INTEENATIONAL AUXILIAEY LANGUAGE 31 



The proper rule, therefore, for determining the internation- 

 ally of a word or stem is to count the number of people 

 who understand it through their mother tongue. This 

 definition of the principle of maximum intern at ionality is 

 simply a necessary consequence of the fundamental principle 

 of the greatest facility for the greatest number. It is natural 

 that each person would prefer the use of the greatest number 

 of words which are familiar to him, and so, to be impartial, 

 we must attach the same value to the individual preferences 

 of the 120,000,000 who speak English as to those of the 

 75,000,000 Germans, the 70,000,000 Kussians, or the 

 50,000,000 French or Spanish, etc. Even the languages 

 spoken by the smaller nations must be taken into account 

 in proportion to their numbers. 



The choice of the words for our neutral language is, 

 therefore, a pure question of arithmetic. Statistics of the 

 number of people who speak the different languages will not, 

 however, furnish us with a complete solution of the problem. 

 In the first place, there are to be found in the dictionaries 

 technical words and special terms which are only known to a 

 minority of each nation. In the second place, there occur 

 cases where a word, though it does not belong to a language, 

 is, nevertheless, known through one or more derivatives. 

 For example, 100 is in English hundred, in German 

 hundert, in Danish hundreds, and yet the root cent (zeni) 

 has been long familiar to the world through the terms 

 per cent. (G. prozent), centesimal, centimetre, centennial, 

 century, centenary, G. zentner, Danish centner. In the 

 third place, even when " the same word " belongs to 

 several languages, it very often possesses different forms, 

 due mostly to a different phonetic development, with the 

 result that the choice of a proper form is very often a 

 delicate matter. The sounds of the word " change," which 

 the English and French write in the same way, are very 

 different ; but as we can employ neither the nasal vowel of 



