Volapiik.] 14 (Jan. 6, 
an Aryan language, without the necessity of oral instruction; second- 
ly, that its grammar should be simplified to the utmost; and thirdly, 
that its lexicon should be based on the large common property of words 
in the Aryan tongues. 
Your Committee repeats and insists that these are the indispensable 
requisites to any such proposed international tongue. It does not insist 
that the individual suggestions and recommendations contained in the 
report should be urged at all hazards. They were advanced rather as 
hints and illustrations, than as necessary conditions. Nevertheless, 
they were not offered hastily, and your Committee desires to refer to 
some of the main arguments advanced against them. This it is pre- 
pared for the better, through the complaisance of Professors Seiden- 
sticker and Easton, who have forwarded to the Committee, at its re- 
quest, abstracts of their remarks. 
Both these very competent critics attack the principle of deducing 
the grammar of the proposed language from the latest evolution of Aryan 
speech, to wit: the jargons. Professor Seidensticker accuses such a 
grammar of ‘‘ poverty,’ andadds: ‘‘A higher organism is of necessity 
more complex than a lower one.’’? Professor Easton denies that the 
later is the better form; or, to use his own words, ‘‘ that the change 
from an inflected to an analytic tongue marks an advance in psycho- 
logic apprehension.’’ 
These criticisms attack a fundamental thesis of your Committee, and 
as they doubtless express the views of very many, they must be met. 
In our opinion, they rest upon a radical misconception of the whole 
process of linguistic evolution. The crucial test of the development of 
language is that the sentence shall express the thought intended to be 
conveyed, and nothing more. When this can be attained simply by the 
order of words inthe sentence, without changes in those words, such 
changes are not merely useless, they are burdensome, and impede the 
mind. All paradigmatic inflections, whether of nouns, adjectives or 
verbs, are relics of lower linguistic organization, of a barbaric condi- 
tion of speech, and are thrown aside as useless lumber by the active 
linguistic faculty in the evolution of jargons. Compare a simple Latin 
sentence from Cicero with its translation into English, which is a 
jargon of marked type, and note how much is dropped, and with what 
judicious economy: Romanis equitibus litere afferuntur. ‘Letters are 
brought to the Roman Knights.’? One word here will serve to illustrate 
all. In Latin the speaker must think of the adjective Romanis as 
masculine, not feminine, or neuter; as plural, not singular; as a dative, 
not a nominative, accusative, or vocative form ; as agreeing in all these 
points with the noun it qualifies; and finally, as of the first, and not of 
the second, third, or of some irregular declension. All this needless 
labor is saved in the English adjective Loman by the method of posi- 
tion or placement. And so it is with every other word in this sentence. 
The evidence, both from theory and from history, is conclusive that 
