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Stan Mulaik rote: > But IALA decided that the grammatical form would be Romance to make > the language appear more natural and coherent with the predominantly > Latin/Romance vocabulary. It's not an artificial language but an > extracted language, extracted out of the modern major European > languages. You are using misleading terms here. Interlingua _is_ an artificial language, just as are Ido, Novial and Occ. And it is not the case that Ia is "extracted" from its source languages in any qualitatively different way to that in which Ido, Novial or Occ are extracted from theirs. The differences are a matter of _degree_, which is why Guerard and Jacob, for instance, used the terms "autonomous" and "naturalistic", which are much clearer and not so open to misinterpretation. So, Interlingua is an "extracted" (I would use the term: a posteriori, as opposed to a priori or mixed), artificial language. Ido is an "extracted", artificial language. Stan, could I ask you to adopt this traditional terminology for future use, rather than one specially designed to promote Interlingua? > Interlingua wasn't designed to meet a certain set of functions, as > given in many artificial languages. It was designed to be a simplified > standardization of the international vocabulary in the major European > Languages. It is an objective reality to extract. How to use it > is secondary to recording the objective reality. Then the question I would ask is: _why_ was Ia not designed to meet any set of functions? _If_ it is enough merely to extract the international vocabulary, and use it raw (in other words, decide on a highly naturalistic model), then this decision must be justified. Ido is also a simplified standardization of the international vocabulary, only at a different level of autonomy or schematism to Ia. And I'm sorry, but the "how to use it", or in other words the level of autonomy to be used in the design of the language, is not at all a secondary question: it is every bit as important as ensuring a scientific extraction of vocabulary. It is _precisely_ this difference that distinguishes Ia from Occ, or from Novial or Ido. Nobody not wedded to a particular form of IL would assert that the question of the level of autonomy to be used in the planned language is a secondary or relatively unimportant question. James Chandler.