So, as a result of reading "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Okrent (so much to like, and yet... Oh, well, that's for another post), I felt like looking a little further into Interlingua.
The irony of it is that I wasn't terribly interested in Interlingua until I realised Okrent hadn't given any examples of the language in her book. She'd shown snippets of most of the languages that had warranted a few paragraphs, but not Interlingua. I noticed she had touched on a bit of the history, but hardly told us anything about the language at all.
So, I looked it up (well, I *am* a librarian)...
And now I'm thinking that Interlingua is pretty cool, and probably worth learning. I had figured one auxiliary language was probably enough, and Esperanto is the biggest ship in that fleet, but now I see that Interlingua has a lot going for it.
Interlingua was created by a committee of language people who had the job of evaluating the currently existing auxiliary languages and finding the best one. Instead they just made their own. It's based on Latin and Greek roots common for most of the Romance languages - which is kind of like Esperanto, only where Esperanto has tried to "spread the love" when it comes to borrowing from other languages and then install a structure that is unique to Esperanto, Interlingua is almost an updated Latin.
This means that if you speak one of the Romance languages (or you've had a lot of exposure to English words from Latin roots), you have a good chance of picking up Interlingua really quickly. It also means that, if you learn Interlingua, you have a fighting chance of being understood by some passing peasant in the back streets of Italy, Spain, Portugal or Peru. The language is different to the language spoken in all of these countries, but close enough that you could probably come to an understanding as long as everyone was speaking slowly.
Esperanto seems less "I'm lost, can you help me?" useful than Interlingua, in this regard. Then again, if you are wondering around the back roads of Europe and trying to find the key to your hotel, I honestly don't know if "Io ha perdite mi clave!" or "Mi perdis mian ŝlosilon!" is going to get you more assistance. It depends on how far North or West you are, I suppose.
I am still quite taken with the way Esperanto is structured, too. I love the table of correlatives (I have them on a mug (actually, three mugs (long story))). And I like the patterns it follows. I haven't looked far enough into Interlingua, but I know it is trying to be less "artificial", so it is less likely to have that rigidly-consistent-even-when-it's-slightly-ridiculous thing going on.
Yet, I can't help but wonder which of the two languages would be the pick of the crop, if they were equal in all other regards. They aren't. Not by a long shot. Esperanto has enough speakers to populate a (very) small country (Liechtenstein, for example), while Interlingua doesn't have enough speakers to populate a small town. A hamlet, maybe. Esperanto has a large body of texts and a large network of connections. Interlingua has a tiny fraction of that. Oh, and Esperanto has over 125 years of use behind it, while Interlingua is just over 50 years old.
Still, I can't help but feel learning Interlingua would be totally worth it if I ever decided to travel in Western Europe again (or South America, for that matter) - if for no other reason than it would be a better foundation for learning Italian, Spanish, French or Portuguese.
So, right now I kind of want to learn both.
I think I just heard my Estonian text books whimper.
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