146 UNIVEESAL LANGUAGES. 



nations and showing a gradual development in form, 

 sometimes reaching back many centuries, we find during 

 the last two or three hundred years several attempts of 

 learned men to create an artificial universal language. 

 It is apparent that the problem of universal speech, the 

 importance of possessing a language for international 

 use occupied the minds of many eminent philosophers, 

 and numberless are the efforts to produce such a lan- 

 guage as might be acquired and understood by all the 

 nations on earth. The desirability of such a means of 

 international communication, and the actual need of it be- 

 came more apparent during the nineteenth century, in 

 which so many barriers of time and space were thrown 

 down, in which many marvelous inventions brought 

 together the remotest peoples of the globe, and in which 

 the international intercourse in commerce, scientific in- 

 terchange of thought, travel and many other relations in 

 which language is an essential factor of convenience and 

 benefit were raised to such unexpected height. The ob- 

 jections to natural languages, for the purposes indicated, 

 were manifold and insuperable — inherent difficulty and 

 national rivalry being the prominent objections. Thus, 

 the immense advantage that would follow the general 

 adoption of an artificial universal language was readily 

 seen. Not a single one, however, of the numerous inven- 

 tions had any practical value in the direction of solving 

 the vexatious problem, until Johann Martin Schleyer, a 

 German clergyman, conceived the thought that to be 

 practicable a world language must be easy of acquire- 

 ment in its pronunciation, simple in its construction, 

 regular in inflection, comparison and conjugation, 

 logical and expansive in its derivation, and must embody 

 in its method the best feature of synthesis and analysis. 

 His quick perception, his retentive memory, and his 

 untiring industry had enabled him, during thirty years 

 of study, to master the grammatical structure of sixty- 



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