Cosmoglotta 1922 - 1950 all done!

Friday, February 11, 2011

Success! I have now uploaded all the issues of Cosmoglotta up to the end of 1950. I originally went at a rate of one issue per day but we're getting on a plane in the next few days with cats and I wanted to finish everything up before leaving, so I did about one year per day over the past few days and quickly went from the late 1930s to 1950.

Cosmoglotta is a good example of what to do right and what to do wrong when promoting an IAL. Producing a magazine every month or two written entirely in the IAL is a good idea, as is creating literature in Occidental and writing about news at the time. Writing news in an IAL may seem to be an exercise in futility since it ends up just being a translation of something already available in another language, but after a few years or decades it actually becomes quite interesting and sheds a lot of light at the world at the time. On the other hand, writing about other auxiliary languages really comes across as a waste of time. Sometimes it seems that half of Cosmoglotta is about other IALs and why they aren't as good, and pretty much every year you can find an article or two about how Idists are all moving over to Occidental and Ido is pretty much done...and now in 2011 Ido is still one of the big three while Occidental is way, way below.

Occidental is still quite large compared to other IALs, mind you. It's kind of on 'tier three'. Tier one is Esperanto, two is Interlingua and Ido, and on tier three one finds some previously large languages (Occidental, maybe Novial) and some interesting new projects (Lingwa de Planeta, Lingua Franca Nova, maybe Sambahsa in two years at the rate Olivier is going).

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