LOGIC AND INTEENATIONAL LANGUAGE 43 



Professor Wundt) and the majority of linguists (also with 

 some distinguished exceptions, e.g., M. Breal) have given 

 little attention to the study of language from the point of 

 view of psychology and logic. Now this study is particularly 

 easy and interesting in the case of an artificial language, 

 since the latter presents a structure analogous to that of our 

 existing languages, but much simpler and more regular. 



The words of the international language consist of 

 invariable elements (morphemes) of three sorts : stems, 

 derivative affixes (prefixes and suffixes), and grammatical 

 inflections which, as in the case of European languages, are 

 always final letters or final syllables. The stems themselves 

 can be divided into two categories : verb stems, which 

 express a state, action, or relation, e.g., dorm, parol, frap ; 

 and non-verbal or nominal stems, which denote an object 

 (living being or thing), or express an aspect of it, e.g., horn, 

 dom, bel, blind. The latter can produce directly only names 

 (substantives or adjectives): man, house, beautiful, blind (in 

 Ido, homo, domo, bela, blinda) ; the former, on the contrary, 

 produce directly verbs : to sleep, to speak, to strike (in Ido, 

 dormar, parolar,frapar), but they can also give rise to nouns : 

 sleep, word, blow (in Ido, dormo, parolo, frapo). The 

 proper r6le of the grammatical terminations is to determine 

 the grammatical function of a stem word and to indicate the 

 category to which the word belongs, whether verb, substantive, 

 or adverb. Thus parol-ar = to speak ; parol-o = (spoken) 

 word ; parol-a = oral ; parol-e = orally. The same idea, 

 namely, that expressed by the stem word, always runs through 

 the various categories. This follows from a principle which 

 dominates the whole structure of the international language : 

 "Every word element" (morpheme) "represents an elemen- 

 tary idea, which is always the same, so that a combination 

 of elements has a meaning determined by the combination 

 of the corresponding ideas." This principle is only a 

 corollary to the general principle of uniqueness so clearly 



