72 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



III. Speaking. The speaking of the international 

 language at first in small and then gradually amongst wider 

 circles and finally at international congresses can only be 

 attempted later. This attempt must not, however, he made 

 before its success is fully assured, and the language has 

 received a certain amount of consolidation through its 

 application to writing. 



We have already remarked in another place that the 

 introduction of the international language is not nearly so 

 difficult as it appears at first sight, almost the only difficulty 

 being the establishment of the confidence that this goal con 

 be attained. 



When one tries to swim for the first time it seems as if 

 one would never succeed. But when, after a few lessons, 

 one has seen one's comrades moving safely and merrily in 

 the water, courage comes, and with it success. . We shall 

 therefore show in an appendix by means of an example 

 that the language of the Delegation is already capable 

 of expressing difficult passages with all possible fidelity. 



At a time when the language had only just been fixed and 

 when he had very little practice in its use, L. Couturat 

 translated into it a particularly difficult passage from the 

 work of Gomperz (the Viennese Academician) on Grecian 

 Thinkers. The present author, without having seen the 

 original, retranslated it at Graz from the international 

 language into German, and sent this to Gomperz at Vienna 

 with the request, that he would give his opinion on the 

 accuracy of the retranslated passage. Gomperz wrote 

 characterising the reproduction as " astonishingly exact," 

 " the test as extraordinarily successful, and the result in a 

 high degree favourable to the possibility of employing the 

 international language." This test must certainly be 

 regarded as a very severe one, because the German language 

 is foreign to the first translator, whilst, owing to its philo- 

 sophical nature, the subject was not familiar to the second 



