18 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



members. Whatever opinion one may hold about these 

 congresses, at which much confusion and misunderstanding, 

 and indeed even much that was ridiculous, took place, they 

 represent, without doubt, a great and remarkable philological 

 experiment, and one which demonstrates the possibility of 

 synthetically constructing a language that can be spoken. 

 On the other hand, however, the Esperanto congresses 

 showed, according to the concordant testimony of all persons 

 of unbiassed opinion, that the Esperanto language in no 

 wise represents the final solution of the problem. All far- 

 sighted leaders of the Esperanto movement have been for a 

 long time the more fully conscious of this state of affairs 

 the more profound their knowledge of the Esperanto 

 language. Chief amongst them may be mentioned M. de 

 Beaufront himself, who has come forward as one of the 

 leaders of reform, a reform which in many important 

 respects was recognised as necessary by Dr. Zamenhof 

 himself in a series of interesting memoirs. The recom- 

 mendations of Dr. Zamenhof were, however, rejected in 

 1894 by the so-called " Fundamentists " (157 votes to 107), 

 who were supported by a few great publishing firms 

 interested in the preservation of Esperanto. By reason 

 of the fact that the Esperanto alphabet contains no fewer 

 than six special letters to be found in no ordinary printing 

 fount, the firms referred to possess the monopoly of the 

 very considerable trade in this literature. The Funda- 

 mentists hold the view that, in spite of a few errors in the 

 auxiliary language, its success can only be assured by 

 absolute conservatism. They have, therefore, declared the 

 grammar, together with the reading book and vocabulary, 

 published by Zamenhof under the title of Fundamento de 

 Esperanto, to be sacrosanct, and go so far in this matter 

 as to revere as " correct " and " classical " Esperanto the 

 infringements of his own rules, the grammatical errors, and 

 even the misprints to be found in the Fundamento. 



