Interlingua

Interlingua, simplified form of Latin intended for use as an international second language. Interlingua was originally developed in 1903 by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, but lack of clarity as to what parts of Latin were to be retained and what were to be discarded led to numerous “dialects” of Interlingua, confusion, and its dying out among enthusiasts. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the linguist Alexander Gode, with the sponsorship of the International Auxiliary Language Association, reformulated and revived Interlingua and promoted its use in the international scientific community. As reformulated, Interlingua’s grammar is not much more complex than that of Esperanto; it has only one form for nouns (taken from the Latin ablative case), no gender, no case, plurals in -s, one form for adjectives with no noun-adjective agreement, one definite article, and verbs with no inflection for person or number. Abstracts and summaries are published in Interlingua by several international scientific journals, but in general the language has not been widely adopted.