156 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



it if necessary. Logically the great classical tongues of Greek and 

 Latin come in first for consideration. It has been demonstrated, 

 however, that for many reasons they are impossible. Their highly 

 inflected structure, their inverted sentence order, especially in the case 

 of the Latin, are wholly alien to the modern mind. For centuries, 

 indeed, Latin retained a certain sort of internationality among scholars 

 and churchmen, but not in the common walks of life; while Greek, in 

 spite of the four millions of modern Greeks, could make no propa- 

 ganda, because, in addition to countless inflections, it retains an un- 

 familiar alphabet. 



Considering the four principal modern languages, French, English, 

 German and Italian, the first two alone have ever been able to enter- 

 tain even a hope of becoming international. Among diplomats, court- 

 iers, officials and people of polish and culture generally, French has 

 of course for many centuries been regarded as an indispensable tongue, 

 and in this way it has actually attained to a limited amount of inter- 

 nationality. The precision, neatness and certain high quality of 

 style in its phrase, its rather simple grammar and its capacity for ex- 

 pressing nice distinctions and fine shades of meaning, must always 

 strongly appeal in its favor. Its difficulties of idiom, and particu- 

 larly its pronunciation and accent, which absolutely can not be cor- 

 rectly acquired by adults, and which can be conveyed only by the 

 cultivated French teachers themselves to ourselves as children, preclude 

 all hope for the universality of French in any but an academic sense. 



Germany, the Mecca of scientists, publishes every year an abso- 

 lutely appalling mass of scientific literature; so that to every investi- 

 gator, a reading knowledge at least, of German, is as indispensable 

 as his native tongue, whatever that may happen to be. Yet German, 

 cumbered with a clumsy, inverted sentence-order, with its complex 

 inflections of nouns and verbs, its incredible genders and its rather 

 difficult pronunciation, has never dared even to aspire to internation- 

 ality. Except that the Germans are indefatigable workers, and publish 

 an inconceivable volume of scientific literature, their tongue would 

 to-day be no more widely known than Danish. 



As to our own well-beloved mother tongue, we are told on every 

 hand (in English-speaking countries) that English is rapidly becoming 

 the world-language. We are confronted with census statistics to this 

 point; but an analysis of the figures somewhat weakens the force of 

 the general assertion. In America, and in the English and American 

 dependencies, there are absolute hordes of non-English-speaking 

 peoples. But even were this otherwise, allowing the utmost to the 

 figures, we should still have but a minor part of the inhabitants of the 

 civilized world as users of English. 



What are then the inducements to bring the rest of the world to the 

 speaking of English ? Who does not remember the story of the valiant 



