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: «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).¹

3. Grammar in one sitting

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). Subject pronouns are yo, tu, il, ella, it — noi, vu, ili; object forms are me, te, le, la — nos, vos, los; possessives mi, tui, su — nor, vor, lor. The formal second person is vu, and «one» is on.¹

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.¹

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 (ceder/cess-, seder/sess-, mover/mot-, tener/tent-, verter/vers-, venir/vent-) — regular derivation AND international vocabulary at once.¹

Adverbs and correlatives

Adverbs derive with -men (rapid → rapidmen, quickly). The correlatives are semi-systematic without being an artificial grid: qui/quo (who/what), ti/to (this/that), alqui (someone), nequi (nobody), quicunc (whoever), omni (every); u (where), quande (when), quam (as), tant (so much). Ci and ta mark proximity: ti-ci libre (this book here), ti-ta libre (that book there).¹

4. 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

5. Further learning & sources

The English Wikipedia article «Interlingue» documents the full grammar (articles, pronouns, verb tenses, correlatives, de Wahl's rule with its six exceptions), the Cosmoglotta archives, and the history above, with references to the standard grammars (Occidental Grammar in English) and the Cosmoglotta corpus itself, largely digitized and freely readable — the best immersion material for a learner.¹

This guide is a starter chapter: it covers orientation and the core grammar, and will be expanded in future editions — vocabulary building via de Wahl's rule, graded readings from Cosmoglotta, and exercises.