Edgar de Wahl

Edgar von Wahl
Edgar de Wahl in 1926
Born	(1867-08-23)23 August 1867 Olwiopol, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	9 March 1948(1948-03-09) (aged 80) Tallinn, Estonia
Citizenship	Russian Empire (1867–1920) Estonia (1920–1948)
Known for	Inventor of Interlingue (also known as Occidental)

Edgar Alexei Robert von^[a] Wahl (Interlingue: Edgar de Wahl; 23 August 1867 – 9 March 1948) was a Baltic German mathematics and physics teacher who lived in Tallinn, Estonia. He is best known as the creator of Interlingue, an international auxiliary language that was known as Occidental throughout his life.

A Baltic German, De Wahl was born, raised and lived most of his life in the Russian Empire. Born in the territory of today's Ukraine, he spent his childhood in Tallinn and Saint Petersburg. He studied at the University of Saint Petersburg and at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. During and after his studies he served in the Imperial Russian Navy. After leaving the navy in 1894 he lived permanently in Tallinn and worked there as a teacher. When most Baltic Germans left Estonia in 1939–1941, he decided to stay. He was arrested during the German occupation in 1943 and was placed in a psychiatric clinic because of alleged dementia. He stayed there until his death in 1948.

De Wahl was engaged with interlinguistics from an early age. He was first introduced to Volapük by his father's colleague Waldemar Rosenberger and even started to compose a lexicon of marine terminology for the language, before turning to Esperanto in 1888. After the failure of Reformed Esperanto in 1894, of which de Wahl had been a proponent, de Wahl started work to find an ideal form of an international language. In 1922 de Wahl published a "key" to a new language, Occidental, and the first edition of the periodical Kosmoglott (later Cosmoglotta). De Wahl developed the language over several decades on the advice of its speakers, but became isolated from the movement (then centred in Switzerland) from 1939 after the start of World War II.
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