Occidental (or Interlingua) for travelers

Monday, July 12, 2010

I don't have much time to write this in detail, but seeing the various accounts of people being able to use Interlingua in Spain or Portugal or wherever in order to communicate with people without having to learn their languages it's interesting to think about a way to improve this a bit more by simply making a few adjustments. In a theoretical world where Occidental or Interlingua has become a powerful auxlang but is still not universally understood, "Occidental for travelers" books could very often simply feature ways of adjusting the vocabulary one already knows in order to make it easy to understand. Here are a few examples of it with Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. It would be colour-coded, so perhaps green could refer to French/Spanish/Portuguese, red would be Portuguese and Spanish, purple is Portuguese only, etc. Pluralizing the article and adjectives would also make it sound more natural, so intelligent mammals would become mammales inteligentes. In a French-speaking country though this would probably not be that useful considering how infrequently the -s plural is pronounced.

Some examples for French/Portuguese/Spanish:

escola - school
escren - screen
estil - style
eternitáde - eternity
lis - the


And then we have the Italian/Romanian plural. An Occidental word would put an -i on the end, and remove the vowel before doing this is one is present.

scola - scoli (ro şcoală - şcoli, it scuola, scuole)
cane - cani (it cane - cani, ro câine, câini)

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