Whats this strange language used for groups names ?
It is Interlingua. When creating europa.*, it appeared not to be a good idea to mix european languages in the names of newsgroups, nor putting them in one language (English or another one), since that would have compromised the principles of multilinguism and language neutrality. Instead, newsgroups names are borrowed from Interlingua, a paneuropean language that was designed by a team of linguists to be comprehensible for a maximum amount of people (see http://www.interlingua.com/ ). These are clean, non-arbitrary international forms that almost everybody understands at first sight, no matter which european language they speak. During the third RFD (Request for Discussion) for the creation of europa.*, Martijn Dekker wrote a “rationale for the use of Interlingua for the names of the europa.* groups” that is to be found on: http://www.europa.usenet.eu.org/interlingua.
