Willem Jacob Visser (27 December 1914,

Rotterdam Rotterdam ( , ; ; ) is the second-largest List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city in the Netherlands after the national capital of Amsterdam. It is in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, part of the North S ...

– 16 May 1991,

Zeist Zeist () is the Capital city, capital and largest town of the Zeist (municipality), municipality of Zeist. The town is located in the Utrecht (province), Utrecht province of the Netherlands, east of the city of Utrecht. History The town of " ...

)Biographias: Willem Jacob Visser
Historia de Interlingua, 2001, revised 2006. Visser's gravestone
in

Appingedam Appingedam (; ) is a city and former municipality in the northeastern Netherlands. Although there is no certainty as to the exact age of Appingedam, historical research demonstrates that the place in which the city would eventually be built had ...

worked to unite the organizations of different auxiliary languages. In the 1970s, he edited a magazine ''Union'' in Eurolatin, his own variation of

Interlingua Interlingua (, ) is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is a constructed language of the "naturalistic" variety, whose vocabulary, ...

. In the pages of ''Union'', he published articles and excerpts from users of all auxiliary languages and their periodicals. Visser argued that "interlinguists throughout the world should become friends", and his magazine is credited with improving understanding. He was

Ido Ido () is a constructed language derived from a reformed version of Esperanto, and designed similarly with the goal of being a universal second language for people of diverse languages. To function as an effective ''international auxiliary ...

Representative in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

and later a member of Interlingua-Nederland.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Visser, Willem Jacob 1914 births 1991 deaths Interlingua speakers International auxiliary languages Writers from Rotterdam 20th-century Dutch linguists