginning, these activities were mainly propaganda for certain projects, Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, etc. Without this sort of propaganda, no language communities would ever have been gathered for the projects. But while some of the projects, most obviously Esperanto, quietly changed into languages, the academic interest in them changed into a science. Those studying planned languages longer do so only in order to defend them, nor only to improve or redesign them or to prescribe a certain usage, but they have learned to observe, to study, and to describe.
Klaus Schubert
Excerpted from "Interlinguistics - its aims, its achievements, and its
place in language science," the lead paper in Interlinguistics:
Aspects of the Science of Planned
Languages, ed. Klaus Schubert, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989.
Trends in Linguistics 42.
Cited works:
Blanke, Detlev. 1985. Internationale Plansprachen. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Bokarev, Evgenij. 1987. "Proekty mezdunarodnych iskusstvennych jazykov (1925-1970) [Projects of international artifical languages (1925-1970)]". In Interlinguistica Tartuensis 4, 147-159. Tartu: Tartu Riikliku Ulikooli.
Couturat, Louis and Leopold Leau. 1903/1907a. Histoire de la langue universelle. Paris: Hachette (1st/2nd eds.).
Dulicenko, Aleksandr. 1988. "Proekty vseobscych i mezdunarodnych jazykov (Chronologiceskij indeks so II po XX vv) [Projects of universal and international languages (Chronological index from the 2nd to the 20th century)]". In Interlinguistica Tartuensis 5, 126-162. Tartu: Tartu Riikliku Ulikooli.
Jacob, Henry. 1947. A planned auxiliary language. London: Dobson.
Meillet, Antoine. 1928. Les langues dans l'Europe nouvelle. Paris.
Monnerot-Dumaine. M. 1960. Precis d'interlinguistique general et speciale. Paris: Maloine.
Sakaguchi, Alicja. 1987. [Review of Blanke 1985.] Kodicas/Code, Ars Semiotica 10: 186-189.
Schubert, Klaus. 1988. "Ausdruckskraft und Regelmassigkeit: Was Esperanto fur automatische Ubersetzung geeignet macht." Language Problems and Language Planning 12: 130-147.