Edgar de Wahl

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

He was born to the Baltic German noble von Wahl family in the then Russian Empire and spent most of his childhood in Tallinn (Reval) and the capital 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 navy. After completing the military service in 1894 he lived permanently in Tallinn and worked as a teacher. During World War II, when most Baltic Germans left Estonia in 1939–1941, he decided to stay. He was arrested in 1943 by the Nazi German occupation authorities and placed in a psychiatric clinic because of alleged dementia. He stayed there until his death in 1948.

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 Wahl had been a proponent, he started work to find an ideal form of an international language. In 1922, he published a "key" to a new language, Occidental, and the first edition of the periodical Kosmoglott (later Cosmoglotta). 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.