Searching for works by Giuseppe Peano

After some two and a half years of looking into IALs (international auxiliary languages) I've come to the reasonably stable conclusion that I will support two, namely Ido and Latino sine Flexione. This is not the main subject of this post but I'll provide a quick rundown over a few other languages and why I prefer not to support them (though I do hope for their success) in place of the two I consider to be the best two candidates.

Esperanto: Machinability problems, derivational system is less precise than it should be, pronunciation I find to be a bit awkward.
Novial: Not a significant improvement over Ido, very small user base.
Interlingua: Irregular stress, temptation for people to try to bring it more and more towards modern romance languages instead of an independent IAL. Orthography too. Note: Latino sine Flexione was first called Interlingua, until 1951 or so when the other language called Interlingua was created.
Interlingue/Occidental: Better than Interlingua but still has irregular stress, a few optional ways to write it, small user base. If you want to learn this language look for a Swedish guy on Auxlang named Kjell.
Lingua Franca Nova: I like LFN a lot but it's still rather ambiguous at times. I'm waiting to see what happens after a larger community develops, as sometimes this can help cement usage and make things a bit less random than they are now.

Ido is good because it is precise, has a good enough derivational system, is similar enough to Esperanto that Esperantists won't need to learn a whole new language, and has just large enough a community that you don't get depressed.

Back to Latino sine Flexione. LsF is good because it's just Latin without the inflexions, and it also does away with articles (that's a big yay for Asians!), and is pronounced as written (unlike Interlingua). The only problem is that it has maybe about five people in the world that can write in it. So we need to start uploading a lot of the old content from the early 20th century in order to show how the language is used. Right now I think there's just Giuseppe's Primo Libro and a few others to show what it looks like, and with a much larger corpus I should be able to make some textbooks for beginners. Also the dictionary he published. It's not impossible to search for the proper word through a Latin dictionary but it can be tedious, and my online dictionary is still too small.

So today I've decided to ask for help on two fronts: The Italian Wikipedia and the Latin Wikipedia. We'll see in a few days whether they'll be able to help. If not I believe I'll start pestering Latin and Catholic groups on MySpace. My best friend is a devoted Catholic so I bet I can pressure him into making a few inquiries.



By the way, why have I chosen to support two languages instead of putting all my effort into one? It's because of the fact that the world's second language will not be chosen by us auxlangers but by the average person, and it's impossible to tell right now which path will have more appeal. Ido is a good language when you have time to make the argument, but there is always the fact that it is constructed, and therefore didn't exist until 1907 that can be a problem. Latino sine Flexione is just easy Latin, and that's a much easier argument to make. In other words, if I were asked to explain in simple terms what they were, they would be:

What's Ido? - It's a language based on six major European languages that is easier to learn than any natural language, but at the same time very precise.
What's Latino sine Flexione? - It's Latin without any difficult grammar, the Latin you wished you had learned in school. All the history and tradition, none of the difficulty.

Which sales pitch is more appealing? Difficult to say. That's why I'm supporting two.