Why I now support Occidental as the world's second language

What the Huffington Post would look like if it were written in Occidental.

(warning: fairly chaotic post)

I'd like to preface this post by mentioning that I do not intend to write this in order to sway people that support certain other languages for whatever reasons, so I'm not writing this to tell anyone to give up the language they have chosen to support. It's more of a retelling of my experiences with using IALs (international auxiliary languages, languages constructed to be easy to learn and generally with the goal of being the world's second language) since 2005, as information on them can be quite difficult to find and new users often choose languages that they end up not liking as much in the end so I hope to save a few people some time in that area.

I will be critiquing a number of languages in this post, but keep in mind that as a whole these are all languages that I like overall, and I'm well aware that different people have different reasons for choosing one to support over the other.

Now let's begin: Occidental was first created in 1922, and also goes by the name Interlingue but most users today prefer the original name. Apparently the second name was chosen after the death of its creator: 1) to avoid looking excessively biased towards the West, and 2) as a pre-emptive strike against the new project Interlingua, or in the hopes that the two would eventually be combined into one language. I know little about the details of this, because once you get into the world of IAL politics there's no escaping and you find yourself poring over letters between people from the late 19th and early 20th century, trying to figure out who betrayed whose project and who didn't (see the Esperanto-Ido schism for the most prominent example of this). In the 21st century the only interest we should have is in the mechanics of the languages, and which ones are best as a possible second language for the world.

Occidental looks like this:

Noi have un grand international congress in li cité. Li nationes de Europa es representat per eminent cultural persones. Li centre del congress es in li palace del parlament. Elegant modern automobiles sta ante li portas e sur li stradas e plazzas. Li fassades es decorat per li national flags. Li flags del nordic landes have li cruz quam symbol. On vide delegationes de divers partes de Europa, de nord e sud, de ost e west. Un deputation visita li presidente del state in li grandios residentie contra li ópera. Special correspondentes fa observationes e scri articules por li redactiones de grand jurnales e telegrafa al burós de information.

The first thing you will notice is that it looks a bit like Spanish, a bit like French, a bit like Italian, and a bit like English, and is probably much easier to understand than the first three unless you're fluent in one of them. The text begins with: "We have a large (grand) international congress in the city. The nations of Europe are represented by eminent cultural people/persons..." and so on.

The reason it's so easy to understand at first glance is because Occidental is of the naturalistic school, meaning a constructed language that is made to be easy to understand at first sight for those that have a background in the languages that form it. At the same time, however, it is a naturalistic language with pretty much all the complications removed, meaning that it has no irregular verbs (except the verb to be), is pronounced as written, nouns have no grammatical gender, basically the language you wished you could have learned in school. Take the following for example from French:

avoir - to have

j'ai [e] ou [E]	nous avons [avO~]
tu as [a]	vous avez [ave]
il/elle a [a]	ils ont [O~]

That's the type of fun one has with natural languages, irregular conjugation. That means that the student gets to spend weeks and weeks with tables of irregular verbs, generally learning a few hundred before attaining an overall mastery of conjugation. The Occidental version of this verb is as follows:

haver - to have

yo have	noi have
tu have	vu have
il/ella/it have	ili have

And this is the same for every single verb: remove the -r from the infinitive and you have the present tense.

To write in the past tense, add a -t:

yo havet	noi havet
tu havet	vu havet
il/ella/it havet	ili havet

Which all mean I/we/you/etc. had.

This easy grammar is a feature you will find with almost all auxiliary languages, however, so I have yet to explain why I prefer Occidental to the rest after three years and a bit. First let's begin with Esperanto and Ido:

Esperanto:

This one is the most well-known and still reigns as the king of IALs. Esperanto is the only one where you'll be able to attend big international conferences, meet families that use it as their primary language, read thousands of books, etc. etc. so Esperantists certainly deserve credit for that. The late Don Harlow, a prominent Esperantist, was also one of my favourite people and we at Auxlang and everyone else who knew him were sad to see him go. He spent most of his time doing exactly what proponents of a language should do: using it every day and creating tons and tons of content. Promoting an IAL is mostly about creating content, telling people about how it works, creating more content, telling more people about how it works, and repeating this ad infinitum.

That said, here are the reasons why I never chose to support Esperanto as the world's second language:

• Derivation. In Esperanto all nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, present tense verbs in -as, etc. This means that the student is supposed to be able to change one to the other such as changing varma (warm) to varme (warmly), then to varmo (warmth or heat). This is easy enough, but problems arise when we bring up verbs. The verb krono for example means crown, and the verb kroni means to coronate (infinitives end in -i). Well, the problem here is that a student has no way to know that when he changes the verb kroni to krono (into a noun) that the resulting noun is not the action of the verb (a crowning) but rather the object itself. Otto Jespersen (the creator of Novial) wrote the following on this subject:

But if Ido's rules are too strict, those of Esp are undoubtedly too lax, as they allow any substantive to be made into a verb simply by changing the ending, and vice versa, without taking the meaning into account; each writer may thus follow the practice of his native language or his own individual fancy. Further, if from krono sb we form kroni vb to crown, what are we to do with the verbal sb coronation? Krono would be parallel to admiro for admiration and a hundred others, but of course one and the same form cannot be allowed to mean both crown and coronation. So Esperantists take the form kronado, in spite of the fact that the suffix -ad- otherwise indicates the repeated or lasting verbal action: kronado thus should mean a repeated or lasting coronation. Or else, if -ad- is allowed to mean verbal action without the notion of repetition, kronado is correct for coronation, but then we miss a suffix for repeated action. Esp theorists admit -ad- in both meanings, but if kronado is coronation, it would seem necessary to admit the possibility of having kronadado for repeated coronation, bearing the same relation to kronado as pafado to pafo shooting. It seems contrary to Z's ordinary practice to admit -ad- in the two senses. Anyhow we get out of all these dilemmas by not requiring -o in all substantives.

Z here refers to Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto.

Some other problems with Esperanto:

• Adjectival agreement. This means that when a noun takes the plural any adjective accompanying it has to take the plural as well, as well as when the accusative case is used (more on the accusative case in the next point). This means that blua libro means blue book, but blue books is bluaj libroj (j is the plural in Esperanto and is pronounced like the English y), not blua libroj.
• The accusative case. The accusative is found in more languages around the world (non-Indo-European languages as well like Japanese, Korean, Turkish, etc.) than adjectival agreement so this by itself is not a deal-breaker, though you'll still find a lot of people confusing it with the dative. The accusative case in Esperanto is -n, so if you have a blue book for example, you write mi havas bluan libron (I have a blue book), not mi havas blua libron, because there is adjectival agreement here too. If it is in the plural then it becomes mi havas bluajn librojn (I have blue books), not mi havas blua librojn or any other combination.
• Six extra letters: there are six letters in Esperanto that don't exist in any other language: Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŝ Ŭ. We often jokingly refer to the things on the top of these letters as 'daft hats'. Accented letters by themselves are not a big problem as long as they exist in other languages, but these ones always make extra work for Esperantists. When the fonts aren't available one either uses the x-system (writing an x after the letters, giving cx, gx, hx, jx, sx and ux) or the h-system (giving ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, uh) or some combination of the two. Sometimes you'll see apostrophes as well. This is a hurdle that a language as small as Esperanto shouldn't have to overcome all the time. The Esperanto Wikipedia has a system that automatically turns letters like ux into ŭ, which results in words like Bruxelles turning into Brŭelles: Weicht ihr schwartzen Trauerwolken (Brŭelles, Conservatoire 900) por baskantisto, 2 violonoj, gambovjolo kaj klaviceno. Bottom line: IALs don't need to make extra work for themselves in this way. Accents already found in other languages are acceptable, because then you have other people doing the work for you.
• Place names: this is one of my biggest peeves: place names in Esperanto are turned into nouns with the addition of an -o, resulting in previously recognizable locations like Yokohama turning into Jokohamo, New York into Novjorko, Buenos Aires into Bonaero (lit. good wind), Dili into Dilo. Place names are a special type of noun that are already recognizable to a good number of people at worst, and at best to the entire world. Changing them in this way creates a whole group of new words that students need to learn.
• Nouns ending in -o: more on this later.

There are more reasons, but those are the main ones. Due to that I turned to Ido after four days with Esperanto and stayed with Ido for the longest time. Ido is also the only IAL I've ever spoken, for a total of five hours, and it works just fine. Ido is a reformed version of Esperanto that removes all the problems I've listed above (except for the last one): that means that mi havas bluajn librojn becomes me havas blua libri (-i is plural in Ido), nouns formed from verbs denote only the action of the noun, not the object, no special accented characters exist, accusative exists but only when you want to change the word order (me havas blua libro or blua libron me havas both mean "I have a blue book"). I love Ido. So why isn't the title "why I not support Ido..." instead? Well, a few reasons for this:

• Ido by itself is great, but I don't know if it will ever be able to appeal to the average person. It doesn't look quite enough like a natural language that you can trick people into thinking it is, and I see that as a VERY big selling point for constructed languages. Like Esperanto, Ido takes a bit of time before you can start understanding what you're reading, and I'm not sure if the average person has the patience for that.
• All nouns end with -o. The language works just fine with this with words that already exist, but incorporating new words is always a bit jarring. If we're writing an article on an intifada in the Palestianian Territories, do we have to convert this to intifado, or should it be intifadao, or should we just leave it alone and write it in italics? Like place names, is it wise to take words that people already recognize and alter them like that? I've noticed that a lot of people have a negative visceral reaction to nouns being modified like this, because this doesn't occur in any natural languages I've seen (even Swahili uses prefixes, not suffixes. There could be some I'm not aware of however).

So in short, I believe Esperanto to be flawed, and Ido may be a bit flawed but even if it isn't it suffers from a real handicap in terms of PR. Even its name doesn't really mean anything besides descendent (-ido is a suffix in Esperanto and Ido that means descendent).

Now let's get to Interlingua.

Interlingua, like Occidental, is a naturalistic language that is also very easy to understand at first sight. Interlingua looks like this:

Instrumento moderne de communication international.
Milliones comprende immediatemente interlingua.
Interlingua es registrate per le Organisation International de Standardisation (ISO) como ia.
Plus que 50 annos de experientias practic.

That's also very easy to understand: "modern instrument of international communication, millions immediately understand Interlingua...". For quite a long time I didn't even have a fair grasp on what exactly the differences were between Occidental and Interlingua except that the latter had a fairly large community, while the Occidental one was mostly nonexistent at the time (it seems to have grown a bit in the past year or so).

So why not support Interlingua over Occidental?

Well, I spent quite a lot of time learning and using Interlingua since 2005, and it was the second IAL that I spent a good amount of time with after first learning Ido. Interlingua looks very nice, is easy to understand, but has a number of flaws that I consider to be fatal:

• It's toooo looooong. Interlingua words themselves are often somewhat longer than the languages it is derived from, and the grammatical particles it uses make this even longer, since it doesn't have pronoun dropping like Romance languages. That means that a phrase like "he had gone to Rome" becomes "ille habeva vadite a Roma", and "it had been developed immediately" becomes "Illo habeva essite disveloppate immediatemente". In Occidental the same phrases are "il hat eat a Roma" and "it hat esset developat ínmediatmen". That's 21 vs. 13 letters for the first, and 42 vs. 30 for the second. This really begins to take its toll when you translate long texts as I have.
• Interlingua doesn't really seem to be sure whether it even wants to be the world's second language. The language's creator didn't really seem all that enthusiastic about promoting it in that way, and seemed to regard those that wanted to do so as idealistic or Esperantist.
• Interlingua is very susceptible to alteration. Interlingua attempts to be as natural-looking as possible, and a lot of people with Romance languages as a background will alter the language to suit what they believe to be a better version of the language, with conjugation of verbs by person, grammatical gender, using new words like aqui instead of hic for here, and anything else they feel to be a better version. It's an absolute mess when that happens. I've even seen threads online where a new user of the language comes along, writes a simple introductory post, and then receives responses in everybody and their dog's personal version of Interlingua, which is not the way you want to welcome a new user into the community. And finally,
• The accent is irregular, and yet there is no marking when this is so. At times when using Interlingua I wasn't even sure if I could make the case that it was always easier than a language like Spanish, given the easier orthography in Spanish and marking irregular accents (philosophy in Spanish is filosofía whereas it's philosophia with the accent on the end, but unmarked so the student isn't able to get the accent right without knowing the word ahead of time, no better than the English pronounciation - f'loss-o-fee).

Those are the main reasons why I prefer Occidental to Interlingua. Now a few short points on other languages I've spent some time with:

• Novial: Novial's pretty good, kind of like a cross between Ido and Occidental. The biggest problem with Novial is that its creator came up with a few versions of the language and never really settled on one, and there is very little content.
• Lingua Franca Nova: this is one of the newest IALs, and one of the most interesting in being somewhat like a creole yet looking like a Romance language. In the end I prefer a language with a large vocabulary and things like perfect tense, distinction between verbs and nouns etc., but you might like LFN.
• Latino sine Flexione: this was created about a century ago by an Italian mathematician named Giuseppe Peano, and is basically a simplified form of Latin with a minimum of grammar. It also ends up as a language quite easy to understand, like Occidental and Interlingua; in fact, it was the first language to be called Interlingua and the Interlingua of today was the second to take the name. LsF's one problem would be that most words are derived from Latin words as opposed to an internal system, so in order to use a word one first has to know the Latin word and then work from there. For more information on LsF see this post of mine.

So having gone through why I've been unable to give 100% support to any of the above languages, here are some of the reasons why I have decided to support Occidental as the world's second language:

• Occidental overall seems to be a type of "ironed-out" standardized Western European. It has a very nice system of derivation that lets you form new words as you need them that look just as natural as words in other languages. Verbs that end in -ar for example turn into nouns with -ation, giving inmigration (immigration) from inmigrar (to immigrate) and implication from implicar (to implicate). -er and -ir verbs form in a similar way. Every once in a while this will give a form like scrition (writing) from scrir (to write, think scribe, inscription etc.), which technically do not exist in natural languages, but certainly could have. German uses the term Besserung for improvement (lit. bettering) which looks strange in English, French uses the term sauvetage for rescue (lit. save-age), and some of the terms in Occidental that don't exist in other languages should be thought of in that manner; that is, even if these words don't already exist, there's no reason why they couldn't have if history had worked out differently.
• Occidental feels a bit like English in how it has a relatively simple Germanic-type grammar along with a mostly Romance lexicon. It's a bit like what English might have looked like if France's official language had been Occitan instead of French and this language had influenced English instead.
• Occidental has a regular grammar but at the same time looks natural enough that it is capable of fooling people either consciously or unconsciously into coming across as a natural language. Just yesterday I wrote a small post here in Occidental on the so-called "Galileoscopes" being produced for the International Year of Astronomy, cheap telescopes that are going to be sold for about $20 but still good enough to show people Saturn's rings and the like, and the title was: "Galileoscopes" - Telescopes por $20" as well as "To es un initiative por plu facilmen monstrar al public li misteries de spacie, mem por tis qui vive in li cité." <-- a="" an="" at="" city.="" constructed="" easily="" easy="" even="" first="" for="" glance="" hat="" in="" initiative="" is="" language.="" li="" live="" more="" mysteries="" of="" pretty="" public="" s="" show="" space="" that="" the="" those="" to="" understand="" who="">

One final note: what about neutrality? This debate always comes up with IALs. Why should a language be so easy for Europeans to learn and not for others? My response to that is always the same: I would have no problems supporting another language such as a Pan-Turkic language, if it were also easy to learn and use. Generally languages that take from too many sources end up having troubles with derivation because different language families use vastly different systems for creating new terms and you'll see word roots taken in quite a haphazard fashion from languages all around the globe. It's also worth remembering that at the moment the world seems to have chosen as its de facto 2nd language a language originating from a single island in the North Atlantic with some of the weirdest spelling you could ever find (through/dough/tough/trough) and before that was French with equally odd spelling and all sorts of irregularities in both, so the idea that the world would be offended by a language with European wordstock simply doesn't hold water.


Conclusion: if you already have a favourite IAL and support it 100%, stick with that. You may have your own reasons that are as valid as mine for supporting Occidental. If you're drifting between one language or another, maybe you'd like to give Occidental a look, and likewise to anyone who knows about some of these languages but has yet to try actually learning one. Occidental at the moment still has a rather small community, but it's still fairly easy to find someone to practice with and I intend to do everything I can to give the language a second chance.