European Lingues

Li Europan lingues is a phrase from Occidental, an artificial language devised by Edgar de Wahl in 1922. The phrase literally means, "the European languages." This particular phrase has become important in HTML and software writing.

Occidental, or Interlingue, was created to maximize the similarities between many European languages, capitalizing on their common ancestry to make them mutually intelligible to a large audience. Unlike Esperanto, Occidental uses not only a simplified grammar but follows a derivative formula called "de Wahl's rule" which allows verb infinitives to be uniformly changed into nouns and adverbs. This means that anyone learning Occidental can predict with perfect regularity the forms of these words. While Occidental has not enjoyed immense popularity among the European Union, it has become useful as a language used in computer programs.

Specifically in computer jargon, "Europan lingues" has come to mean a placeholder, often used in HTML text, which really has no meaning but is used for filling space, perhaps for printing purposes. One of the most commonly used examples is the lorem ipsum, which means, oddly enough, "pain itself," and is familiar to many from graphic and print examples in software. Running a template for a newsletter program, for example, will often show a page filled with text in various fonts containing the lorem ipsum language. This allows the reader to visualize how the text will look when it is on the page without typing vast amounts of text.

One theory of the origination of the use of Europan lingues as placeholder text is propounded by Don Gasper, a former London Times reporter, who believes that it began in the London paper from a chance translation by one of the editors, apparently a fan of Occidental, to fill space while layout of the paper was created. While this theory is not provable, it makes sense given the use of the passage in so many situations.

The most common transcription of the passage begins: "Li Europan lingues es membres del sam familie" (The European languages are members of the same family). The passage runs to about two paragraphs, or 100 words, and discusses the development of Occidental, or Interlingue, language and the desirability of conversion to this form of communication for all European language groups. These two paragraphs, known as the "lorem ipsum," appear frequently on all types of computer programs and web pages, and have come to be understood that where they appear, no real meaning is assigned. The form may vary slightly but the text is generally similar in all appearances.

Other favorite placeholder passages are pangrams, sentences that use all letters in a given alphabet. An example in English is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This is also popular for use as a placeholder because the reader can visualize how all letters will appear when typed in as text. The lorem ipsum is probably used more frequently, as it does not assign meaning for most readers and can safely act as background without interfering with visualization of the layout.