Gloro

"Questa es nula konference por formacar alianci, por dividar la preduri di milito, por repartar landi, por traktar homa enti, velut se li esud la gaji in un ludo di hazardo. Nia skopo, sub fortunoza auspicii, es sikurigar la continuations dil prospero di paco."

So would President Roosevelt have spoken before the Inter-American Peace Conference last December had he spoken in Gloro.* This artificial language, which has been worked on for several years, was described in Manhattan last week by its inventor, Dr. Max Talmey, small, twinkling, 70-year-old eye specialist and amateur linguist. In its earlier stages Dr. Talmey called Gloro "Arulo" (Auxiliary Rational Universal Language). Its new name is derived from a phrase of Gloro: gloto racionoza (rational language).

In Gloro there are 18 suffix forms to denote different parts of speech, verb tenses, case endings. There are no other rules of grammar. It looks and sounds even more like a hodge-podge of Latin, Italian and Spanish than that more famed lingua franca, Esperanto, which it considerably resembles. Its roots were chosen with great care, however, from various languages, especially English. Dr. Talmey particularly tried to incorporate those national words which have no one-word equivalents in other languages and are therefore frequently borrowed, becoming quasi-international. In English such words are snob, fad, aloof, to glance, to bluff; in German, anheimeln, entmuendigen, schadenfroh, Weltschmerz, Zeitgeist; in French chic, aplomb, verve, elite, chicane.

Dr. Talmey prefers to regard Gloro as a "model language" rather than an international one, its chief function as the precise exchange of "ideas of moment," such as the explanation of Relativity to laymen. No word can be formed in Gloro unless the meaning is exact. Thus the English word solution requires three words in Gloro; solvo, act of solving; solvuro, result of solving; solvateso, state of being solved.

Nor does Dr. Talmey set up Gloro as a rival to such synthetic or simplified languages as Esperanto, Volapuk, Ido, Novial, Occidental, Interlingua, Idiom Neural, Perfecto, Anglic (phonetic English), Basic (English with a restricted vocabulary).

Most successful international language is plain English, which is spoken by some 225,000,000 people and is assiduously taught and eagerly learned from Helsingfors to Yokohama. Among the made or doctored languages, Esperanto has the most numerous and enthusiastic devotees, who hold frequent congresses and enjoy an extensive literature either written in their tongue or translated into it. But if not already a "dead" language, Esperanto is at least a static one, for its adherents have refused to change it since 1880 when it was launched by its inventor, Dr. Lazarus Zamenhof of Poland. Says Henry Louis Mencken in The American Language: "The trouble with all the 'universal' languages is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail to meet the needs of a highly human world." Freestyle Philologist Mencken feels that Basic, "for all its deficiencies," is better than any artificial tongue because it is derived from a living one.

Born in Lithuania, Max Talmey has been a practical philologist since he was oppressed by the poverty of words in his native dialect, turned to other languages, mastered six before he was 18. He tinkered with Volapuk and Esperanto, dropped them as unsatisfactory, was one of the constructors of Ido (a name which he disavowed as absurd). When Ido began to deteriorate, Dr. Talmey abandoned it too, but used its principles as a base for Gloro. Now a successful Manhattan medical man, he has also invented a combination carrying case and sterilizer for instruments used in eye operations.

While studying medicine in Munich Talmey met an impecunious young student named Albert Einstein, lent him books on physics and mathematics. Their friendship was resumed when Einstein went to Princeton, and Talmey wrote a book (in English) called The Relativity Theory Simplified. When Dr. Talmey expounded Gloro in Manhattan last week, one of the most interested auditors was Friend Einstein.

*Translation: "This is no conference to form alliances, to divide the spoils of war, to partition countries, to deal with human beings as though they were pawns in a game of chance. Our purpose, under happy auspices, is to assure the continuation of the blessing of peace."

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