INTEENATIONAL AUXILIARY LANGUAGE 35 



too much in this matter. Nevertheless it does not leave us 

 entirely in the lurch. 



Such cases as the dative and genitive and also the 

 ablative, etc., must be expressed by prepositions in con- 

 formity with the tendency of Western European languages. 

 It is advisable to have an inflection for the accusative, 

 although this is only intended for occasional use, because in 

 the great majority of instances there is no necessity to 

 distinguish it from the nominative. As neither the Komance 

 languages nor English and Scandinavian possess any accusa- 

 tive inflection, and as the Slavonic languages do not give us 

 any help here, we are obliged to fall back on German, which 

 in the feminine and neuter has no inflection. The masculine, 

 however, in many cases has an -n (den guten knaberi). The 

 fact that this termination is also mostly used for the dative, 

 as well as for the infinitive, need not prevent us employing 

 it in our language for the accusative. It necessitates the 

 use, however, of forms ending in a vowel for the nominative 

 of substantives (and adjectives and pronouns). It may be 

 remarked that -n as an accusative inflection is also found in 

 Greek and Finnish. 



The only vowels that can be employed in this connection 

 are o and a, which, as a matter of fact, occur very frequently 

 as the terminations of substantives and adjectives in the 

 Slavonic languages, as well as in I. and S. Since gram- 

 matical gender, as distinct from sex, cannot be permitted in 

 an artificial language, it is not possible to employ o and a as 

 in natural languages, where the former is often, though not 

 exclusively, used for the masculine (I. S., but in R. and 

 Polish for the neuter), and the latter similarly for the 

 feminine. One might be inclined to employ o for the male 

 and a for the female sex, with the result that one would 

 have no termination for inanimate things, abstract ideas, or 

 living beings whose sex is not a matter of importance at the 

 moment. The carrying out of this rule, however, leads to 



D 2 



