30 INTEKNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



There remains to be discussed a matter of very great 

 importance for the phonetics of international language. 

 Whilst all nations pronounce without difficulty a series of 

 sounds in which the vowels alternate with single consonants, 

 and almost all nations have no objections to certain groups 

 of consonants which are easily pronounced (such as tr, sp, 

 bl f etc.), the pronunciation of other heavier groups, especi- 

 ally at the end of words, presents the greatest difficulty to 

 many nations. The French usually simplify too complicated 

 groups by inserting an unwritten vowel (as, for example, in 

 Felix(e) Faure), Italians who speak English do almost the 

 same thing in the case of such groups as kstr (Greek Street) 

 or ksp (sixpence), and the phonetic usages of other nations 

 do not permit even as many successive consonants as the 

 Italians. In order to make matters as easy as possible for 

 everybody, one must avoid the mistake of Neutral Idiom, 

 many of whose words contained very heavy groups of final 

 consonants, endeavouring rather to follow the example of 

 Esperanto, which succeeded very cleverly by means of its 

 predominance of vowel terminations in producing not only 

 grammatical clearness, but also as easy and flowing a pro- 

 nunciation as possible. In this way the language becomes 

 musical and pleasant to the ear. 



We shall now proceed to the question of a vocabulary. 

 In choosing the majority of his stems, Dr. Zamenhof had 

 already followed the principle of maximum internationality, 

 but the authors of Neutral Idiom were the first to carry 

 out this principle scientifically for the whole language. 

 Their procedure was, however, somewhat superficial, since 

 in each particular case they calculated the number of 

 languages to which a given word was common. One must 

 not count the languages (and Latin especially must not be 

 counted along with the living languages), but the people who 

 use them, for languages are not organisms which possess an 

 individual existence independent of those who speak them. 



