attainment of a common language: to rationalize and make regular some existing language. Even if we agreed to adopt an existing language unaltered in itself, we should certainly get rid of its external difficulties: neither English nor French could become world-languages till they had got rid of their unphonetic spelling. But from this it would be a natural step to eliminate such grammatical difficulties as those of shall and will in English. If this were once agreed on, why not go a step further and get rid of all grammatical irregularities, making, for instance, better men into gooder mans, saw, seen into seed, and so on? The vocabulary would offer little obstacle to a parallel simplification. The self-evident method would be to select certain words as the foundation: to use them as root-words from which all the other words could be formed by derivation and composition. The inconvenient length of many of the words so formed would then suggest reducing the root-words to a monosyllabic form, with such modifications as would be required to prevent confusions of form or meaning, or to make their pronunciation easier.
It is on these principles that the well-known Volapük (q.v.) is constructed (1880)—the first artificial language that achieved a certain measure of success. But its roots are so disguised by arbitrary alterations that the English basis is not generally easy to recognize.
Volapük is mainly an adapted (borrowed) or a-posteriori language, as opposed to an original or a-priori one, although it belongs partly to the latter class as well. Its vocabulary is adapted, but its grammar is, to a great extent, original.
On the ruins of Volapük there rose Esperanto (q.v.), which by 1907 had become the most widely known and used of its numerous competitors. In its grammar Esperanto is partly original, partly borrowed. Its vocabulary is not based exclusively on that of any one language, but is selected from the chief European languages—including Latin and Greek—the words being generally unaltered except in spelling. The extensive use made of word-composition and of derivative prefixes and suffixes enables the author to reduce the number of his root-words to between two and three thousand. This does not include international literary, scientific and technical words such as professor, telegraph, which are not translated into Esperanto compounds or derivatives, but are simply incorporated into the language with the minimum of change.
The most formidable rival of Esperanto is unquestionably Idiom Neutral (1902). It is the collective work of the Akademi internasional de lingu universal, its real author being the director of the Akademi, M. Rosenberger, of St Petersburg. This academy was originally instituted by the two international Volapük congresses in 1887 and 1889: it now numbers among its members not only many former adherents of the defunct Volapük, but also many ex-Esperantists. The most marked feature of Idiom Neutral is that its vocabulary is definitely and consistently based on the principle of the maximum of internationality for the roots. A systematic examination of the vocabularies of the seven chief European languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin—showed that the number of international roots and words was much greater than had been supposed. There are many, such as apetit and tri, “three,” which occur in all seven; and it is only occasionally that it has been found necessary to adopt a word or root which occurs in less than four of them. The result is that instead of the unpleasant mixture of Romance elements with words taken arbitrarily from English and German which makes a great part of the vocabulary of Esperanto unintelligible to learners who know only one language, Idiom Neutral offers a vocabulary which is practically Romance-Latin. Thus the Idiom Neutral ornit, “bird,” and diurn, “day,” are almost self-interpreting even apart from any context, while the Esperanto bird and tag are unintelligible except to those who know English and German; and as the former is pronounced in Esperanto approximately as English beard, it is only intelligible to English speakers when written, not when spoken. In its grammar Idiom Neutral is almost entirely a-posteriori on a Romance basis, generally following French, sometimes in a somewhat slavish and unintelligent fashion, as in the use of eske as an interrogative particle, and of leplu as the mark of the superlative, although there is no definite article in Idiom Neutral. On the whole, there can be no doubt that Idiom Neutral is the simplest language that has yet been devised, and the most easily understood by any educated European; those who take several days to learn to read Esperanto find that they can read Idiom Neutral in as many minutes. Compare the following extract from a letter written by a Norwegian doctor to a colleague in Russia with the specimens given under the headings Volapük and Esperanto:
Idiom Neutral es usabl no sole pro skribasion, ma et pro perlasion; sikause in kongres sekuant internasional de medisinisti mi av intension usar ist idiom pro mie raport di maladitet “lupus,” e mi esper esar komprended per omni medisinisti present.
But the construction of such languages is by no means so easy as would at first sight appear. All a-posteriori systems are liable to various defects, the inevitable result of the conflict between their old and new elements, and the difficulties and embarrassments of an arbitrary selection. Thus Idiom Neutral, which ought to be the most perfect of these attempts, admits homonyms (kar = “carriage” and “dear,” adj.), alternative forms such as sientik and sientifik, and ambiguities such as filosofi, which is both an abstract noun and the plural of filosof, “philosopher.” Esperanto is better constructed in this respect; but it often only avoids confusion by arbitrary alteration of its words.
Another difficulty is that of national associations. No one likes to have his own language travestied. Thus Esperanto, which looks like bad Italian, is on that account less popular among the speakers of Romance languages (except in France) than elsewhere. It is a significant fact that none of the inventors of these languages base them on their native speech.
And then, these languages are not international after all. A really international language ought to be as acceptable to speakers of Arabic, Chinese or Japanese as to a European. Even from a European point of view they are not wholly international.
And they are not independent languages: they are only parasites—sickly parasites—on other languages. Their vocabularies are liable to incessant change and addition; and the meanings of their words are liable to be misunderstood in different ways by speakers of different languages. It is no answer to say that they are only auxiliary languages, which are not intended to supplant the national languages; for every artificial language must, at first at least, content itself with this rôle.
It is evident that the a-priori is the only basis which is really international, neutral and independent. And it is a significant fact that the earlier attempts were all a-priori. But all these attempts—beginning with Dalgarno's Ars signorum (1661) and Wilkins' well-known Real Character (1668)—have been failures. They were failures because the ground was not sufficiently prepared. A great part of Wilkins' folio is taken up with attempts to lay the necessary foundations. He saw—what none of his successors has yet seen—the necessity of a knowledge of the formation of sounds and the principles of their representation; and his sketch of phonetics is still valuable. His classification of the ideas expressed by language is an attempt to do what was afterwards done by Linnaeus and his successors and by Roget in the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
Wilkins was only a dilettante, because the greater part of science was then only in the dilettante stage. We have a right now to demand that our universal language shall be the work, not of dilettantes, but of experts: that is, of trained philologists.
Now that the ground has been prepared—now that the principles of linguistic science are the common property of the educated world, and the chief languages of the earth have been made accessible, and whole families of languages have been included in comparative grammars and dictionaries—we
