FIRST ENCOUNTER

ENGLAND -- 1950's

One day in late 1955 or early 1956 I walked into a bookstore. The store was located in Newbury, England.

In Tucson, where I live now, there is another bookstore. It is called Bookman's. When they first moved to a certain location, they came up with an advertising slogan, "Right on the CORNER, Right on the PRICE." Well, the relationship with my 1955/56 experience is only this. That bookstore was also on "...the CORNER." It was a terrific bookstore. Even today I long to revisit it, but I suspect it may not be there today.

Today, I do not remember the name of that bookstore. However, I do remember two specific books that I purchased then. For some reason, both intrigued me. The titles were:

Teach Yourself Dutton Speedwords, and,

Teach Yourself Esperanto.

At the time I was going to "highschool" in London. The school was on an Army base that was the headquarters for General Eisenhower during WWII. Later they turned it into the Bushy Park Central High School. At least, the part of the base I went to. The school was a school for American children of military personnel stationed all over Europe. Anyway, I needed to take notes faster at the time, and I was also studying Spanish in class.

With that in mind, I bought the Dutton Speedwords book and the Esperanto book. Today, I'm not sure why I connected the Esperanto with my Spanish, but somehow as I recall, it seemed to me that such a language would help with my Spanish study.

Those two books, then, started me on the path to researching the field of IAL's. Yet, this did not really begin till 4 decades had passed.

All during those years I used Speedwords for notetaking. And, for writing notes in books with small margins. This was a great help to me. Even though Speedwords was touted as an international language also, I never really used it that way. I used it more for notetaking speed.

As to Esperanto, I got through the first two or three chapters and stopped dead in the waters. After getting that far, it struck me, at least at the time, that Spanish was more valuable. Later in my articles you will see why this began my study into why the IAL's to this point have not really caught the public's attention nor fancy.

Covering a few decades brings up how I again returned to the concept of international languages. In one of our moves in Tucson years ago, somehow I lost the box that had all my Speedwords material in it. That was devastating to me. Even though, as I said, I never really got into the full international usage of Speedwords, I had grown very attached to the manuals. In fact, those were the LAST, literally, manuals the Duttons had. It turned out that after returning to the United States, about two decades later, I decided to order the rest of the books, or manuals. So, I wrote to the address in the Teach Yourself Dutton Speedwords book. The response I got was "devastating" in one sense. Even more so today.

That response was this. We have only ONE copy of those publications left. They are being held for you if you want them until "such and such a date". Well, needless to say, I wanted them and rushed the funds airmail. The response gave me the LAST such books from the Duttons. Then, on top of that, I ended up losing them!!!

A few years later, I finally got connected to the Internet. With all I found there I decided to do a search for Speedwords materials. Well, I ended up finding Ray Brown, and Kenneway's site. Ray it turned out had a copy of the manuals. He kindly copied them for me and sent them.

A little later I decided to try and find the Duttons again. The old address didn't work as my mail was returned. So, I searched on the Internet for people who lived in the town where the Duttons had lived. Finding a person, I sent them an email and asked for a favor. Could they check the phone book for Reginald Dutton? The reply was yes. They looked and came back with a number, a name. I didn't know if it was the correct person or not, so I asked him to call and find out. It was!

It turned out that the individual I found only lived a couple streets from where the Dutton residence was. So, through email sent to him, he got the message to the Duttons. The reply that came back was the address to write them, along with the sad news that Mr. Dutton had died.

Be that as it may, the short story is that I was able to establish contact and obtain more material. That is, the last of some publications I did not know existed before. Including the LAST dictionaries published in 1951. According to the letter I received along with the dictionaries I am the only one with these dictionaries today, plus some other material.

One exciting thing in addition to this is the fact that the Duttons have given me, in writing, permission to republish all the materials when and how I wish. The only exception being I cannot directly reproduce the Teach Yourself Dutton Speedwords book since that copyright belongs to a book publisher, not the Duttons.

So, for what it's worth, sometime in 2008, all the Dutton materials will be made available in book form again. With corrections to the latest changes R.J.G. Dutton did to Speedwords.

Having said the above, there was another benefit of my search on the Internet. I found information on other international languages. And, I found discussion lists on the subject. Over the years though, much of my discussions with these lists has been "heated". The primary reason was/is this. I found, at least in my research, that most of what is said on these lists about the various langauges are not really totally true. And, I found out very fast that it is not a good idea to bring that up. It doesn't matter what the authors of those languages wrote and said, it only mattered what the list members "thought" they said. Usually, negative about each other's language preference.

This led me to study even further on the subject, and to find what I feel is the almost perfect real international langauge of the lot. And, I think, has led me to understand the half dozen to a full dozen reasons why these languages do not go much further than the discussion lists. With virtually 90+% of the discussions in English, not in the languages being discussed.

Which brings up the big question, "why are you then writing this material in English, Bob?" Simple, one of the needs for these languages to catch on is to create an understanding about them in the first place. No one will take up something they don't understand on a whim. At least, not normally.

After a certain amount of information is given, you will find that gradually, and simply and easily these articles will fade from English to Occidental, my language of choice, and the one I believe is the one most effective of them all. Let me say, this is not my opinion only. That opinion is based on reading hundreds and hundreds of historical papers on the language and on this subject. And, reading what proponents of the "other" IAL's have said themselves about Occidental.

It is that information I hope to present to you in these original articles on "interlinguistics." Hopefully, they will not only help those already interested in the subject, but will help the skeptics who aren't sold on the idea of a secondary international language.

Stay tuned, there is much more to come.

Robert Petry

P.S. Soon there will be two discussion lists made available to our website visitors. One is for the discussion of Occidental in Occidental, and the other will be a general discussion list for discussing IAL's in a totally positive atmosphere. The second list will be for presenting all that is good about the concept, and ideas about how to make any, and or all of the most used IAL's successful.