It features a vocabulary based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages, and a grammar heavily influenced by English. The first introduction of Novial was in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928, with an update in his dictionary, Novial Lexike, published two years later.
Further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but with Jespersen's death in 1943, it became dormant, although in the 1990s, with the revival of interest in artificial language brought on by Internet, many people rediscovered Novial.
While Novial is not very popular relative to its famous predecessor, Esperanto, it has a small group of enthsiasts. Several efforts to revise Novial have emerged. One such project is Novial '98; see below.
Jespersen was a professional linguist, unlike Esperanto's creator. He disliked the arbitrary and artifical character that he found in Esperanto and Ido. Additionally, he objected to those languages' Latin-line systems of inflection, which he found needlessly complex. He sought to make Novial at once euphonious and regular while also preserving useful structures from natural languages.
In Novial:
The most striking difference between Novial and Esperanto/Ido concerns noun endings. Jespersen rejected a single vowel to terminate all nouns (-o in Esperanto/Ido), finding it unnatural and potentially confusing. Instead, Novial nouns may end in -o, -a, -e, or -um. These endings may be taken to indicate natural gender according to the custom in Romange languages. Of course there is no grammatical gender or requirement for adjectives to agree with nouns.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump