Latino Sine Flexione - History

History

In 1903 Peano published the article De Latino Sine Flexione to introduce his language, by quoting a series of suggestions by Leibniz about a simplified form of Latin. Peano’s article appeared to be a serious development of the idea, so he gained a reputation among the movement for the auxiliary language. In 1904 Peano undertook an essay about the way to obtain the minimal grammar of an eventual minimal Latin (Latino minimo), with a minimal vocabulary purely international.

Peano and some colleagues published articles in Latino sine flexione for several years at the Revue de Mathématiques. Because of his desire to prove that this was indeed an international language, Peano boldly published the final edition of his famous Formulario mathematico in Latino sine flexione. However, as Hubert Kennedy notes, most mathematicians were put off by the artificial appearance of the language, and made no attempt to read it.

In October 1907, Peano was at the Collège de France in Paris to take part in the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language. Having declared for Latino sine flexione to be adopted, he eventually could not participate in the final voting, because of labour affairs at Turin.

On 26 December 1908, Peano was elected member and director of the Akademi internasional de lingu universal still using Idiom Neutral, which was refounded one year later under the name Academia pro Interlingua. Every academician might use his favourite form of Interlingua, the term being initially used in a general sense as a synonym for international language, yet it soon began to be specially used to denote a reformed Latino sine flexione based on the common rules the academicians were reaching by frequent votings. Thus, the name Interlingua soon began to denote the language evolving from the Academia Pro Interlingua, with the corresponding abbreviation IL.

However, every member was free to write in his own personal style, and indeed some members were proposing radical reforms which eventually might end up as independent languages (like Michaux's Romanal or De Wahl's Interlingue). For this reason, the name Peano’s Interlingua might be regarded as the most accurate for the particular standard by Peano. (As found in “Interglossa and its predecessors”.)

The discussions to reach a standard Interlingua may be seen on the pages of Discussiones, the official journal of the Academia pro Interlingua from 1909 to 1913. This and subsequent journals of the academy have been recently published in a CD-Rom by the mathematics department of the university of Turin, the place where Peano developed his teaching and research.

Since De Latino Sine Flexione had set the principle to take Latin nouns either in the ablative or nominative form (nomen was preferred to nomine), in 1909 Peano published a vocabulary in order to assist in selecting the proper form of every noun, yet an essential value of Peano’s Interlingua was that the lexicon might be found straightforward in any Latin dictionary (by getting the thematic vowel of the stem from the genitive ending, that is: -a -o -e -u -e from -æ -i -is -us -ei). Finally, a large vocabulary with 14 000 words was published in 1915.

A reformed Interlingua was presented in 1951 by Alexander Gode as the last director of the International Auxiliary Language Association. It was claimed to be independent from Peano’s Interlingua, because it had developed a new method to detect the most recent common prototypes. But that method usually leads to the Latin ablative, so most vocabulary of Peano’s Interlingua would be kept. Accordingly, the very name Interlingua was kept, yet a distinct abbreviation was adopted: IA instead of IL.