88 INTEENATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



adopt Esperanto in its present form as the international 

 auxiliary language. 



Dr. Zamenhof has given us an interesting account of the 

 way in which his language gradually developed in his mind 

 while he was at the Warsaw Gymnasium. Before he arrived 

 at the conviction that the material for the vocabulary must 

 be obtained from the Romance and Germanic languages, 

 and that the already existing stock of international words 

 must be used, he had " simply invented " his words, that is 

 to say, chosen them quite arbitrarily, but with as much 

 regard to system and brevity as possible. Although he 

 himself noticed that such words are difficult to learn and 

 still more difficult to remember, he has unfortunately 

 retained in the finished language a whole series of such a 

 priori formations, which appear in words of such frequent 

 occurrence as who, how, where, never, everywhere, etc. 

 The nul tempe and pro quo chosen by the Delegation agree, 

 however, much better with the general character of language 

 than the neniam and kial of Dr. Zamenhof. 



Some peculiarities may be accounted for by the Slavonic 

 mother tongue of the author : for example, his preference 

 for sibilants and diphthongs, which is especially evident in 

 the invented words (e.g., chi, here ; chiu, each ; ech, even ; ghi, 

 that; ghis, until, gh and ch being pronounced as E.^'and 

 ch). In an article in Zamenhof 's Krestomatio I find, for 

 example (p. 288), chiuj tiuj senantaujughaj kaj honestaj 

 homoj, kiuj, anstatau filizofadi pri ghi, and (p. 293) tion 

 chi ankorau antau la apero de la unua arta lingvo antauvidis 

 kaj antaudiris chiuj tiuj eminentaj kapoj, kiuj, etc. The 

 method of writing x is also Russian : ekzameni, ekzemplo, 

 etc., and also ekspedi, eksplodi ; also kv for qu. French 

 words with oi take ua in Esperanto when they are spelt in 

 this way in Eussian, e.g., trotuaro, tualeto, vuala ; otherwise 

 they are spelt with oi or oj, e.g., foiro, fojo,foino. Nacio, 

 tradicio, etc., instead of -iono, is also Russian. Russian 



