CORRESPONDENCE 437 



ability to avoid ambiguity, to discriminate meanings and 

 shades of meaning. 



French is probably more capable of clear expression thar. 

 English. In English many words can be noun, adjective, or 

 verb, without change of form, and the reader may hesitate 

 which way to take them. 



Latin, in its grammatical arrangements, may be fairly clear 

 for those who are well at home with it. But its terminations 

 are largely ambiguous : -a is fern. nom. sing, and nom. and 

 ace. neut. pi., and if length marks are omitted, also abl. fern, 

 sing. ; -um may be ace. sing. masc. or nom. or ace. neut. sing. 

 or gen. pi. ; -ae may be gen. or dat. sing. fern, or nom. pi. fern. ; 

 -i may be gen. sing, or dat. sing, or nom. pi. These ambiguities 

 can hardly count as merits in efficiency. The detached observer 

 might be inclined to remark that any child might have ar- 

 ranged the terminations better. 



In Ido — o means noun sing., -i noun pi., -a adj., -e adv. 



And as to Latin vocabulary, let anyone turn the pages 

 of the Latin dictionary and notice how numerous are the words, 

 and what common ones, which have six, eight, or ten mean- 

 ings, and meanings seriously wide apart from each other. 

 Ratio, tollo, fero. Fero means among other things to carry, 

 plunder, rush, tolerate, direct, show, vote. (See The Aux- 

 iliary Language Ido, by L. de Beaufront. Isaac Pitman.) 



Does it seem likely that science, which above all things 

 requires clear thought, would be well served by such a vehicle ? 



Ido approximates to the ideal of " one word, one meaning." 

 Of course the words of one language frequently include more 

 or less than the nearest corresponding word in another lan- 

 guage. In Russian the word for " hand " includes also the 

 meaning " arm." Two or more meanings are occasionally 

 allowed in Ido, but only when they are unlikely to clash. 



But Ido is often even more precise than " one word, one 

 meaning." What in English or French is one word is separ- 

 ated out into two or more forms to distinguish different mean- 

 ings — e.g., "number " as ordinal is " nombro," as cardinal is 

 " numero." 



Ido technical terminology is still to complete, but a mathe- 

 matical and a biological vocabulary have already been pub- 

 lished : " organisation "as a condition is organ-iz-es-o ; as an 

 action, organ-iz-o ; as a product, organ-iz-uro (obtainable from 

 Ido-Edileyo Ltisslingen, Solothurn, Switzerland). 



Examine the French-Ido dictionary (Dictionnaire Franeais- 

 Ido, par L. de Beaufront et L. Couturat. Paris Imprinerie 

 Chaix, 191 5), and you will find abundant examples of shades 

 of meaning distinguished with greater accuracy in Ido than in 

 French. 



