A dim perception of the requirements of the modern world has inspired the various schemes for a barbarized and simplified Latin. It is almost incredible that the authors of such schemes cannot see that debased Latin suffers from all the defects alleged against an artificial language, plus quite prohibitory ones of its own, without attaining the corresponding advantages. It is just as artificial as an entirely new language, without being nearly so easy (especially to speak) or adaptable to modern life. It sins against the cardinal principle that an auxiliary language shall inflict no damage upon any natural one. In short, it disgusts both parties (scholars and tradesmen), and satisfies the requirements of neither. Those who want an easy language, within the reach of the intelligent person with only an elementary school groundwork of education, don't get it; and the scholarly party, who treat any artificial language as a cheap commercial scheme, have their teeth set on edge by unparalleled barbarisms, which must militate most seriously against the correct use of classical Latin.
Such schemes are dead of their own dogginess.
Latin, pure or mongrel, won't do.
This chapter might be as short and dogmatic as Mark Twain's celebrated chapter upon snakes in Ireland. It would be enough to merely answer "No," but that the indefatigable Mr. Henderson, after running through three artificial languages of his own, has come to the conclusion that Greek is the thing. Certainly, as regards flexibility and power of word-formation, Greek would be better than Latin on its own merits. But it is too hard, and the scheme has nothing practical about it.
Jingoes are not wanting who say that it is unpatriotic of any Englishman to be a party to the introduction of a neutral language, because English is manifestly destined to be the language of the world.
Reader, did you ever indulge in the mild witticism of asking a foreigner where the English are mentioned in the Bible? The answer, of course, is, The meek shall inherit the earth. But if the foreigner is bigger than you, don't tell him until you have got to a safe distance.
It is this attitude of self-assertion, coupled with the tacit assumption that the others don't count much, that makes the English so detested on the Continent. It is well reflected in the claim to have their own language adopted as a common means of communication between all other peoples.
This claim is not put forward in any spirit of deliberate insolence, or with the intention of ignoring other people's feelings; though the very unconsciousness of any arrogance in such an attitude really renders it more galling, on account of the tacit conclusion involved therein. It is merely the outcome of ignorance and of that want of tact which consists of inability to put oneself at the point of view of others. The interests of English-speaking peoples are enormous, far greater than those of any other group of nations united by a common bond of speech. But it is a form of narrow provincial ignorance to refuse on that account to recognize that, compared to the whole bulk of civilized people, the English speakers are in a small minority, and that the majority includes many high-spirited peoples with a strongly developed sense of nationality, and destined to play a very important part in the history of the world. Any sort of movement to have English or any other national language adopted officially as a universal auxiliary language would at once entail a boycott of the favoured language on the part of a ring of other powerful nations, who could not afford to give a rival the benefit of this augmented prestige. And it is precisely upon universality of adoption that the great use of an international language will depend.
To sum up: the ignorance of contemporary history and fact displayed in the suggestion of giving the preference to any national language is only equalled by its futility, for it is futile, to put forward a scheme that has no chance of even being discussed internationally as a matter of practical politics.
A proof is that precisely the same objection to an auxiliary language is raised in France—namely, that it is unpatriotic, because it would displace French from that proud position.
The above remarks will be wholly misunderstood if they are taken to imply any spirit of Little Englandism on the part of the writer. On the contrary, he is ardently convinced of the mighty rôle that will be played among the nations by the British Empire, and has had much good reason in going to and fro in the world to ponder on its unique achievement in the past. When fully organized on some terms of partnership as demanded by the growth of the Colonies, it will go even farther in the future. But all this has nothing to do with an international language. Howsoever mighty, the British Empire will not swallow up the earth—at any rate, not in our time. And till it does, it is not practical politics to expect other peoples to recognize English as the international language as between themselves.
There are, in fact, two quite separate questions:
(1) Supposing it is possible for any national language to become the international one, which has the best claims?
(2) Is it possible for any national language to be adopted as the international one?
To question (1) the answer undoubtedly is "English." It is already the language of the sea, and to a large extent the medium for transacting business between Europeans and Asiatic races, or between the Asiatic races themselves.1 Moreover, except for its pronunciation and spelling, it has intrinsically the best claim, as being the furthest advanced along the common line of development of Aryan language.2 But the discussion of this question has no more than an academic interest, because the answer to question (2) is, for political reasons, in the negative.
1Another argument is that based on the comparative numbers of people who speak the principal European languages as their mother-tongue. No accurate statistics exist, but an interesting estimate is quoted by Couturat and Leau (Hist. de la langue universelle), which puts English first with about 120,000,000, followed at a distance of 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 by Russian.
2This is explained in Part III., chap. i., q.v.
"You base your argument for an international language mainly on the operation of economical laws. Be consistent, then; leave the matter to Nature. By unlimited competition the best language is bound to be evolved and come to the top in the struggle for life. Let the fittest survive, and don't bother about Esperanto."
On a first hearing this sounds fairly plausible, yet it is honeycombed with error.
In the first place, it proves too much. The same argument could be adduced for the abandonment of effort of all kind whatever to improve upon Nature and her processes. "You can walk and run and swim. Don't bother to invent boats and bicycles, trains and aeroplanes, that will bring you more into touch with other peoples. Let Nature evolve the best form of international locomotion."
Again, Nature does not tend towards uniformity. She produces an infinity of variety in the individual, and out of this variety she selects and evolves certain prevailing types. But these types differ widely within the limits of the world under varying conditions of environment. What we are seeking to establish is world-wide uniformity, in spite of difference of environment.
Again, the argument confuses a sub-characteristic with an organism. A language is not an organism, but one of the characteristics of man. After the lapse of countless ages there are grey horses and black, bay and chestnut, presumably because greyness and blackness and the rest are incidental characteristics of a horse. No one of them gives him a greater advantage than the others in his struggle for life, or helps him particularly to perform the functions of horsiness.
Just in the same way a man may be equally well equipped with all the qualities that make for success, whether he speaks English or French, Russian or Japanese. It cannot be shown that language materially helps one people as against another, or even that the best race evolves the best language.1 Take the last mentioned. If there is one people on the face of the globe who rejoice in an impossible language, it is the Japanese. In the early days of foreign intercourse a good Jesuit father reported that the Japanese were courteous and polite to strangers, but their language was plainly the invention of the devil. To a modern mind the language may have outlived its putative father, but its reputation has not improved, so far as ease is concerned. Yet who will say that it has impaired national efficiency?
1Greece went down before Rome. Which was the better race, meaning by "better" the more capable of imposing its language and manners on the world? Yet who doubts that Greek was the better language?
The fact is, that for purposes of transaction of ordinary affairs by those who speak it as a mother tongue, one language is about as good as another. Whether it survives or spreads depends, not upon its intrinsic qualities as a language, but upon the success of the race that speaks it.1 There is, therefore, no presumption that the best or the most suitable or the easiest language will spread over the world by its own merits, or even that any easy or regular language will be evolved. Printing and education have altogether arrested the natural process of evolution of language on the lips of men. This is one justification for the application of new artificial reforms to language and spelling, which tend no longer to move naturally with the times as heretofore.
1A curious phenomenon of our day suggests a possible partial exception. In Switzerland French is steadily encroaching and bearing back German. Is this owing to the intrinsic qualities of French language and civilization? Materially, the Germans have the greater expansive power.
As regards free competition between rival artificial languages, the same considerations hold good. The worse might prevail just as easily as the better, because the determining factor is not the nature of the language, but the influence and general capacity of the rival backers. Of course a very bad or hard artificial language would not prevail against an easy one. But beyond a certain point of ease a universal language cannot go (ease meaning the ease of all), and that limit has probably been about reached now. Between future schemes there will be such a mere fractional difference in respect of ease, that competition becomes altogether beside the point. The thing is to take an easy one and stick to it.
One of the commonest arguments that advocates of a universal language have to face runs something like this:
"Yes, there really does seem to be something in what you say—your language may save time and money and grease the wheels of business; but, after all, we are not all business men, nor are we all out after dollars. Just think what a dull, drab uniformity your scheme would lay over the lands like a pall. By the artificial removal of natural barriers you are aiding and abetting the vulgarization of the world. You are doing what in you lies to eliminate the racy, the local, the picturesque. The tongues of men are as stately trees, set deep in the black, mouldering soil of the past, and rich with its secular decay. The leaves are the words of the people, old yet ever new, and the flowers are the nation's poems, drawing their life from the thousand tiny roots that twist and twine unseen about the lives and struggles of bygone men. You are calling to us to come forth from the cool seclusion of these trees' shade, to leave their delights and toil in the glare of the world at raising a mushroom growth on a dull, featureless plain that reaches everywhither. Modern Macbeths, sophisticated by your modernity and adding perverted instinct to crime, you are murdering not sleep, but dreams—dreams that haunt about the mouldering lodges of the past, and soften the contact with reality by lending their own colouring atmosphere. You are hammering the last nail into the coffin of the old leisurely past, the past that raised the cathedrals, to which taste and feeling were of supreme moment, and when man put something of himself into his every work."
The man must be indeed dull of soul who cannot join in a dirge for the beauty of the vanishing past. Turn where we may now, we find the same railways, the same trams, music-halls, coats and trousers. The mad rush of modernity with its levelling tendency really is killing off what is quaint, out of the way, and racy of the soil. But why visit the sins of modernity upon an international language? The last sentence of the indictment itself suggests the line of defence. "You are hammering the last nail into the coffin of the old, leisurely past...."
Quite so, you are.
The universal ability to use an auxiliary language on occasion rounds off and completes the levelling process. But the old leisurely past will not be any the less dead, or any the less effectually buried, if one nail is not driven home in the coffin. The slayer is modernity at large, made up of science, steam, democracy, universal education, and many other things—but especially universal education. And the verdict can be, at the most, justifiable, or at any rate inevitable, pasticide. You cannot eat your cake and have it; you cannot kill off all the bad things and keep all the good ones. With sterilization goes purification, pasticide may be accompanied by pasteurization. At any rate, "the old order changeth," and you've got to let it change.
The whole history of the "progress" of the world, meaning often material progress, is eloquent of the lesson that it is vain to set artificial limits to advancing invention. The substitution of cheap mechanical processes of manufacture for hand-work involved untold misery to many, and incidentally led to the partial disappearance of a type of character which the world could ill afford to lose, and which we would give much to be able to bring back. The old semi-artist-craftsman, with hand and eye really trained up to something like their highest level of capacity, with knowledge not wide, but deep, and all gained from experience, and not from books or technical education—this type of character is a loss. Many, with the gravest reason, are dissatisfied with the type which has already largely replaced it, and which will replace it for good or evil, but ever more swiftly and surely. But no well-judging person proposes on that account to forgo the material advantages conferred upon mankind by the invention of machinery. If the world rejects, on sentimental grounds, the labour-saving invention of international language, it will be flying in the face of economic history, and it will not appreciably retard the disappearance of the picturesque.
There is another type of argument which may also be classed as aesthetic, but which differs somewhat from the one just discussed. It emanates chiefly from literary men and scholars, and may be presented as follows:
"Language is precious, and worthy of study, inasmuch as it enshrines the imperishable monuments of the thought and genius of the race on whose lips it was born. The study of the words and forms in which a nation clothed its thoughts throws many a ray of light on phases of the evolution of the race itself, which would otherwise have remained dark. The history of a language and literature is in some measure an epitome of the history of a people. We miss all these points of interest in your artificial language, and we shall, therefore, refuse to study it, and hereby commit it to the devil."
This is a particularly humiliating type of answer to receive, because it implies that one is an ass. In truth the man who should invent an artificial language and invite the world to study it for itself would be a fool, and a very swell-headed fool at that. It seems in vain to point this out to persons who use the above argument; or to explain to them that they would be aided in their study of languages that do repay study by the introduction of an easy international language, because many commentaries, etc., would become accessible to them, which are not so now, or only at the expense of deciphering some difficult language in which the commentary is written, the commentary itself being in no sense literature, and its form a matter of complete indifference.
Back comes the old answer in one form or another, every variation tainted with the heresy that the language is to be studied as a language for itself.
Perhaps the least tedious way of giving an idea of this kind of opposition, and the way in which it may be met, is to give some extracts from a scholar's letter, and the writer's answer. The letter is fairly typical.
"My dear ——,
"Many thanks for your long letter on Esperanto.... According to the books, Esperanto can be learnt quickly by any one. This means that they will forget it quite as rapidly; for what is easily acquired is soon forgotten.... In my humble opinion, an Englishman who knows French and German would do much better to devote any extra time at his disposal to the study of his own language, which, I repeat, is one of the most delicate mediums of communication now in existence. It has taken centuries to construct, while Esperanto was apparently created in a few hours. One is God's handiwork, and the other a man's toy. Personally, any living language interests me more than Esperanto. I am sorry I am such a heretic, but I fear my love for the English language carries me away....
The points that rankle are artificiality and lack of a history.
Reply
"My dear ——,
"I really can't put it any more plainly, so I must just repeat it: we are not trying to introduce a language that has any interest for anybody in itself. An international language is a labour-saving device. The question is, Is it an efficient one? If so, it must surely be adopted. The world wants to be saved labour. It never pays permanently to do things a longer way, if the shorter one produces equally good results. No one has yet proved, or, in my opinion, advanced any decent argument tending to show, that the results produced by a universal language will not be just as good for many purposes1 as those produced by national languages. That the results are more economically produced surely does not admit of doubt.
1And those very important ones, relatively to man's whole field of activity.
'Personally, any living language interests me more than Esperanto.' Of course it does. So it does me, and most sensible people. But what the digamma does it matter to Esperanto whether we are interested in it or not? It is not there to interest us. The question is, Does it, or not, save us or others unprofitable labour on a large scale? Neither you nor most sane persons are probably particularly interested in shorthand or Morse codes or any signalling systems. Yet they bear up.
"Do try to see that we think there is a certain felt want, amongst countless numbers of persons, which is much more efficiently and economically met by a neutral, easy, international language, than by any national one. That is the position you have got to controvert, if you are seriously to weaken the argument in favour of an international language. If you say that it is not a want felt by many people, I can only say, at the risk of being dogmatic, that you are wrong. I happen to know that it is.1 The question then is, Is there an easy way of meeting that want? And the equally certain and well-grounded answer is, There is....
1I have before me a list of 119 societies, representing many different lines of work and play and many nations, who had already in 1903 given in their adhesion to a scheme for an international language. Technical terms alone (in all departments of study) want standardizing, and an international language affords the best means. The number of societies is now (1907) over 270.
"As to your argument that what is easy is more easily forgotten—it is true. But I think you must see that, neither in practice nor in principle, does it or should it make for choosing the harder way of arriving at a given result. Chance the forgetting, if necessary re-learning as required, and use the time and effort saved for some more remunerative purpose.
"'One is God's handiwork, the other a man's toy.' I should have said the first was man's lip-work, but I see what you mean. It is God working through his creature's natural development. The same is equally true of all man's 'toys.' Man moulded his language in pursuance of his ends under God. Under the same guidance he moulded the steam engine, the typewriter, shorthand, the semaphore, and all kinds of signals. What are the philosophical differentia that make Esperanto a toy, and natural language God's handiwork? Apparently the fact that Esperanto is 'artificial,' i.e. consciously produced by art. If this is the criterion, beware lest you damn man's works wholesale. If this is not the criterion, what is?
"'An Englishman who knows French and German would do much better to devote any extra time at his disposal to the study of his own language.' Yes—if his object is to qualify as an artist in language. No—if his object is to save time and trouble in communicating with foreigners. You must compare like with like. It is unscientific and a confusion of thought to change the subject-matter of a man's employment of his time on grounds other than those fairly intercomparable. You have dictated as to how a man should employ his time by changing his object in employing his time. This makes the whole discussion irrelevant, in so far as it deals with the comparative advantage of studying one language or the other.
"Time's up! I have missed my after-lunch walk, and I expect only hardened your heart.
And I had!
There is a broad, twofold distinction in the aims with which the study of foreign languages is organized and undertaken.
It serves: first, purely utilitarian ends, and is a means; secondly, the purposes of culture, and is an end in itself.
An international auxiliary language aims at supplanting the first type of study completely, and, as it claims, with profit to the students. The second type it hopes to leave wholly intact, and disclaims any attempt to interfere with it in any way. How far is this possible?
The answer depends mainly upon the efficiency of the alternative offered by the new-comer in each case as a possible substitute.
Firstly, if it is true that a great portion of the human race, especially in the big polyglot empires and the smaller states of Europe, are groaning under the incubus of the language difficulty, and have to spend years on the study of mere words before they can fit themselves for an active career, then the abolition of this heavy handicap on due preparation for each man's proper business in life will liberate much time for more profitable studies. It is certain that the majority of mankind are non-linguistic by nature and inclination rather than linguistic—i.e. that the best chance of developing their natural capacities to the utmost and making them useful and agreeable members of society does not lie in making all alike swallow an overdose of foreign languages during the acquisitive years of youth. By doing so, vast waste is caused, taking the world round. As to the attainment of the object of this first type of language study, not only is it as efficiently secured by a single universal language, but far more so. Ex hypothesi the object is utilitarian; the language is a means. Well, a universal language is a better means than a national one—first, because, being universal, it is a means to more; secondly, because, being easy and one, it is a means that more people can grasp and employ. In fact, it is in this field an efficient substitute; it saves much, without losing anything.
For the second type of language-study, on the other hand, where the end is culture and the language is studied for itself and in no wise as an indifferent means, a universal artificial language offers no substitute at all. This end is not on its programme. Why, then, should any language-study that is organized in view of culture be given up on its account?
It may, of course, be said that the time given to it by those who pursue culture in language will be taken from the time devoted to more worthy linguistic study, and will therefore prejudice the learning of other languages. This is a point of technical pedagogics or psychology. There is very good reason, from the standpoint of these sciences, to believe that a study of a simple type-tongue would, on the contrary, pay for itself in increased facility in learning other languages. But this is more fully discussed in the chapter for teachers (Part III., chap. ii.).
The question, however, is not in reality quite so simple as this. There is no water-tight partition between utilitarian and cultural language-study. They act and react upon each other. There really is some ground for anxiety, lest the provision of facilities for learning an easy artificial language at your door may prevent people from going out of their way to learn national ones, which would have awakened scholarly instincts in them. The cause of culture would thus sustain some real hurt.
The question is another phase—a wider and lower-grade phase—of the great compulsory Greek question at Oxford and Cambridge. It affects the masses, whereas the Greek controversy affects the few at the top; but otherwise the issue at stake is essentially the same.
In both cases the bedrock of the problem is this, Can we afford to put the many through a grind, which is on the whole unprofitable to them and does not attain its object of conferring culture, in order to uphold the traditional system in the interests of the few? In neither case do the reformers desire to suppress the study of the old culture-giving language; rather it is hoped that the interests of scholarly and liberal learning will benefit by being freed from the dead weight of grammar grinders, whose mechanical performance and monkey antics are merely a dodge to catch a copper from the examiners.
When Greek is no longer bolstered up by the protection of compulsion, some of the present bounty-fed (i.e. compulsion-fed) facilities for its study will no doubt disappear from the schools which are at present forced to provide them. With them will be lost some recruits who would have been led by the facilities to study Greek, and would have studied it to their profit. On the other hand, the university will be open to numbers of students who are at present shut out by the Greek tariff. Another barrier against modernity will go down, and democracy make another step out of the proverbial gutter towards the university.
Similarly, the possession of a universally understood medium of communication will in some cases deter people from making the effort to study real language, with all the treasures of original literature to which it is the key.
But—and this is the great point—it will open the cosmopolitan outlook to countless thousands who could never hope to grapple successfully with even one national language. This cannot be a small gain.
It all comes back to this—you cannot eat your cake and have it too. Il faut souffrir pour être belle. The international language has the defects of its qualities. But then its qualities are great, and the world is their sphere of utility.
This is a particularly unfortunate objection, because it displays a radical ignorance of the history of language, and of the conditions under which it develops.
In the first place, the whole tendency of language in the modern world is towards disappearance of local dialects, and their absorption into a uniform literary language. The dialects of England are almost dead before the onset of universal education, and the great work of Dr. Wright was only just in time to rescue them from oblivion. Even one generation hence it will be impossible to collect much of the local speech recorded in his dictionary. It is the same in Germany and everywhere, though, of course, all countries are not equally advanced in this respect. A standard form of words and grammar is fixed by print for the literary language, and when every one can read and write, it is all up with national evolution of language, such as has produced all national languages. A gradual change of the phonetic value given to the written symbols there may be. This has been pre-eminently the case in England, though even this will now be arrested by universal education. But a change of forms or of grammar can only be indefinitely slight and gradual. When it takes place, it reflects a common advance of the literary language, and not local or dialectical variation (though the common advance may have originally spread from one locality).
In the second place, dialects are variations that spring up under the stress of local circumstance in the familiar every-day unconscious use of a common mother tongue among people of the same race and inhabiting the same district. Now, these are the very circumstances in which an auxiliary international language never can, and never will, be used. The only exception is the case of people meeting together for the conscious practice of the language or using it in jest.
There are no occasions when an international language would be naturally used when any variation from standard usage would not be a distinct disadvantage as tending to unintelligibility. In short, a neutral language consciously learned as a means of communication with strangers is not on an equal footing with, or exposed to the same influences as, a mother tongue used by people every day under like conditions.
A cardinal point of difference is well illustrated by Esperanto. The whole foundation of the language, vocabulary, grammar, and everything else, is contained in one small book of a few pages, called Fundamento de Esperanto. No change can be made in this except by a competent elected international authority. Of course, no text-books or grammars will be authorized for the use of any nation that are not in accordance with the Fundamento. People will make mistakes, of course, just as they make mistakes in any foreign language, and they can help themselves out with any words from other languages, just as they do now when their French or German fails them. But the standard is always there, simple and short, to correct any aberration, and there is no room for any alterations in form or structure to creep in.
It is true that Esperantists refuse to make any change in their language at present, and this is found irritating by some able critics, who wrongly imagine that this attitude amounts to a claim of perfection for Esperanto. The matter may be easily put right.
The inadmissibility of change (even for the better) is purely a matter of policy and dictated by practical considerations. Esperantists make no claim to infallibility; they want to see their language universally adopted, and they want to see it as perfect as possible. Actual and bitter experience shows that the international language which admits change is lost. Universal acceptance and present change are incompatible. Esperantists, therefore, bow to the inevitable and deliberately choose to concentrate for the present on acceptance. General acceptance, indeed, while it imposes upon the present body of Esperantists self-restraint in abstaining from change, is in reality the essential condition of profitable future amendment. When an international language has attained the degree of dissemination already enjoyed by Esperanto, the only safe kind of change that can be made is a posteriori, not a priori. When Esperanto has been officially adopted and comes into wide use, actual experience and consensus of usage amongst its leading writers will indicate the modifications that are ripe for official adoption. The competent international official authority will then from time to time duly register such changes, and they will become officially part of the language.
Till then, any change can only cause confusion and alienate support. No one is going to spend time learning a language which is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow. When the time comes for change, the authority will only proceed cautiously one step at a time, and its decrees will only set the seal upon that which actual use has hit off.
This, then, is the explanation of the famous adjective "netuŝebla," applied by Dr. Zamenhof to his language, and so much resented in certain quarters. Surely not only is this degree of dogmatism amply justified by practical considerations, but it would amount to positive imprudence on the part of Esperantists to act otherwise. If the inventor of the language can show sufficient self-restraint, after long years spent in touching and retouching his language, to hold his hand at a given point (and he has declared that self-restraint is necessary), surely others need not be hurt at their suggestions not being adopted, even though they may in some cases be real improvements.
The following extracts, translated from the Preface to Fundamento de Esperanto (the written basic law of Esperanto), should set the question in the right light. It will be seen that Dr. Zamenhof expressly contemplates the "gradual perfection" (perfektigado) of his language, and by no means lays claim to finality or infallibility.
"Having the character of fundament, the three works reprinted in this volume must be above all inviolable (netuŝeblaj).... The fundament must remain inviolable even with its errors.... Having once lost its strict inviolability, the work would lose its exceptional and necessary character of dogmatic fundamentality; and the user, finding one translation in one edition, and another in another, would have no security that I should not make another change to-morrow, and his confidence and support would be lost.
"To any one who shows me an expression that is not good in the Fundamental book, I shall calmly reply: Yes, it is an error; but it must remain inviolable, for it belongs to the fundamental document, in which no one has the right to make any change.... I showed, in principle, how the strict inviolability of the Fundamento will always preserve the unity of our language, without however preventing the language not only from becoming richer, but even from constantly becoming more perfect. But in practice we (for causes already many times explained) must naturally be very cautious in the process of 'perfecting' the language: (a) we must not do this light-heartedly, but only in case of absolute necessity; (b) it can only be done (after mature judgment) by some central institution, having indisputable authority for the whole Esperanto world, and not by any private persons....
"Until the time when a central authoritative institution shall decide to augment (never to change) the existing fundament by rendering official new words or rules, everything good, which is not to be found in the Fundamento de Esperanto, is to be regarded not as compulsory, but only as recommended."
An attempt has been made in the preceding chapters to deal with the more important and obvious arguments put forward by those who will hear nothing of an international language. The objections are, however, so numerous, cover such a wide field, and in some cases are so mutually destructive, that it may be instructive to present them in an orderly classification.
| For there we have them all "at one fell swoop," | ||
| Instead of being scattered through the pages; | ||
| They stand forth marshalled in a handsome troop, | ||
| To meet the ingenuous youth of future ages. | ||
| Byron. | ||
Let us hope that they will die of exposure, like the famous appendix pilloried by Byron, and that the ingenuous one will be able to regard them as literary curiosities.
If the business of an argument is to be unanswerable, the place of honour certainly belongs to the religious argument. Any one who really believes that an international language is an impious attempt to reverse the judgment of Babel will continue firm in his faith, though one speak with the tongues of men and of angels.
Here, then, are the objections, classified according to content.
Objections to an International Language
I. Religious.
It is doomed to confusion, because it reverses the judgment of Babel.
II. Aesthetic and sentimental.
(1) It is a cheap commercial scheme, unworthy of the attention of scholars.
(2) It vulgarizes the world and tends to dull uniformity.
(3) It weakens patriotism by diluting national spirit with cosmopolitanism.
(4) It has no history, no link with the past.
(5) It is artificial, which is a sin in itself.
III. Political.
(1) It is against English [Frenchmen read "French"] interests, as diverting prestige from the national tongue.
(2) It is socialistic and even anarchical in tendency, and will facilitate the operations of the international disturbers of society.
IV. Literary and linguistic.
(1) Lacking history and associations, it is unpoetical and unsuited to render the finer shades of thought and feeling. It will, therefore, degrade and distort the monuments of national literatures which may be translated into it.
(2) It may even discourage authors, ambitious of a wide public, from writing in their own tongue. Original works in the artificial language can never have the fine savour of a master's use of his mother tongue.
(3) Its precisely formal and logical vocabulary and construction debauches the literary sense for the niceties of expression. Therefore, even if not used as a substitute for the mother tongue, its concurrent use, which will be thrust on everybody, will weaken the best work in native idioms.
(4) It will split up into dialects.
(5) Pronunciation will vary so as to be unintelligible.
(6) It is too dogmatic, and refuses to profit by criticism.
V. Educational and cultural.
(1) It will prejudice the study of modern languages.
(2) It will provide a "soft option" for examinees.
VI. Personal and particular.
It is prejudicial to the vested interests of modern language teachers, foreign correspondence clerks, interpreters, multilingual waiters and hotel porters.
VII. Technical.
This heading includes the criticisms in detail of various schemes—e.g. it is urged against Esperanto that its accent is monotonous; that its accusative case is unnecessary; that its principle of word-formation from roots is not strictly logical; that its vocabulary is too Romance; that its vocabulary is not Romance enough; and so forth.
VIII. Popular.
(1) It is a wild idea put forth by a set of cranks, who would be better occupied in something else.
(2) It is impossible.
(3) It is too hard: life isn't long enough.
(4) It is not hard enough: lessons will be too quickly done, and will not sink into the mind.
(5) It will oust all other languages, and thus destroy each nation's birthright and heritage.