De Wahl's rule is a rule of word formation, developed by

Baltic German Baltic Germans (german: Deutsch-Balten or , later ) were ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their coerced resettlement in 1939, Baltic Germans have markedly declined ...

naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and applied in the

constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction ...

Interlingue Interlingue (; ISO 639 ''ie'', ''ile''), originally Occidental (), is an international auxiliary language created in 1922 and renamed in 1949. Its creator, Edgar de Wahl, sought to achieve maximal grammatical regularity and natural character. ...

, which was also his creation. The rule served for the formation of certain changed grammatical forms, like adjectives and nouns, from verb infinitive. Edgar de Wahl observed existing patterns of sound changes that occurred in natural languages (d to s, r to t, etc). The purpose of his rule was to distill these patterns into a regular and logical system that is reproducible yet also natural in appearance.

Rule

Verb

infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...

s in Interlingue end in -ar, -ir or -er. The root is obtained by the following way: # If, after the removal of -r or -er of the infinitive, the root ends in a vowel, the final -t is added: ''crea/r, crea/t-, crea/t/or''; ''peti/r, peti/t-, peti/t/ion''. # If the root ends in consonants d or r, they are changed into s: ''decid/er, deci/s-, deci/s/ion''; ''adher/er, adhe/s, adhe/sion''; ''elid/er, eli/s-, eli/s/ion''. # In all other cases, with six exceptions, the removal of the ending gives the exact root: ''duct/er, duct-, duct/ion''; ''emiss/er, emiss-, emiss/ion''. These six exceptions are # ''ced/er, cess-'' # ''sed/er, sess-'' # ''mov/er, mot-'' # ''ten/er, tent-'' # ''vert/er, vers-'' # ''veni/r, vent-'' and the verbs formed out of them using prefixes. Because the rule is actually made of three parts, it also known as the "three rules of de Wahl". The nouns and adjectives are created by removing the ending and thus obtaining the root. After adding -r or -er, one obtains the infinitive in the majority of cases: ''decora/t/ion, decora/t-, decora/r''.

Application

This rule is used in the constructed languages

and Sambahsa. After a possible modification one can apply this rule to create new forms of a word especially in

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

or in languages which borrowed vocabulary from Romance languages.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Henry Jacob, ''The Preparatory Work for an International Technical Terminology''
reprint of ''The British Steelmaker'', December 1945

De Wahl's rule
Constructed languages International auxiliary languages