Words can be included in Interlingua

Interlingua

Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...

 in either of two ways: through regular derivation using roots and affixes

Free word-building in Interlingua

Words can be included in Interlingua in either of two ways: by establishing their internationality or by deriving them using Interlingua words and affixes. The second of these methods is often called free word-building.-Free derivation and compounding:...

 or by establishing their eligibility as international words. The second of these methods is explained below.

The control languages and the international vocabulary

The theory underlying Interlingua posits an international vocabulary, a large number of words and affixes that are present in a wide range of languages. Social forces, most notably the dynamism of science and technology, have spread this vocabulary to "all corners of the world". The goal of the International Auxiliary Language Association

International Auxiliary Language Association

The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 to "promote widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language, together with research and experiment that may hasten such establishment in an intelligent manner and...

 was to accept into Interlingua every widely international word in whatever languages it occurred. For practical reasons, however, IALA's researchers could not examine all the world's languages. Therefore, they conducted studies to identify a small group of languages that would deliver "the most generally international vocabulary possible", while still maintaining the unity of the language.

The languages selected are called control languages. The primary controls are English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, with Spanish and Portuguese taken as one language. The secondary controls are German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 and Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

. According to the rule of three, a word is eligible for Interlingua if it occurs in at least three of the four primary control languages, with either or both of the secondary control languages acting as possible substitutes.

Productive and receptive spheres

To provide generally international words, the control languages had to have a high degree of radiating power and a high degree of receptive power. In particular, they had to "radiate" a large number of words into other languages and to "absorb" a large number from other languages. Thus, IALA developed the concepts of productive and receptive spheres of language.

In classical antiquity, Latin and Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 were the languages of the dominant political and cultural forces. Afterward, these languages acted for two millennia as essential lingua franca

Lingua franca

A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...

s in Western science and religion. As a result, the Western languages have imported many thousands of Greek and Latin words, either through ancestry or through transfer and loan. Many of these same words are found in non-Western languages, such as Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

, Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...

, Swahili

Swahili language

Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...

, and Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

.

The IALA considered Greek and Latin, together with their descendents the Romance languages, to be the primary components of the productive sphere. English was the chief representative of the receptive sphere. In modern times, however, English has become a prolific source of international words, "radiating" them to such varied languages as Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu

Urdu

Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...

, as well as to most Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages.

Initially, this view of an Anglo-Romance productive sphere permitted the researchers of IALA to greatly simplify the derivation of the international vocabulary. They could omit research into the receptive sphere, because all of the words that the languages of this sphere held in common were taken from the productive sphere. For example, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...

 and Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

 have little in common, being of different language families, except for variations of many thousands of Greco-Latin international words such as information, international, and politics. These words are already found in the productive sphere. Thus, the addition of Dutch and Hungarian to Interlingua's control languages would not affect the resulting vocabulary.

Addition of two new controls

As research progressed, IALA found that a close adherence to the Anglo-Romance productive sphere led to the omission of some clearly international words. As a result, the rule of three was adjusted. The two most prominent languages in the receptive sphere, German and Russian, became control languages. A word that was missing from one or two of the productive controls was then eligible for Interlingua if it occurred in one or both, respectively, of the added receptive controls.

"Iberian"

The Iberian languages Spanish and Portuguese were considered as one language not because their separate importance was in question, but because their linguistic roles in the modern world were similar.

Greek

Because the international vocabulary has a substantial Greek component, the absence of Greek as a control language sometimes evokes surprise. The paths by which Greek words enter the international vocabulary are different from those of the control languages. Greek contributed large numbers of international words in ancient times, leading to a large body of Greek vocabulary in Vulgar Latin. This vocabulary has accompanied Latin language material into the international vocabulary. In addition, many scientific and technical terms that make use of the Greek are coined in such languages as German and English. Many of these words, such as automobile and telephone, have passed into common use. Through these routes, Greek words become part of Interlingua without the Greek language itself being used as a control.