Alexander Gode
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Alexander Gottfried Friedrich Gode-von-Aesch or simply Alexander Gode (October 30, 1906 in Bremen - August 10, 1970 in Mount Kisco, New York) was a German-American linguist, translator and the driving force behind the creation of the constructed language Interlingua.
Alexander_Gode_at_desk.jpg
Born to a German father and a Swiss mother, Gode studied at the University of Vienna and the University of Paris, before leaving for the U.S. and becoming a citizen there in 1927. There, he taught as an instructor at the University of Chicago as well as Columbia University; at the latter he received his Ph.D. in Germanic Studies in 1939.
Gode became involved with the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) from 1933 on, but at first his work there was of an irregular nature. In 1936 the IALA began development on a new international auxiliary language and in 1939 Gode was hired to help for that purpose.
After André Martinet was brought in to head the research in 1946, both men's view would come into conflict as Gode considered Martinet to be trying to schematize the new language too much, similar to Occidental. Gode, however, was not interested in creating a new language as such with it being the product of some a-priori creativity; instead, he wanted to register the "international vocabulary" as he saw it already existing (mostly in the Anglo-Romance languages); this was to be done (and was already being done before Martinet) by systematically extracting and modifying the words from the existing source languages in such a way that the latter could each be seen as a dialect with its own specific peculiarities. After Martinet resigned in 1948 over a salary dispute, Gode took up leadership and got full reign in implementing this vision. The result was Interlingua, the dictionary and the grammar of which were published in 1951.
In 1953 IALA disbanded, but Gode would continue to be involved with Interlingua right up to his death by translating scientific and medical texts to Interlingua; for this he would win awards from the American Medical Writers Association and the International Federation of Translators.
He was one of the founders and first president of the American Translators Association. In his honor, this organization awards the Alexander Gode Medal "for outstanding service to the translation and interpreting professions".
Alexander Gode died of cancer in hospital and was survived by a wife and two children.
Works
- Natural Science in German Romanticism (1941)
- Spanish at Sight (with Ezra Clark Stillman, 1943)
- Portuguese at Sight (1943)
- French at Sight (1945)
- Interlingua-English Dictionary (http://www.interlingua.com/ied/) (as editor-in-chief, 1951)
- Interlingua Grammar (http://members.optus.net/~ado_hall/interlingua/gi/home/entry_page.html) (with Hugh Edward Blair, 1951)
- Interlingua a Prime Vista (1954)
- Homo Sonetticus Moorensis (1955)
- Dece contos (1958)
External links
- Biographias - Alexander Gottfried Friedrich Gode-von Aesch (http://www.interlingua.com/historia/biographias/gode.htm) - biography in Interlingua
- November 1970 newsletter from the American Medical Writers Association (http://www.amwa.org/default/history/newsletters/nov70.pdf) - contains an obituary (in PDF format)
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