AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE 285 



tongue overbalances practical and economic considerations, and hence 

 the Flemish, Celtic and similar " revivals." 



The proportion of those speaking a certain language is no less im- 

 practicable a basis for the choice of an international auxiliary medium. 

 Leaving out the question of Asiatic tongues, in spite of their supe- 

 riority in this regard, the selection is among those same reciprocally 

 jealous nations, namely, Eussian, French, English and German. More- 

 over, this method would be unfair to multitudes among nations speak- 

 ing other languages. For even French (in France, Belgium and 

 Switzerland) is spoken by only about forty-five millions among the 

 three hundred and fifty millions of Europeans, English by about forty 

 millions, and so on. If the calculation be made upon a wider basis, and 

 the new world and the far east included, the additional figure for Eng- 

 lish would be more than neutralized by the additional figure for Span- 

 ish tongues and the entrance of the multitudinous non-Aryan as well 

 as Aryan languages. 



Let still a different basis for the selection be offered : Let that lan- 

 guage be chosen which is the easiest of acquirement for all peoples to 

 whom some other language than this is the native tongue. This is even 

 more perplexing. The people of each nation, accustomed to the na- 

 tional language from infancy, are unconscious of its peculiarities and 

 irregularities, its difficulties of pronunciation, inflection and syntax, 

 and its various idiomatic expressions. Not aware that these are diffi- 

 culties, they unhesitatingly declare their own language the easiest of all. 

 Yet English-speaking people would debar German from the choice be- 

 cause its mastery takes far too long, and is woefully hampered by the 

 umlaut vowels, the three categories of grammatical gender, the compli- 

 cated verb and the troublesome word-order. Similar objections exist 

 for the Scandinavian languages, while against Eussian are its additional 

 vowels and additional consonant combinations, its perfective verbs, its 

 seven-case substantive, with changing declensions for noun, adjective 

 and pronoun, and three classes of formal gender, its alphabet which 

 like Greek and German would need transliteration into the more uni- 

 versal and therefore also more economical Eoman characters. French 

 would be dismissed because of the " French u," the nasals, the varying 

 verbal forms, the grammatical gender, quite as annoying as the gender 

 of three categories in the previously mentioned languages, inasmuch as 

 the assignment of those categories is entirely arbitrary in each from the 

 point of view of the others, and the irregular plurals, and the many 

 fine distinctions which make complete mastery all but hopeless. Of 

 Spanish and Italian much the same may be said. English is quite as 

 much out of the question as any other language. A smattering of it, as 

 of the others, is obtainable without great difficulty, but to learn it well, 

 to overcome all of its difficulties, is another matter. English contains 

 three consonant sounds peculiar to English alone, the w, the sound 



