The International Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV) and Esperanto

When human beings get close each other as consequence of communication improvements, standardization is something that sooner or later appears, it's a real need because it makes possible mutual understanding, facilitates commercial transactions, scientific knowledge interchange, and even helps with everyday little things. The alphabet invention by Phoenicians about 3000 years ago, was a good example of this, it was used to simplify trade between Mediterranean cities.

At the end of the XIX century and especially at the first half of the XX century, science and communications progressed in an exponential way (and still goes that way), then standardization became a real need. In that period a number of countries adopted the metric system officially used by France since French Revolution in 1799, the world had its universal time coordinated by choosing the Greenwich Meridian as “Zero Longitude” (1884), telegraph communication adopted Q-code (1909), the American National Standard Institute ANSI was formed (1918), the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations ISA was established (1926) and after WWII the International Organization for Standardization ISO officially began operations (1947).

In this same period some people tried to create a standard language, this is the case of Johann Martin Schleyer (Volapük, 1870) and Ludwik Zamenhof (Esperanto, 1887) just to mention two of them.

But also in the electrical field, standardization was taken very seriously, on September 15th1904, the Chamber of Delegates of the International Electrical Congress of Saint Louis, adopted the report of its Committee on international standardization, which read …steps should be taken to secure the co-operation of the technical societies of the world, by the appointment of a representative Commission to consider the question of the standardization of the nomenclature and ratings of electrical apparatus an machinery. In June 1906, in a preliminary meeting that took place in London, under the chairmanship of Alexander Siemens, delegates of Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Japan and United States of America approved the proposal of a new organism: the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin¹, was its first president (1).

The new commission first meeting was held in London in October 1908. The delegates of 15 countries were welcomed by Mr. Arthur Balfour², later Lord Balfour, after referring the great value of the work of IEC on the unification of electrotechnical vocabulary spoke on his vision of the future activities of the IEC in the field of standardization:  As I comprehend it, the chief desire of the Commission is to arrange, by international agreement, the test which are to be applied to different kinds of electrical machinery, so to describe the qualities of different machines that, whilst the man who buys and the man who sells will know exactly what each, respectively, is doing, there will yet be the freest initiative left to both; to the man who desires machinery to be constructed to carry out some particular design of his own, and to constructors of machinery on their side, who desire to take advantage of ever/increasing changes which growth in knowledge and increasing invention enable mankind to turn into account (2).

In 1938 the IEC publish the first edition of the International Electrothecnical Vocabulary IEV, this edition included 2000 terms in 6 languages: French, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Esperanto, and its definitions in French and English.

Eugen Wüster (1898-1977)

As esperantist, it was a happy surprise to find out that IEC chose Esperanto as one of the languages for this international vocabulary. Esperanto is a created language in order to be a kind of standard international language, for me this fact shows the universal vision of IEC in all aspects.

The inclusion of Esperanto in IEV was an initiative of Eugen Wüster (1898-1977), an austrian industrialist, terminologist and eager esperantist. Due to his research on international technical communication, the Technical Committee for Terminology of the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations (ISA) ³ was established in 1936, after WWII it became ISO/TC 37 (3). The online IEV www.electropedia.org still has French and English as languages for terms and definitions and "terms only" in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish (coverage varies by subject area), and pitifully not in Esperanto, it needs a new champion?

Germán Montero Alcalá
July 2017

Venezuela

References
(1) RUPPERT, L. The History of the International Electrotechnical Commision. Bureau Central de la Commission Electronique Internationale, Geneve 1956, p.1.

(2) Op. cit. p.2.

(3) Wikipedia. Eugen Würster (Esperanto, English, Spanish), consulted at July 24^th 2017.

Notes

¹ The one who calculated absolute zero.

² UK Prime Minister (1900-1905).

³ Wikipedia article on Eugen Wüster (English and Spanish) says that Wüster was one of the founders of ISO TC/37 in 1936, this is not possible, ISO was created in 1946, in the Esperanto version says that was the terminology section of ISA that later became ISO TC/37.