1888. ] 7 [Volaptik. 
scientific terminology, to be decided upon by the committees of inter- 
national congresses, appointed for that purpose. 
Commercial and business terms are already largely the same, and 
there would be little difficulty in obtaining a consensus of opinion about 
them which would prevail, because it is of direct pecuniary advantage 
to business men to have such a uniformity. 
There remain the terms in art, literature, poetry, politics, imagina- 
tion, etc., to be provided for. But in the opinion of this committee it 
does not seem desirable at this time to urge the formation of a vocabu- 
lary which would be exhaustive. Much of it should be left to the 
needs of the future, as observed and guided by the international com- 
mittees who should have the care and direction of the universal tongue. 
These committees should, by common consent, hold the same relation 
to it that the French Academy has, in theory at least, to the French 
language, enlarging and purifying it by constant and well-chosen addi- 
tions. As in France, each writer would enjoy the privilege of intro- 
ducing new terms, formed in accordance with the principles of the 
tongue, and such terms would be adopted or not, as they should recom- 
mend themselves to other writers in the same field. 
Ill. Grammar.—By far the greatest difficulty is presented by the 
formal or grammatical features of such a proposed tongue. 
We may best approach this part of our task by considering how the 
grammatical categories, or ‘‘ parts of speech,’’ as they are called, are 
treated in the various Aryan tongues, and selecting the simplest 
treatment, take that as our standard. 
It may indeed be inquired whether in the grammar we might not 
profitably pass beyond the Aryan group, and seek for simpler methods 
in the Semitic, Turanian, African or American languages. But it is 
a sufficient answer to this to say that there is no linguistic process 
known to these remote stocks but has a parallel in some one of the 
Aryan dialects; and if such a process is very slightly developed in 
these dialects, this is probably the case because such a process has been 
found by experience to be unsuited to the modes of Aryan thought. 
Returning to the grammatical categories or parts of speech, we find 
them usually classified as nine, to wit: articles, noun, pronoun, adjec- 
tive, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection. 
The last of these, the interjection, is of no importance, and as for 
the first of them, the article, we find that the Latin and the Russian 
move along perfectly well without it, and hence we may dismiss it 
whether article definite or article indefinite, as needless in the univer- 
sal language. 
The adjective in Latin has gender, number and case, and in most 
living Aryan languages has number and gender; but in English it 
has neither, and, therefore, true to the cardinal principles of economy 
in the formal portions of speech, in the universal language it should 
