Vocabularies

Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia are almost the same, but their vocabularies are very different.

The Assyrian student, moreover, has an advantage which the Hebrew student has not; he possesses dictionaries and vocabularies compiled by the Assyro-Babylonians themselves, and these frequently throw light on a word which otherwise would be a “hapax legomenon.”

The Dictionary contains a copious all-purpose vocabulary of about 27.000 international words and includes an Introduction with a detailed analysis of the methods employed in gathering and standardizing so comprehensive a body of terms which owe their representation in a variety of national languages to the fact that, with regard to considerable portions of their vocabularies, the languages of Western civilisation may be viewed as so many variants or dialects of a common standard.

Hence a sound working principle in the elaboration of IALA's system of grammar is that the term “minimum grammar” shall not permit the suppression of any grammatical feature which according to the testimony of the source languages is indispensable in the government of their vocabularies and hence of the vocabulary of the interlingua embodied in the Intelingua-English Dictionary.