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Also Giuseppe Peano's Latino sine Flexione was originally called Interlingua but this denomination fell into disuse after the publication of IALA's Interlingua. Yet another constructed language is called Interlingue (formerly known as Occidental).
Interlingua is sometimes as a synonym for international auxiliary language. See also interlinguistics .
Abstract intermediary languages used in the machine translation of human languages are also called interlinguas.
The expansive movements of science, technology, trade, arts, etc. combined with the historical dominance of the Greek and Latin languages have resulted in a large overlap of vocabulary among contemporary languages. Interlingua is designed to be a combination of this pre-existing international vocabulary with a streamlined Anglo-Romance grammar, created in hopes that many people would be able to understand it easily.
The grammar and vocabulary of Interlingua were initially published in 1951. Alexander Gode, director of IALA during its later years, was one of the prime movers in this effort. He published a survey of the grammar, a one-way dictionary (Interlingua to English), and an introductory book entitled Interlingua a Prime Vista ("Interlingua at First Sight").
The international vocabulary has absorbed materials of the most varied origins, but its center of gravity lies in the sphere of the Greco-Latin tradition. It can be collected within the confines of a homogeneous group of source or control languages which not only represent the Greco-Latin tradition in our time but have likewise absorbed all significant international words radiated from other centers. This group was defined by IALA as the Anglo-Romance group of languages ( English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) with German and RussianRussian /'ruski j'zk/) is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, inclu as potential contributors.
A word is eligible in Interlingua if it occurs with same meaning and etymology in three of the four main control units. Spanish and Portuguese are regarded together as one control unit. If support is found in two control units, German and Russian are checked to provide the last support. Grammatical words, required to operate the language, are taken from Latin if the regular procedure fails.
The form of the international words is based on the historical or hypothetical form from which the national forms evolved. The derivational series is also examined. Though French oeil, Italian occhio, Spanish ojo and Portuguese olho ("eye") are quite different, they all came from a historical form oculo, and international derivatives like ocular and oculista determine the form oculo to be used in Interlingua.
Interlingua as now used tends to have less Classical LatinClassical Latin is the language used by the principal exponents of that language in what is usually regarded as 'classical' Latin literature. Its origins within the framework of Indo-European are well understood, but there is much work still to be done on vocabulary than IALA's original version, replaced in part by southern Romance vocabulary. For example emer ("to buy") has been mostly replaced by comprar, sed ("but") with mais and nimis ("too") with troppo. However, other classical Latin words, such as "pro" ("for"), "contra" ("against"), "post" ("after") and "ergo" ("therefore") are retained because they are seen as more internationally understandable than their Romance counterparts.