[1] Hogben applied semantic principles to provide a reduced vocabulary of just over 880 words which might suffice for basic conversation among peoples of different nationality.
As a professor, Hogben had seen how hard it was for the students to memorize the terms of biology, as they were poorly acquainted with etymology and the classical languages.
Men of science, more than others, have at their finger-tips an international vocabulary which is already in existence (...)Eventually, Hogben became convinced that such an auxiliary language appeared to be more necessary than ever before, so he decided to publish his proposal, insisting that it was simply a draft: A good enough reason for publishing this draft is that the post-war world may be ripe, as never before, for recognition of need for a remedy which so many others have sought.
the author modestly consigns this first draft in the hope that readers will make suggestions and offer constructive criticisms as a basis for something better.
The inconvenience of having a few anomalies which go into a dozen lines of print is far less than the disadvantage which would result from mutilating roots beyond visual recognition.The stress is generally on the penultimate syllable, e.g. billeta (ticket), nesia (island).
A classification of parts of speech relevant to an isolating language would not follow the categories appropriate to the flexional system of the Indo-European group.
The vocables of Interglossa can be classified following the function of individual vocables in the “sentence-landscape”[1] (p. 32-3): For ready recognition, a language free of flexions can benefit from two types of signposts of “sentence-landscape”: articles (see “Parts of Speech”), and terminals (that is, final vowels): Hogben prefers to have this number of exceptions instead of the disadvantage of mutilating a familiar international stem or of unduly lengthening the word.
[1] (p. 37) Interglossa is a purely isolating language like Chinese, not depending on suffixes, neither flexional nor derivational, yet it uses a kind of composites whose second component is a monosyllabic noun.
Interglossa provides a minimal grammar with a series of syntactic rules, yet differing from the usual grammar of inflexional-agglutinative languages like the Indo-European ones: Inevitably, we find our-selves gravitating away from the grammatical pattern of the Aryan [Indo-European] family to a more universal idiom with features common to Chinese.
The result is that learning a language so designed is a lively training in clear thinking of a kind which anyone can usefully undertake.
At times Hogben wavers between Greek and Latin, and suggests pairs of equivalent synonyms (e.g. hypo and infra, soma and corpora), for an eventual international committee to decide between them.