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From: brg@netcom.com (Bruce R. Gilson)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Single European language: European english
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References: <3273663A.3C0A@pp.inet.fi> <32764E53.6165@pp.inet.fi> <846811864snz@vision25.demon.co.uk> <327cf09a.3912896@news.nando.net>
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Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 23:19:06 GMT
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In article <327cf09a.3912896@news.nando.net>,
D Gary Grady <dgary@nando.net> wrote:
>phil@vision25.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt) wrote:


[...]

>>Novial, unlike most conlangs, was designed by a linguist (Otto Jespersen).
>>Jespersen had previously worked on Ido, and his design for Novial is
>>no doubt based on that experience.

>If I'm not mistaken, Jesperson was also involved in at least one other
>artificial language project, none of which ultimately seemed to
>satisfy him.

I don't know of any other. Ultimately he became involved in Occidental only
in that he endorsed it, but it would appear from what he'd written earlier
(he died over 50 years ago, so he can't be asked) that he simply decided
Novial was not as likely to gain acceptance as Occidental. It's clear that
originally he felt Novial to be better than Occidental (he wrote quite a
bit about the two in comparison), and since Occidental did not significantly
change, I can't imagine he changed his mind except for pragmatic reasons
(easier for both groups to work together than fight each other).

>>As with Ido, the vocabulary is based on Romance and Germanic
>>roots, and there is a set of regular affixes which can be applied to the
>>root words to form other words.

>For clarity, it should perhaps be noted that all this is also true of
>Esperanto.

Not completely. One of the most common words in Esperanto (kaj) is neither
Romance nor Germanic, but from classical Greek. There are a priori roots
(many of the correlatives) and at least one noun (edzo) which is neither
Romance nor Germanic, but of obscure origin. I will admit that Ido also
has some Greek (mikra, for example, though I think this is a much more
international word than "kaj"), but Novial is far more purely Germano-Romance
in its word selection.



                                Bruce R. Gilson
                                email: brg@netcom.com
                                IRC: EZ-as-pi
                                WWW: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3141
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