On Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:54:06 EDT Frank Pfaff <[log in to unmask]> said: >For example, educated users of English, French, Spanish, Italian, and >Portuguese can often read and understand significant amounts of >Interlingua with little or no training. (See the Interlingua example >below.) > >Io crede que accesso a un lista postal meliorea grandemente le efficacia >de nostre communication. Ergo, io cerca un servicio de posta electronic >que nos permitterea a establir e administrar un tal lista postal.) If I hadn't known any better, I would have said this was an Italian who'd started learning Spanish a month ago, or vice versa. It looks like a 50/50 mix with invariant verbs and other grammatical simplifications, ie the way a student sounds when he has to use a construct covered in a chapter they haven't yet reached in class :-) As for English speakers understanding what was being said, if this example weren't obviously about e-mail I doubt it would be understood. Above all, I have extreme difficulty in picturing a native speaker of Spanish, Italian or Portuguese actually writing in this dialect and keeping his lunch where it belongs. I do concede that it's easier to understand than Esperanto, but then only because it's much closer to the original languages. I mean... Original jumble: >Io crede que accesso a un lista postal meliorea grandemente le efficacia >de nostre communication. In Italian you *could* say: Io credo che [pronounced "que"] l'accesso a una "lista postale" migliorera [pronounced "miliorera"] grandemente l'efficacia delle nostre communicazioni. You would probably say "una mailing list", not "una lista postale", but that's specific to the example in question. You would probably phrase things differently, too. But anyway, say both aloud with a foreign accent and you won't know which was which originally. I'll spare you the Spanish translation. Anyway, this sounds just like what we needed to make our lives more interesting on the Internet :-) Eric