32 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



the French nor the diphthong (ei) of the most usual English 

 pronunciation, chanj would appear to he the most convenient 

 form for all. In very many cases it is possible to find a 

 common denominator for the different forms. Had not in 

 English and German the external form of many etymo- 

 logically closely related words diverged so much that it is 

 impossible to find a middle form (for example, water, 

 wasser ; tooth, zahn ; speak, sprechen ; soap, seife ; week, 

 woche), the Germanic element would have been the dominat- 

 ing one on account of the great number of those speaking 

 these two related languages. Such being the case, the 

 Romance element in English usually decides the matter in 

 the majority of instances, since it coincides with the French, 

 Spanish, and Italian, or at least with one of these languages, 

 the result being that our language necessarily possesses a 

 Romance form in a much higher degree than one might have 

 thought. Another very important circumstance (which I 

 have hinted at previously) acts in the same direction, the 

 circumstance, namely, that numerous Latin derivatives have 

 passed over into the Germanic languages even when the 

 stem does not occur there. For example, German possesses 

 the words absentieren, abstinent, artist, dentist, dental, moral, 

 popular, which greatly facilitate for a German the under- 

 standing of the words absenta, abstenar, arto, dento, moro, 

 populo, although he does not possess them in his own 

 language (with the exception of p'obel = populacho). 



Sometimes there exists a very troublesome rivalry between 

 two words. In order to render the substantive " arm " (limb) 

 the proper word would seem to be the German, English, and 

 Scandinavian " arm," until one makes the discovery that the 

 same root " arm " in the sense of " weapon " is still more 

 international (E., F., I., S., supported by armee G., E., F., R., 

 armata I., armada S., armieren G., etc.), which compels us 

 for " arm " (limb) to have recourse to a Romance form. In 

 other cases a more or less arbitrary change of one of the 



