Jantjaby 21, 1910] 



SCIENCE- 



109 



of Manchester, has been appointed professor 

 of chemistry in the University of Madras, and 

 Dr. A. Holt has succeeded him at Manchester. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 

 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE 



The history of artificial languages for inter- 

 national communications presents some of the 

 same features as many other human inven- 

 tions. At first people began to work out such 

 languages from so diilerent points of view 

 that the first attempts are extremely unlike 

 one another and have only that one point in 

 common that they are just as impracticable 

 as the first flying machines were. But gradu- 

 ally all phantastic elements were eliminated, 

 and now we have reached a period where prac- 

 tically every one works on the same basis and 

 where only small differences are found between 

 the various systems proposed or practised by 

 all serious believers in an international lan- 

 guage. As Ostwald puts it, " the international 

 language is no longer the matter of more or 

 less noisy enthusiasts, but a serious and tech- 

 nical problem, which we are going to solve 

 just as well as we are solving the flying 

 problem." 



The flrst " universal languages," such as 

 those of Dalgarno (1661) and Wilkins (1668), 

 were " philosophical " or a priori systems, in 

 which each thing was denominated according 

 to its place in a universal logical system. In 

 one hu is mammal, ie fish, ha insect, the 

 various orders and suborders being denoted by 

 added letters and syllables; but as there is no 

 earthly reason why we might not just as well 

 use ub and eh and ah or mi, mo, mu, no two 

 such systems have one syllable in common. 

 The next step is represented by such languages 

 as Schleyer's Volapiik, which is only semi- 

 philosophic, most of the words being English 

 roots, many of them, however, strangely dis- 

 figured to fit in with the requirements of the 

 completely philosophical and arbitrary gram- 

 mar: DoZ = world, piih ^ speech, Melop^ 

 America, because no word was allowed to con- 

 tain an r or to begin or end with a vowel, as 

 that would interfere with Schleyer's prefixes 

 and suffixes. 



An enormous step in advance was made in 

 Dr. Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887), because in 

 the majority of words he retained the forms 

 that were already international. But unfor- 

 tunately he still has too many Volapiikisms in 

 his language. Not only does he disfigure 

 many of the words taken from actual lan- 

 guages, as when alert becomes lerta (with an 

 arbitrarily changed signification, too) or when 

 French ahoyer becomes hoji; but he also quite 

 arbitrarily coins some words with no founda- 

 tion whatever in any language. As these are 

 among the most frequently used in the lan- 

 guage (pronouns, etc.) they give an air of 

 strangeness and unfamiliarity to nearly every 

 Esperanto sentence and probably more than 

 anything else have deterred a great many 

 people from taking the trouble to learn the 



Since 188Y, many people have worked out 

 closely related artificial languages which all 

 tend to keep the good features of Esperanto 

 and to eliminate the bad ones. When the 

 scientific committee elected by the Delegation 

 for the Adoption of an International Auxil- 

 iary Language set to work in 1907, it found 

 in the works of Liptay, Beerman, Molenaar, 

 Peano and others, but above all in those of 

 the " Academy " that had created the Idiom 

 Neutral, a wealth of valuable suggestions all 

 tending practically in the same direction, 

 namely, in the direction of those elements of 

 Esperanto which had never been criticized. 

 On the other hand, it found an almost unani- 

 mous criticism of much in Esperanto not only 

 on the part of believers in the possibility of 

 an international language, but also on the 

 part of such skeptics as the famous Leipzig 

 philologists, Brugmann and Leskien; the 

 points criticized in Esperanto were in all 

 cases practically the same, namely, those in 

 which Zamenhof had arbitrarily created some- 

 thing instead of finding out what was already 

 the most international expression. 



The language resulting from a careful in- 

 vestigation of all previous attempts is Ido : it 

 must appeal to all unbiased minds because it 

 is nothing but a systematic turning to account 

 of everything that is already international. 



