Occidental (Interlingue)

1. What is Occidental?

Occidental — officially renamed Interlingue in 1949, with «Interlingue (Occidental)» also permitted — is an international auxiliary language announced in 1922 by Edgar de Wahl, a Baltic German naval officer and teacher from Tallinn, Estonia. De Wahl's goal was a language with maximal grammatical regularity and a natural look: vocabulary drawn from existing Western European (chiefly Romance) words, derived with recognized prefixes and suffixes rather than invented ones. The result reads at first sight to anyone acquainted with a Romance language.¹

The language debuted in the first issue of the magazine Kosmoglott (Tallinn, 1922), renamed Cosmoglotta in 1927 when its office moved to Vienna. Cosmoglotta's regular appearance made Occidental popular in interwar Europe despite Nazi suppression of auxiliary languages; the community was established in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, with use in France from 1928. ISO 639 codes are ie / ile.¹

2. First contact — the language at a glance

The opening of the Lord's Prayer, a standard comparison text among auxiliary languages, shows how transparently Romance the language is:¹

Patre nor, qui es in li cieles, mey tui nómine esser sanctificat…¹

Attested example sentences from the standard grammars already read almost transparently: «Il ha bon laborat» (He has worked well), «Noi serchat long» (We searched for a long time), «scriente un missage, yo videt que…» (writing a message, I saw that…), «un amant cat» (a loving cat).²

Greetings & courtesy

The everyday openers below are taken from Alphonse Matejka's conversation phrasebook (redacted by Thomas Schmidt), the standard modern source for Interlingue social phrases. Read each aloud — the stress falls where the accent is written, otherwise on the penultimate vowel.⁵

Meeting people — a first dialogue

Every line below is attested in the phrasebook; together they form a natural first exchange.⁵

• — Bon die, senior! Yo es senior Martin. (Good day, sir! I am Mr Martin.)
• — Yo tre joya conossentar vos. (I am very pleased to meet you.)
• — Esque yo trubla vos? (Am I disturbing you?)
• — Nullmen, ples sedentar vos. (Not at all, please sit down.)
• — Qualmen vu standa? — Mersí, tre bon, e vu? (How are you? — Very well, thanks, and you?)

Numbers

Cardinals are fully regular; tens are formed with -ant and hundreds with -cent. Ordinals add -esim (with prim and secund as common short forms for «first» and «second»).⁴

Articles, nouns, pronouns

The definite article is li, the indefinite un. Plurals add -s after a vowel and -es after most consonants (un libre → du libres). The full pronoun set is compact and regular:²

The formal second person is vu (also the plural), and the indefinite «one» is on.²

Health & feelings

These attested phrases let you say how you (or your family) are doing:⁵

The verb: three endings, no conjugation tables

Handy periphrastic moods round the system out: ples amar! (please love!), lass nos amar! (let us love!), yo mey amar (may I love). The verb esser (to be) is the one notable irregular: present es, imperative esse. Note that va, vell and ha are auxiliaries, not verbs in their own right — «to go» is ear or vader, «to have» is haver.²

Talking about time

Chaining the auxiliaries lets you place any action in time. All the following are grammatical constructions of the paradigm above:²

• Hodie yo scri un missage. (Today I write a message.)
• Yer yo scrit un missage. (Yesterday I wrote a message.)
• Deman yo va scrir un missage. (Tomorrow I will write a message.)
• Yo ha scrit li missage. (I have written the message.)
• Si yo havet témpore, yo vell scrir plu. (If I had time, I would write more.)

The weather

Shopping

Travel & directions

De Wahl's rule — the famous trick

Occidental's signature invention solves a real dilemma: international words (vision, decision, creation) come from irregular Latin double stems, while fully regular schemes produce unrecognizable words. De Wahl's rule (first described in 1909) converts nearly every infinitive into its derivation stem mechanically: a vowel-final root adds -t (crear → creat- → creation, creator, creatura); roots in -d or -r change to -s (decider → decis- → decision); all other roots stand as they are (ducter → duct- → duction). Only six exceptions remain — regular derivation AND international vocabulary at once.²

Prefixes & suffixes

A small kit of affixes multiplies your vocabulary. Each row below is drawn from the standard affix list:²

Correlatives

The correlatives are semi-systematic without being an artificial grid. Ci and ta mark proximity: ti-ci libre (this book here), ti-ta libre (that book there).²

A reading: the Lord's Prayer

Read the opening lines against the gloss; almost every word is recognizable from a Romance language.¹

Style notes

A few points distinguish idiomatic Occidental from a word-for-word calque:²

• There is / there are is hay: «Hay du homes in li dom» (There are two people in the house).
• The subjunctive does not exist; mey after que does its work: «Yo vole que tu mey amar» (I want you to love).
• The passive uses esser: «yo es amat» (I am loved); a reflexive se often replaces it: «li frontieras cludet se» (the borders were closed).
• The progressive is rarer than in English: «Quo tu fa?» — not «quo tu es fant?» — for «What are you doing?».
• Star (to stand) marks completion: «li dom sta constructet» (the house stands built, i.e. it is finished).

History: Occidental → Interlingue

De Wahl — first a Volapük supporter, then an Esperantist who left after the failed 1894 reform vote — tested his ideas as «Auli» (1906–1921) before releasing Occidental in 1922, accelerated by the League of Nations' inquiry into an international language. The first dictionary, the Radicarium Directiv (root words with equivalents in eight languages), followed in 1925. War cut the community off from its creator: de Wahl's Tallinn house and library were destroyed in the 1943 bombing raids, his mail was intercepted, and he died in 1948 largely unaware of the language's development. In 1949 the Occidental-Union voted 91 % to rename the language Interlingue — partly to signal neutrality toward the Soviet Union, partly anticipating collaboration with the IALA project that became Interlingua (1951), whose appearance drew away many users. A small but active community continues today, revived by the Internet.¹

Further learning & sources

For grammar, the English-language Wikipedia articles «Interlingue» and «Interlingue grammar» document articles, pronouns, the full verb system, correlatives and de Wahl's rule with its six exceptions.¹² For core vocabulary, the Wiktionary Interlingue Swadesh list gives 207 basic words with English glosses,³ and Omniglot tabulates the numerals.⁴ For living usage, Alphonse Matejka's conversation phrasebook (redacted by Thomas Schmidt) is the standard source for everyday phrases,⁵ and the Cosmoglotta archive — largely digitized and freely readable — is the best immersion corpus.⁶ This guide's 287-word flashcard deck above draws on all of these; import it into Anki or any SRS app with the CSV / TSV / Anki / .apkg links.

• Wikipedia — Interlinguereference — History, phonology, sample texts
• Wikipedia — Interlingue grammarreference — Full grammar with de Wahl's rule
• Wiktionary — Interlingue Swadesh listA1 — 207 core words with English glosses
• Omniglot — Numbers in InterlingueA1 — Cardinal and ordinal numerals
• Matejka/Schmidt — conversation phrasesA2 — Everyday phrasebook (Interlingue Wiki)