De Wahl's rule

The de Wahl's Rule is a rule of word formation, developed by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and applied in the artificial language Interlingue (also called "Occidental") which was also his creation.

The rule served for the formation of certain changed grammatical forms, like adjectives and nouns, from verb infinitive.

The Rule

Verb infinitives in Interlingue most frequently end in -ar or -er. The root is obtained by the following way:

1. If, after the removal of -r or -er of the infinitive, the root ends in vocal, the final -t is added or the final y is changed into t: crea/r, crea/t-, crea/t/or; atiny/er, atin/t, atin/t/ion
2. If the root ends in consonants d or r, they are changed into s: decid/er, deci/s-, deci/s/ion
3. In all other cases, with six exceptions, the removal of the ending gives the exact root: duct/er, duct-, duct/ion.

These six exceptions are

1. ced/er, cess-
2. sed/er, sess-
3. mov/er, mot-
4. ten/er, tent-
5. vert/er, vers-
6. veni/r, vent-

and the verbs formed out of them using prefixes.

Because the rule is actually made of three parts, it also known as the "three rules of de Wahl".

The nouns and adjectives are created by removing the ending and thus obtaining the root. After adding -r or -er, one obtains the infinitive in the majority of cases: decora/t/ion, decora/t-, decora/r.

Application

This rule is applied in the language Occidental. After a possible modification one can apply this rule to create new forms of a word especially in Romance languages or in languages which borrowed vocabulary from Romance languages.

References

• Henry Jacob, The Preparatory Work for an International Technical Terminology reprint of The British Steelmaker, December 1945
• Henry Jacob, Occidental (1922) by Edgar de Wahl