Benevenit ad un compendie de information pri Occidental, li lingue comun inter omni lingues del occidente. It esset creat de Edgar de Wahl in 1922 por esser un international auxiliari lingue. Hodíe ti lingue es por quicunc quel es interessat!
Welcome to a compendium of information about Occidental, the common language between all languages of the occident. It was created by Edgar de Wahl in 1922 to be an international auxiliary language. Today this language is for anyone who is interested!: Occidental-lang.
The best way to think of Occidental is as a tidied-up common Western European. It's the French or the Spanish you wish you had learned in school, because it keeps the common vocabulary but removes the parts that make them difficult. For example, to form the simple past tense you change the r in the verb to a t. And to form the simple future tense, you put a va in front of it.
Yes, you just finished learning the simple past and future tenses. Try doing that in two sentences with a natural language.
But because it's a tidied-up common Western European, it also looks like it. English liberty and French liberté is libertá, English moon and Spanish luna is lune (think lunar), English sit and Italian sedere is seder (think sedentary).
It was created in 1922 in Tallinn, Estonia, reached its height in Europe just before World War II, went into decline and nearly died in the 1980s after which it came back to life.
Occidental can be thought of as the simplified and tidied up quintessence of the Western European languages, or rather Europe’s Greco-Roman heritage. The common vocabulary is connected but hidden, and Occidental makes it visible. Take the word father for example. Why is it patre and not some other word? It’s because it serves the key role in words related to it that we all know.
Now in other languages this is hidden: patre is père in French (the t is gone), padre in Spanish. But when we get to the derived terms, we see the t come back. This is the ingrained common root that Occidental uses.
| Occidental | French | Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| patre | père | padre |
| expatriate | expatrié/é | expatriado/a |
| patriarch | patriarche | patriarca |
| patriot | patriote | patriota |
| patriotisme | patriotisme | patriotismo |
| repatriation | rapatriement | repatriación |
When you know Occidental, the common roots simply become visible in a way excelled by maybe only Latin. Have a look over the following list and see just how clear the vocabulary becomes when expressed in Occidental.
That's right. It's almost as if English looked like this, with hints everywhere about the meaning of the words we use everyday:
Morning! How was your break fast?
Pretty good. Nothing like breaking your fast with ham and eggs.
Hey, do we have to work to morrow? Isn't to morrow a holyday?
Let's see...to morrow is Odinsday, right?
No, that's to day! So to morrow is Thorsday.
Oh right. Any way, the holy day is on Freyday though. Two days left.
You know what I hate though? Moonday.
Lol, every body hates Moonday. That's no thing special.
Hey, what do you think of the nameinee for the election this year?
They shouldn't have nameinated him, in my opinion.
Sure, but that's what a nameination is, right?
I guess. He said he'd increase taxes for people with as much in come as you.
Wait, what? Guys, can some body clearify what that means?
It means that making your tax declearation this year is going to suck.
But do I have to make a tax declearation even if I lived over seas last year? I was in Hispania.
Uh, may be. May be not? Ask the nameineee I guess. By the way, did you study hispanish when you were there?
I'm not very studyous, but I learned more than I thought I would. Hispanish people love it when you tell them you're learning.
It is a valid concern that Occidental is in the uncanny valley for Romance language speakers in particular. However, see this quote below:
The "Uncanny Valley" is much the same as what I've called the "Rube Effect": a feature of a system that makes me feel illiterate for using it. [...] My point was that if there is a slight resemblance between the new system and ones already known, you can accept it as coincidence and use it as a mnemonic, but if the resemblance is great, then any deviation will be perceived as an error.
Thus the "Romance" aspect of Esperanto is fairly low, so it doesn't bother me when it does something non-Romance. But when Interlingua does something non-Romance, such as not having multiple negation (which Occidental does allow), it not only seems wrong, but almost deceptive: I feel set up, taken in by its Romance appearance. Because Occidental doesn't look entirely Romance (the pronoun "it," past tense in -t, "lass," "mey," etc.) I may find it annoying, perhaps, but I don't feel deceived.
I once wrote that when you visit Interlingua, it answers the door in a Romance mask, ushers you inside, exchanges pleasantries, and goes to get you some tea. Then it pours the tea on your head and reverts to the mask. "Is something wrong?"
When you visit Occidental, it resembles some Romance languages you've known, but it looks more like a creole of Romance and English. It almost immediately slaps you in the face, says, "I'm not Romance," and then invites you in and is a gracious host. In other words, it establishes independence early on, and you either accept it or leave. Interlingua maintains a Romance guise most of the time, only to do something really alien when you aren't expecting it.
This is why I kept seeing native speakers of Romance languages trying to fix Interlingua: when you try something that seems odd, even though the grammar may specifically permit it, you're wrong. You cannot really say "Ille vide me," even though it's technically allowed (it is completely acceptable as "Il vide me" in Occidental).
The suffixes in Occidental are in fact already present in Esperanto and similar languages (substanco, direktoro, sentimento, spekulativa, etc.). The difference is that in Occidental these are regularly formed using its own internal rules (sub + star + -ntie = substantie, directer + -or = director, sentir + -ment = sentiment, specular + de Wahl's rule + iv = speculativ, etc.) and do not need to be imported as foreign loanwords. [More details]
Occidental was created to follow a natural evolution similar to the natural languages, where usage or lack of it decides the fate of a word. And Occidental's large body of literature and wealth of suffixes taken from the natural languages makes the creation of new words easy.
Here for example is an article published in 1948 on atomic theory in Occidental when the field was completely new, showing how easily it dealt with the new nomenclature with words such as atomic (atom·ic), ionisation (ion·isar -> ion·isa·t·ion), resonantie (re·son·ar -> re·sona·nt·ie), and so on.
Because of this, the best way to create new words is to simply learn the language well.
On top of this, Occidental does not require any specific endings for words so international words can generally be imported without change.
Occidental looks very Romance. Does a word in Occidental have to match a Romance word to be correct?
Not at all. Occidental tends to form words that either match an existing international word, are very close to one, or one that other languages could have created themselves but simply have not.
We do not hesitate to form words like “ludette, plorada, substantival, pruntation, credaci, perdibil, leonello, musicastro, plumallia, tassade, sucrage, glotton, stridore, hesitatori, successosi, flexura” etc. etc. without asking ourselves whether these words are international or not...They always represent forms that living languages would have been able to produce using their own means.
The fun thing about Occidental as a newly-revived language is that you can start to contribute to it and give it new life pretty quickly after getting the basics down. On top of that, because it is also an auxlang with a long history, it has a lot of existing content and established infrastructure that new languages are still working on.
That means it has:
And of course, just by learning the language and interacting with the community, you are contributing!