Volapiik,] : 16 
race would at once seize upon it, enrich it, mould it, and adapt it to all 
the wants of man, to the expression of all his loves and hates, his pas- 
sions and hopes. 
Your Committee closes with a reference to the remaining two 
tongues now claimants for universal adoption. 
The ‘ Pasilengua”’ (Gemeinsprache, ‘‘ Tongue of All’) was intro- 
duced by P. Steiner, in 1885, with a small grammar and dictionary, 
published inGerman. The ‘International Language” of Dr. L. Samen- 
hof, of Warsaw, is an arrival of the present year, and is explained by 
him in a small volume, issued in French, in his native city, under the 
pseudonym of ‘‘ Dr. ’Esperanto.”’ 
Both these have pursued the correct path in the formation of their 
vocabulary ; they both proceed on the plan of collecting all words com- 
mon to the leading Aryan languages, changing their form as little as 
possible consistently with reducing them to an agreeable phoneticism, 
and when the same word has acquired diverse significations, selecting 
that which has the broadest acceptation. The plan of Dr. Samenhof 
is especially to be recommended in this respect, and may be offered as 
an excellent example of sound judgment. It is remarkable, and re- 
markably pleasant, to see how easy it is to acquire the vocabulary of 
either of these writers, and this is forcible testimony how facile it 
would be to secure an ample and sonorous stock of words, practically 
familiar to us already, for the proposed Universal Tongue. 
Unfortunately, the alphabets of both employ various diacritical 
marks and introduce certain sounds not universal to the leading 
Aryan tongues. These blemishes could, however, be removed without 
much difficulty. 
It is chiefly in the grammar that both err from the principles strenu- 
ously advocated by your present Committee. The -asilengua has an 
article with three genders, to, ta, te, corresponding to the German der, 
die, das; it has also three case endings to the noun, besides the nomi- 
native form, which itself changes for singular and plural, masculine 
and feminine. In the verb the tenses are formed by suffixes, six for 
the indicative, four for the subjunctive; while a number of other sut- 
fixes indicate participles, gerunds, imperatives, ete. 
In the same manner, Dr. Samenhof expresses the relation of the ele- 
ments of the proposition in the sentence ‘+ by introducing prefixes and 
suffixes.”? “All the varying grammatical forms, the mutual relation 
of words to each other, are expressed by the union of invariable words”? 
(Langue Internationale, p. 18). He acknowledges that this is ‘*wholly 
foreign to the construction of* Kuropean [he means Aryan] languages,’? 
but claims that it yields a grammar of such marvelous simplicity that 
the whole of it could be learned in one hour. In reality, it is what is 
known to linguists as the agglutinative process, and is found in the 
Ural-Altaic tongues, in high perfection. 
It will be seen at once that the grammatic theories of both these 
[Jan. 6, 
cen Strititan alocet 
