Double-Column Presentation of the Texts of “Interlingua multilingue”

For language students, the most effective way of presenting the texts of “Interlingua Multilingue” would be in a double- or multi-column format in with the first paragraphs of all texts lined up at the same horizontal level. This would make it very easy for people to compare these texts for their similarities and differences.

Because electronic text-editing systems were not designed for language students, multi-column presentations of this sort are not easy to format. That is why I have presented the texts of “Interlingue multilingue” in a sequential instead of a multi-column format. Nevertheless, I hope that in the future someone (or a group of people) will see these texts as important enough to reformat in columns.

Probably the best way of easily presenting them on current computer screens will be to use bicolumnar formats with Interlingua on one side and one of its source languages on the other.

As I have said many times before, if others decide to work with these texts further, they are welcome to re-edit both the Interlingua and the source-language texts to fit their preferences in the use of any of these languages. They are also welcome to add materials to any of these texts if they feel inclined to do so.

The editing process comes down to taking a given text and either inserting new text into it or taking text out of it. Electronic editing makes this process very easy.

In many of my publications in Interlingua, I have started out with some text that I have used as a seed to produce the final texts. In my Interlingua conversation course, for example, I started out with another foreign-language conversation course and adapted it into Interlingua, occasionally adding new text to it if I felt inspired to do so.

This kind of editing, while useful for producing materials for studying languages, is not respectable in many academic circles, where it is condemned as a form of plagiarism. But long before copyright laws were enacted (especially in the case of surviving ancient texts) this kind of activity in the production of new texts was quite common. The current versions of the Bible, for example, are reworked combinations of older texts from a variety of sources.

I don’t know how much longer I will be able to continue working on “Interlingua multilingue.” I have just received some bad news from my cardiologist that after my second operation for a mitral-valve prolapse, my heart is starting to fail, and he has referred me to my surgeon for an evaluation of the possibility of a third operation.

I expect that these problems with my heart will kill me before all that long. Nevertheless, I will continue working on “Interlingua multilingue” for as long as I am physically able and as long as I have the necessary computer equipment and internet connections to continue with this project. I hope that after I am forced to give it up, others will continue to add to it or rework what I have published up to to now to make it useful for future students of Interlingua and its source languages.