Edgar de Wahl, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Edgar de Wahl

Baltic German linguist

Date of Birth: 11-Aug-1867

Place of Birth: Olviopol, Ukraine

Date of Death: 09-Mar-1948

Profession: teacher, Esperantist, linguist, Idist

Nationality: Estonia

Zodiac Sign: Leo


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About Edgar de Wahl

  • Edgar Alexei Robert von Wahl or de Wahl (23 August 1867 – 9 March 1948) was a Baltic German teacher, mathematician and linguist.
  • He is most famous for being the creator of Interlingue, a naturalistic constructed language based on the Indo-European languages, which was initially published in 1922. He was born at Olwiopol (according to some sources in Bohopil, a town nearby), Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (now part of Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine).
  • The family spent some years in Ukraine, since the father of Edgar von Wahl worked there as a railway engineer.
  • After that the family stayed some years in Tallinn and moved then to Saint Petersburg.
  • Wahl studied there and began after that service in Imperial Russian Navy.
  • Since 1894 Wahl worked as a teacher in Tallinn.At first an adherent of Volapük, de Wahl later became one of the first users of Esperanto in 1888 and advised L.
  • L.
  • Zamenhof on some points of grammar and vocabulary of that language.
  • After several years he abandoned Esperanto after the failed vote to reform the language in 1894 (de Wahl was one of the few that voted for a completely new reform), and in the following decades he worked on the problem of the ideal form of an international auxiliary language. In 1922 he published a "key" to a new language, Occidental, and the first number of a periodical entitled Kosmoglott (later Cosmoglotta), written in that language.
  • In following years, de Wahl participated in discussions about Occidental, and allowed the language to develop gradually as a result of the recommendations of its users.
  • After World War II started in 1939, he had only intermittent contacts with the Occidentalist movement, which had become centred in Switzerland.
  • He became a member of the Committee of Linguistic Advisors, part of the International Auxiliary Language Association, which would present Interlingua in 1951. The last years of his life were spent in a psychiatric hospital in Tallinn, Estonia, where he died in 1948. Shortly afterwards, in 1949, the name of Occidental was changed to Interlingue.
  • Later, in 1951, Interlingua was unveiled; this led to the present insignificance of Interlingue.

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