36 INTEKNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



considerable difficulties which would take too long to enter 

 into here. (This is one of the points which led to most 

 discussion in the Delegation Committee.) As a matter of 

 fact, a very great deal can be said in favour of the Esperanto 

 usage of o for the substantive and a for the adjective, and, 

 as Couturat has remarked, la bona viro is not any stranger 

 than the Italian il buono poeta. 



We need have no compunction in leaving the qualifying 

 adjective without inflection, as is done, for instance, in 

 English. The ending -i is very suitable for the plural of 

 substantives, being used for this purpose in Italian, in 

 Russian and the other Slavonic languages, as well as in 

 modern Greek ; it is also tolerably familiar to the English 

 in foreign words, such as banditti. The only termination 

 which might dispute the honours with -t is -s (F., although 

 usually silent, S., E., G. partly, and Dutch), but -* cannot 

 be used if we employ the accusative termination -rc, as 

 neither virosn nor virons could be permitted. 



As regards the inflections of verbs, we are bound, if we 

 want a termination for the infinitive, to choose, according to 

 our fundamental principle, the -r of all the Romance lan- 

 guages, because neither the German -n, which we have used 

 for other purposes, nor the palatised Slavonic -t (or -d), can be 

 employed, and English possesses no inflection. We require 

 a vowel before the -r, the choice of which will be evident 

 from what follows. For the active and passive participles 

 we need only consider -nt and -t respectively, the vowels 

 being also left undecided for the present. The greatest 

 difficulty, however, is caused by the finite tenses, in which 

 we must distinguish present, past, and future. In this 

 respect living languages differ so much amongst themselves 

 that the principle of maximum internationality does not 

 suffice, especially as the inflections of tense are inextricably 

 mixed up with those of person and number, which for our 

 purposes are quite unnecessary. The Delegation Committee 



