Talk:Interlinguistics

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2021 and 13 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lholt77.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 11:27, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

To do:

To do:

• Split etymology into separate section

• History section needs expanding a lot
• Under field of study, talk about categorisations - zonal langs, auxlangs, euroclones, worldlangs etc.

Use Vera, Gobbo, Blanke, Eco.  Frzzl  talk; contribs  15:22, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

"Interlanguage" is polysemous

The second sentence of this odd article reads: Formalised by Otto Jespersen in 1931 as the science of interlanguages....; within which, "interlanguages" is linked to the article Interlanguage. The latter article starts: An interlanguage is an idiolect developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1) and can overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules.

Talk of "interlanguage" seems to have been added in this major edit of 2009 (by an IP), an edit that used the term several times but scrupulously avoided linking it, other than this once:

... interlanguages that serve for interlinguistic communication - not to be confused with the [[interlanguage|interim language]]s of language learners, which also came to be called ”interlanguages” by some authors

(And notably by Larry Selinker, one might add; though the statement is OK as is.) Jump ahead to 2025. Jespersen is quoted as having written:

... interlanguages, i.e. auxiliary languages destined for oral and written use between people who cannot make themselves understood by means of their mother tongues

Again, OK.

Now let's consider this edit of 26 December 2023. The edit summary that accompanied it: This lead is amazingly bad - will rewrite later, but that makes it a little clearer?

I'm sure that the edit was well-intentioned; but my answer to the question posed by the summary is no. Frzzl, please reconsider. -- Hoary (talk) 08:46, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi Hoary,

Yes, I agree, and thank you for your attention! I'm honestly not very active here anymore, but you're definitely right that this article needs a lot more detail and care in showing different definitions of the term across history, and which are the most commonly used - because there is very wide variation in that. I think I was looking at the topic in other editions when I made that edit, which was unhelpful because it's not at all consistent (http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/jki.2018.13.1). Perhaps we should just rollback?

Kind regards, Frzzl  talk; contribs  15:11, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay in responding, Frzzl. (I'd managed to forget about the matter.) Please use your judgment. -- Hoary (talk) 05:27, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Constructed languages, constructed languages, and constructed languages

A quote from the lead (with my emphases):

. . . over its century-long history [interlinguistics] has been understood by different authors more and more broadly as an interdisciplinary branch of science which includes various aspects of . . . literature written in constructed languages (international auxiliary languages (auxlangs) as well as constructed languages : conlangs), . . . and constructed languages in the internet and other topics were added.

I know next to nothing about interlinguistics. Perhaps somebody familiar with it could take a look at this. -- Hoary (talk) 05:27, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

"Cosmoglottics"

This August 2023 edit (by Frzzl) makes it clear that the unreferenced note "Sergey N. Kuznetsov makes an opposition between cosmoglottics, the science about universal planned language, and interlinguistics, the science about international languages and communication." (subsequently somewhat reworded) comes from the merged article Cosmoglottics. Actually it comes from the very first version (2009) of the "Cosmoglottics" article, which is referenced: "Interlingvistiko en 'kosma dimensio': vojagxo inter kosmoglotiko kaj kosmolingvistiko de Sergej N. Kuznecov". The latter page no longer exists, but Wayback Machine scrapes of it do exist: here's an example (from 2008). It has an English-language abstract, but this fails to mention "interlinguistics". The meat of the page is in Esperanto, which I can't read.

Calling some proficient reader of Esperanto: Does Kuznetsov/Kuznecov actually compare cosmoglottics and interlinguistics? If so, please re-reword the note, so that it's clearer. If not, let's delete this as unreferenced. -- Hoary (talk) 11:28, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

PS when I said that it's in Esperanto, I meant that it's in what I presume is Esperanto. (And Frzzl, I believe that you can read Esperanto....) -- Hoary (talk) 22:40, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it is Esperanto. —Tamfang (talk) 03:55, 2 October 2025 (UTC)