A Survey of Interjections in International Auxiliary Languages

Abstract

In this paper, I examine various aspects of interjections in international auxiliary languages. Many authors of works on such languages give little or no attention to interjections, apparently thinking that it is not necessary or important to say much about them. The main matter to be discussed is how interjections were created; in some cases they were derived by means of a suffix from words of other classes, in others, zero-derived from other words. In some languages, they are marked in a particular way, distinguishing them from words of other parts of speech. Most works on international auxiliary languages provide very little, if any, information on how interjections are to be used; we will see some instructions which have been given. I will also bring up some of the ideas that language designers have about interjections.