Engelbert Pigal (1899? – 24 April 1978) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...

. A speaker of

Interlingua Interlingua (; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the most widely used IALs and is t ...

and two other auxiliary languages, he wrote two cosmological monographs in Interlingua.

Life

As a youth, Pigal learned the auxiliary language

Ido Ido () is a constructed language derived from Reformed Esperanto, and similarly designed with the goal of being a universal second language for people of diverse backgrounds. To function as an effective ''international auxiliary language'', I ...

. In 1921, he joined the preparatory committee for the first Ido congress in Vienna. At the 1926 Ido conference in Cassel, he startled many listeners by delivering a presentation on the naturalistic auxiliary language Occidental. The next year, he and Karl Janotta began to work for Occidental in Austria. Pigal was editor and co-author of ''Occidental, die Weltsprache'' ("Occidental, the World Language"), the principal work on this language. In a later work, ''Ab Occidental verso Interlingua'' ("From Occidental towards Interlingua"), he showed why he considered Interlingua to be the better alternative. Between 1931 and 1938, Pigal served as Scientific Director of the Hoerbiger Institute in Vienna. In this position, he examined Hans Hoerbiger's theory of glacial cosmology. He published two monographs on cosmology in Interlingua, ''Problematica del cosmologia moderne'' and ''Astro-Geologia''. In the second work, he endeavored to solve fundamental problems of geology, such as the origins of mountains and oceans, using the exact method of physics and his own theory of planetary interference. Later, Pigal persuaded professor Eugen Wüster, also of Austria, to use Interlingua in his work to standardize international scientific terminology. This work led to the founding of the powerful

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Art ...

(ISO). To his death at the age of 80 (?), Pigal was a member of the Council of the

Union Mundial pro Interlingua The Union Mundial pro Interlingua (UMI; World Interlingua Union) is a global organization that promotes Interlingua, an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). UMI was ...

and was the national Interlingua representative in Austria.

References

External links

Biographias: Engelbert Pigal
Historia de Interlingua, 2001, Revised 2007.
Union Mundial pro Interlingua
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pigal, Engelbert 1890s births 1978 deaths Pigal, Engelbert Interlingue Engineers from Vienna 20th-century Austrian engineers Interlingue speakers