DO THEY DARE DEBATE THE ISSUES?

by Hugh E. Blair
On September 26, 1962, Dr. Alexander Gode, President of the Union
Mundial pro Interlingua, issued a challenge to Dr. Ivo Lapenna, Secre-
tary General of the Universala Esperanto Asocio. A copy of his letter
is enclosed with this issue of Interlingua at Work. Breaking sharply
with his practice of avoiding controversy with other wings of the
national language movement, Dr. Gode challenged Dr. Lapenna "to a public
oral, man-to-man debate" . -He suggested that arrang.ements for the debate
be handled by a committee to be appointed by the editors of Internation
Language Review and Esperanto. Mr. Floyd Hardin, Editor of the Inter-
national Language Review, has accepted his share of the responsibility
and is working to get the committee organized. He asked me to serve on
the committee, and I gladly accepted.
Dr. Gode will defend the position presented in his "Five Theses to
Hammer on the Gates of Babel", which he first presented at the Annual
Meeting of the .American Translators .Association, November 30, 1962, in
New York City. This document contains much that is calculated to
der and exasperate anyone who favors the arguments, aspirations and
ideals of Zamenhof, De Wahl, and other great pioneers of the internation
al _language movement, but is unfamiliar with Dr. Gode's thinking. The
"Five Theses" will be published in the forthcoming issue of The Inter-
national Language Review [it is included in this issue] and will also
be distributed to the of Interlingua at Werk with our next
issue.
In his "Five Theses" Dr. Gode has achieved a masterly statement of
his position. I do not hesitate to call it the most important article
on Interlingua he has yet written. It represents a complete break with
traditional ways of thinking about the international language movement,
and poses a number of issues which directly challenge the entire philos-
ophy of Esperanto.
Do the Esperantists dare debate the issues?
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From the current issue of:
Interlingua at Work
Hugh E. Blair, Editor
80 E. llth St., Room 627
New York 3, N.Y., USA