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Idiom Neutral is an
international auxiliary language An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primaril ...
, published in 1902 by the International Academy of the Universal Language () under the leadership of Waldemar Rosenberger, a St. Petersburg
engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considerin ...
.


History

The Academy had its origin as the (literally 'International Academy of the World Language') at a congress in
Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and ...
in August 1887, was set up to conserve and perfect the auxiliary language
Volapük Volapük (; , "Language of the World", or lit. "World Speak") is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an ...
. Under Rosenberger, who became the Academy’s director in 1892, the group began to make considerable changes in the grammar and vocabulary of Volapük, changing its nature into an entirely different language. The vocabulary was almost completely replaced by words more closely resembling those used in Western European languages, and a number of grammatical forms unfamiliar to Western Europeans were discarded. It was understood that the changes effectively resulted in the creation of a new language, which was named (which means “the neutral idiom” or “the neutral language”). The name of the Academy was changed to in 1898 and the circulars of the Academy were written in the new language from that year. Those who continued to use Volapük re-formed the International Academy of Volapük, retaining its name (with a spelling change) as ''Kadäm Bevünetik Volapüka''. Dictionaries of Idiom Neutral including an outline of the grammar were published in several European languages in 1902 and 1903. The language, sometimes referred to as “Neutral” or “the Neutral language” by English-speaking writers, created interest among international language enthusiasts at the time. Rosenberger published a periodical in the language called . In 1907 Neutral was one of the projects considered by a committee of scholars which met in
Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...
to select an international auxiliary language (what the committee actually decided upon is disputed; see Ido and its external links for more information). In 1908 the which had created Idiom Neutral effectively chose to abandon it in favor of Latino sine flexione, a simplified form of
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
developed by Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano. Peano was appointed the director of the , and its name was changed to . Peano's language was also called , not to be confused with the better-known Interlingua presented in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association ( IALA). In 1912 Rosenberger published a reformed version of Neutral called .
Handbook of Reform-Neutral (1912) at archive.org


Grammar

The following is a rough sketch of Idiom Neutral
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
. It does not lay out every detail of grammar worked out for the language. The simple grammar of Idiom Neutral is similar to Interlingua's.


Writing and pronunciation

Twenty-two letters of the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...
are used to write Neutral; the letters q, w, x, and z do not occur. The five
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
s (a, e, i, o, u) are pronounced roughly as in Spanish. Vowels which appear next to each other are pronounced separately, not as a
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
. The
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
s have the same values as in
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
, except that c is pronounced like English ''ch'' in ''church'', g is always like the ''g'' in ''gate'', and j is pronounced as the ''s'' in ''measure''. The combination sh is pronounced like English ''sh''. The stress falls on the vowel that precedes the last consonant. If no vowel precedes the last consonant (e.g. via ''way'') the stress is on the first vowel. In a few cases the vowel at the end of a word is stressed; these vowels are marked with an
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ...
(e.g. idé ''idea''). Such accents are the only
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s used in writing Neutral words.


Nouns and adjectives

Unlike Esperanto and Ido,
noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
s can end in any letter. There is no
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
for
case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to ca ...
. The
plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
is formed by adding the letter i at the end of the word.
Adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...
s can also end in any letter. They normally appear after the nouns they modify and do not agree in
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
with their nouns, e.g. kaset grand ''big box'', kaseti grand ''big boxes''. Comparison of adjectives (and
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s) is with plu ... ka (''more ... than''), tale ... kuale (''as ... as'') and leplu (''most, -est'').


Verbs

Verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
s are conjugated as follows. Examples are shown for the verb amar ''to love'' in the active voice; the endings do not change for
person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
or
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
, except in the imperative.
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 de ...
: amar ''to love''
Present: mi am ''I love''
Imperfect: mi amav ''I loved, I was loving''
Future The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that current ...
: mi amero ''I shall love''
Present perfect: mi av amed ''I have loved''
Pluperfect: mi avav amed ''I had loved''
Future perfect: mi avero amed ''I shall have loved''
Conditional Conditional (if then) may refer to: *Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y *Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a co ...
: mi amerio ''I would love''
Past conditional: mi averio amed ''I would have loved''
Imperative second person singular: ama! ''Love!''
Imperative second person plural: amate! ''Love!''
Imperative first person plural: amam! ''Let's love!''
Active
participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
: amant ''loving''
Passive
participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
: amed ''loved'' The
passive voice A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or '' patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing ...
is formed with the verb esar ''to be'' and the passive participle: mi es amed ''I am loved'', mi averio esed amed ''I would have been loved'', etc. There is no inflection for a
subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality s ...
or volitive. In expressions of desire etc., the present tense is used e.g. mi volu ke il am ''I want him to love''; ila demandav ke vo lekt it ''she asked you to read it''.


Other parts of speech

There is no definite or indefinite
article Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: ...
.
Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s can be formed from adjectives by adding e. Some
preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s are formed from other words by adding u e.g. relativu ''relative to'' from relativ ''relative'' (adj.).


Sample texts

''The apparatus must be addressed to the chief of the St. Petersburg station and must be insured by you and by your account; if the apparatus or parts of them are ruined or lost in the voyage, you must send others immediately in place of the apparatus and parts ruined or lost.'' ''The publication of Idiom Neutral will interest your son, who collects postage stamps, because this idiom is a practical language for correspondence with collectors in other countries.''


References


External links

* Holmes, M. A. F. (1903)
''Dictionary of the Neutral Language''
(Idiom Neutral), Neutral-English and English-Neutral, with a complete grammar in accordance with the resolutions of the International Academy of the Universal Language and a brief history of the Neutral Language

Rochester, N. Y. (1903); Milton Keynes, UK (2010).
Chapter on Idiom Neutral
in Otto Jespersen's ''An International Language'' (1928)
LangMaker entry about Idiom Neutral (archived)


{{conlangs International auxiliary languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1900s 1902 introductions Volapük Constructed languages