352 



NATURE 



\_August 9, 1 888 



spared to learn one language, if that were enough, particularly 

 if this one were exceptionally simple and easy in its grammar. 



Again, the commercial and travelling world demands one 

 tongue only, in addition of course to that which its members 

 learn in infancy, a tongue facile to acquire, and adaptable to 

 their peculiar wants. The time is not far off when one system 

 of weights, measures, and coinage, one division of time, one 

 code of international law, one mode of quarantine and sanita- 

 tion, one costume, will prevail throughout the civilized world, 

 and along with this unification of action must and will come a 

 unification of speech. It is not only desirable, it is certain to 

 arrive ; and, as beings of intelligent self-consciousness, looking 

 before as well as after, it becomes us to employ our faculties to 

 direct the course of events so that this one universal language 

 be not left to blind chance, but be framed and adopted of 

 deliberate choice, and with the wisest consideration. 



II. — Convinced, therefore, that the time is ripe for the pro- 

 mulgation of a general form of speech for the civilized members 

 of the race, we will now inquire what should be the require- 

 ments of such a tongue to merit the recommendation of this 

 Society. 



We begin by the observation that the Aryan stock is now, and 

 has been for-2coo years, the standard-bearer of the civilization 

 of the world ; hence, a universal language should be based upon 

 the general linguistic principles of that stock. In the Aryan 

 stock the six principal living tongues in the order of their im- 

 portance and extent may be ranged as follows : English, French, 

 German, Spanish, Italian, Russian. It should be the aim of 

 the proposed general tongue to ally itself to these somewhat in 

 the order noted, as thus being more readily acquired by the 

 greater number of active workers in the world at the present 

 time. 



The elements of all languages arrange themselves to the 

 linguist under three headings — phonetics, grammar, and lexico- 

 graphy ; in other words, the vocal, the formal, and the material 

 characteristics of the tongue ; and under these three headings 

 we will sketch the traits which should make the projected 

 universal language. 



(i) Phonetics. — We believe all will assent to the following 

 propositions :— 



The orthography of the universal language should be absolutely 

 phonetic. 



Every letter in it should always have the same sound. 

 This sound should be one common to all the leading Aryan 

 languages, and hence present no difficulty to a person speaking 

 any one of them. 



Diphthongs, digraphs, and double consonants should all be 

 omitted as misleading. 



The meaning should never depend on tone, accent, quantity 

 of vowels, nor rising and falling inflections of the voice. All 

 these are inadequate and unnecessary expedients of the linguistic 

 faculty. 



The vowels should be limited to the five pure vowels : a, e, i, 

 o, u, pronounced as in Italian, and all impure or modified 

 vowel sounds, as the German a, o, if, the French u, the English 

 u (as in use), o (as in not), and the neutral vowel u (in but) 

 should be discarded. All the Aryan tongues named possess 

 the five pure vowels, but not all the impure and neutral 

 vowels. 



In the consonantal scheme all gutturals, aspirates, lisps, and 

 nasals should be omitted. Thus, the German ch, soft or hard, 

 the Spanish z, the English h and th, the French n ; and likewise 

 all double consonantal sounds, like the Spanish n, 11, rr, 

 the German kn, pf, the Russian schtsch, the Italian zz, cc, &c, 

 should find no place. Of all the Aryan languages the pure 

 Castilian Spanish comes the nearest to such an ideal phoneti- 

 cism, and it approaches very near indeed, a few consonantal 

 heresies and the accent being its only drawbacks. 



In the written alphabet of such a language there should be, 

 and there would be no occasion for, any diacritical marks what- 

 ever. The so-called Latin or Roman handwriting and type 

 should be employed, but with the omission of every sign which 

 would require the writer to take his pen from the paper in the 

 middle of a word, or else return to it in order to complete it. 

 Hence the i should have no dot (as is the case in German), nor 

 the/, and the t should not be crossed. No accents should be 

 needed, and no apostrophes. 



The sounds of the language should not only be easy, they 

 should also be fairly agreeable to the ear ; and combinations 

 should be sedulously avoided which in any of the leading 

 tongues have indecorous or degrading associations. 



Brevity is of great importance, and eacn word should be 

 reduced to its simplest discriminative sound, consistent with 

 sonorousness and lucidity. 



(2) Lexicography. — The vocabulary of the universal language 

 should be based primarily on the vocabulary which is common to 

 the leading Aryan tongues. There are 1500 words in German 

 which are almost or quite the same in English ; there are more 

 than this number common to English, French, Italian, and 

 Spanish. A selection should be made from these similar or 

 identical word-forms as the foundation of the lexicon. At least 

 a thousand words in common use will be found to be the same 

 in all these languages, when we allow for the operation of 

 simple and well-known phonetic laws. Let the learner be 

 taught these laws, and he will at once know a good share cf all 

 the more usual terms of daily intercourse in this new language, 

 and he will pronounce them correctly without a teacher, because 

 it will contain no sound which is strange to his ears, and each 

 word would be spelled as it is pronounced. 



This existing common property of words, once assorted and 

 presented in the orthography above set forth, would form one 

 element of the lexicon ; another will be those words obtained 

 from an international scientific terminology, to be decided upon 

 by the Committees of International Congresses, appointed for 

 that purpose. 



Commercial and business terms are already largely the same, 

 and there would be little difficulty in obtaining a consensus of 

 opinion about them which would prevail, because it is of direct 

 pecuniary advantage to business men to have such a uniformity. 



There remain the terms in art, literature, poetry, politics, 

 imagination, &c, to be provided for. But in the opinion of 

 this Committee it does not seem desirable at this time to urge 

 the formation of a vocabulary which would be exhaustive. Much 

 of it should be left to the needs of the future, as observed and 

 guided by the International Committees who should have the 

 care and direction of the universal tongue. These Committees 

 should, by common consent, hold the same relation to it that 

 the French Academy has, in theory at least, to the French lan- 

 guage, enlarging and purifying it by constant and well-chosen 

 additions. As in France, each writer would enjoy the privilege 

 of introducing new terms, formed in accordance with the prin- 

 ciples of the tongue, and such terms would be adopted or not, 

 as they should recommend themselves to other writers in the 

 same field. 



(3) Grammar. — By far the greatest difficulty is presented by 

 the formal or grammatical features of such a proposed tongue. 



We may best approach this part of our task by considering 

 how the grammatical categories, or "parts of speech," as they 

 are called, are treated in the various Aryan tongues, and selecting 

 the simplest treatment, take that as our standard. 



It may indeed be inquired whether in the grammar we might 

 not profitably pass beyond the Aryan group, and seek for 

 simpler methods in the Semitic, Turanian, African, or American 

 languages. But it is a sufficient answer to this to say that there 

 is no linguistic process known to these remote stocks but has a 

 parallel in some one of the Aryan dialects ; and if such a pro- 

 cess is very slightly developed in these dialects, this is probably 

 the case because such a process has been found by experience 

 to be unsuited to the modes of Aryan thought. 



Returning to the grammatical categories or parts of speech, 

 we find them usually classified as nine, to wit : articles, noun, 

 pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, 

 interjection. 



The last of these, the interjection, is of no importance ; and 

 as for the first of them, the article, we find that the Latin and 

 the Russian move along perfectly well without it, and hence we 

 may dismiss it, whether article definite or article indefinite, as 

 needless in the universal language. 



The adjective in Latin has gender, number, and case, and, in 

 most living Aryan languages, has number and gender; but in 

 English it has neither, and, therefore, true to the cardinal prin- 

 ciples of economy in the formal portions of speech, in the uni- 

 versal language it should have neither. More than this, in 

 colloquial English and German, and always in English in the 

 comparative degree, there is no distinction between the adjective 

 and the adverb ; and upon this hint we perceive the inutility 

 of the distinction and dismiss it as operose only. The com- 

 parison of adjectives should be by words equivalent to more and 

 most, as is practically the case in the Romance languages, and 

 never by comparative and superlative terminations, as in 

 English and German, as our endeavour should always be to 

 maintain the theme unchanged. 



