International Language, Walter J. Clark [popular books of all time txt] 📗
- Author: Walter J. Clark
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Let us analyse that smile. It varies in intensity, ranging from the scathing sneer damnatory to the gentle dimple deprecatory. But in any case it belongs to the category of the smile that won't come off. I know that grin—it comes from Cheshire.
What, then, do we mean when we smile at a crank? Firstly and generally that we think his ideal impracticable. But it has been shown that an international language is not impracticable. This alone ought to go far towards removing it from the list of cranks' hobbies.
Secondly, we often mean that the ideal in question is opposed to common sense—e.g. when we smile at a man who lives on protein biscuits or walks about without a hat. We do not impugn the feasibility of his diet or apparel, but we think he is going out of his way to be peculiar without reaping adequate advantage by his departure from customary usage.
The test of "crankiness," then, lies in the adequacy of the advantage reaped. A man who learns and uses Esperanto may at present depart as widely from ordinary usage as a patron of Eustace Miles's restaurant or a member of the hatless brigade; but is it true that the advantage thereby accruing is equally disputable or matter of opinion? Is it not, on the contrary, fairly certain that the use of an auxiliary language, if universal, would open up for many regions from which exclusion is now felt as a hindrance?
Take the case of a doctor, scientist, scholar, researcher in any branch of knowledge, who desires to keep abreast of the advance of knowledge in his particular line. He may have to wait for years before a translation of some work he wishes to read is published in a tongue he knows, and in any case all the periodical literature of every nation, except the one or two whose languages he may learn, will be closed to him. The output of learned work is increasing very fast in all civilized countries, and therefore results are recorded in an increasing number of languages in monographs, reports, transactions, and the specialist press. A move is being made in the right direction by the proposal to print the publications of the Brussels International Bibliographical Institute in Esperanto.
Take a few examples of the hampering effect upon scholarly work of the language difficulty as it already exists. The diffusion of learning will, ironically enough, increase the difficulty.1 The late Prof. Todhunter, of Cambridge, was driven to learning Russian for mathematical purposes. He managed to learn enough to enable him to read mathematical treatises; but how many mathematicians or scientists (or classical scholars, for that matter) could do as much? And of how much profit was the learning of Russian, quâ Russian, to Prof. Todhunter? It only took up time which could have been better spent, as there cannot be anything very uplifting or cultivating in the language of mathematical Russian.
1By multiplying the languages used.
Prof. Max Müller proposed that all serious scientific work should be published in one of the six languages following—English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. But why should other nations have to produce in these languages? and why should serious students have to be prepared to read six languages?
All this was many years ago. The balance of culture has since then been gradually but steadily shifting in favour of other peoples. The present writer had occasion to make a special study of Byron's influence on the Continent. It turned out that one of the biggest and most important works upon the subject was written in Polish. It has therefore remained inaccessible. This is only an illustration of a difficulty that faces many workers.
Thirdly, there is a good large portion of the British public that regards as a crank anything not British or that does not benefit themselves personally. It really is hard for an Englishman, Frenchman, or German, brought up among a homogeneous people of old civilization, to realize the extent of the incubus under which the smaller nations of Europe and the polyglot empires further east are groaning. Imagine yourself an educated Swiss, Dutchman, or a member of any of the thirty or forty nationalities that make up the Austrian or Russian Empires. How would you like to have to learn three or four foreign languages for practical purposes before you could hope to take much of a position in life? Can any one assert that the kind of grind required, with its heavy taxation of the memory, is in most cases really educative or confers culture?
Think it out. What do you really mean when you jeer at an Esperantist?
An international language is not an attempt to replace or damage in any way any existing language or literature.
An international language is an attempt to save the greatest amount of labour and open the widest fields of thought and action to the greatest number.
Though the idea of an artificially constructed language to meet the needs of speakers of various tongues seems for some reason to contain something absurd or repellent to the mind of Western Europeans, there have, as a matter of fact, been various attempts made at different times and places to overcome the obvious difficulty in the obvious way; and all have met with a large measure of success.
The usual method of procedure has been quite rough and ready. Words or forms have been taken from a variety of languages, and simply mixed up together, without any scientific attempt at co-ordination or simplification. The resulting international languages have varied in their degree of artificiality, and in the proportions in which they were consciously or semi-consciously compiled, or else adopted their elements ready-made, without conscious adaptation, from existing tongues. But their production, widespread and continuous use, and great practical utility, showed that they arose in response to a felt want. The wonder is that the world should have grown so old without supplying this want in a more systematic way.
Every one has heard of the lingua franca of the Levant. In India the master-language that carries a man through among a hundred different tribes is Hindustanee, or Urdu. At the outset it represented a new need of an imperial race. It had its origin during the latter half of the sixteenth century under Akbar, and was born of the sudden extension of conquest and affairs brought about by the great ruler. Round him gathered a cosmopolitan crowd of courtiers, soldiers, vassal princes, and followers of all kinds, and wider dealings than the ordinary local petty affairs received a great stimulus. Urdu is a good example of a mix-up language, with a pure Aryan framework developed out of a dialect of the old Hindi. In fact, it is to India very much what Esperanto might be to Europe, only it is more empirical, and not so consciously and scientifically worked out.
Somewhat analogous to Urdu, in that it is a literary language used by the educated classes for intercommunication throughout a polygot empire, is the Mandarin Chinese. If China is not "polygot" in the strict technical sense of the term, she is so in fact, since the dialects used in different provinces are mutually incomprehensible for the speakers of them. Mandarin is the official master-language.
Rather of the nature of patois are Pidgin-English, Chinook, and Benguela, the language used throughout the tribes of the Congo. Yet business of great importance and involving large sums of money is, or has been, transacted in them, and they are used over a wide area.
Pidgin consists of a medley of words, largely English, but with a considerable admixture from other tongues, combined in the framework of Chinese construction. It is current in ports all over the East, and is by no means confined to China. The principle is that roots, chiefly monosyllabic, are used in their crude form without inflection or agglutination, the mere juxtaposition (without any change of form) showing whether they are verbs, adjectives, etc. This is the Chinese contribution to the language.
Chinook is the key-language to dealings with the huge number of different tribes of American Indians. It contains a large admixture of French words, and was to a great extent artificially put together by the Hudson Bay Company's officials, for the purposes of their business.
Quite apart from these various more or less consciously constructed mixed languages, there is a much larger artificial element in many national languages than is commonly realized. Take modern Hungarian, Greek, or even Italian. Literary Italian, as we know it, is largely an artificial construction for literary purposes, made by Dante and others, on the basis of a vigorous and naturally supple dialect. With modern Greek this is even more strikingly the case. As a national language it is almost purely the work of a few scholars, who in modern times arbitrarily and artificially revived and modified the ancient Greek.
There seems, then, to be absolutely no foundation in experience for opposing a universal language on the score of artificiality.
List of Schemes proposed
The story of Babel in the Old Testament reflects the popular feeling that confusion of tongues is a hindrance and a curse. Similarly in the New Testament the Pentecostal gift of tongues is a direct gift of God. But apparently it was not till about 300 years ago that philosophers began to think seriously about a world-language.
The earliest attempts were based upon the mediaeval idea that man might attain to a perfect knowledge of the universe. The whole sum of things might, it was thought, be brought by division and subdivision within an orderly scheme of classification. To any conceivable idea or thing capable of being represented by human speech might therefore be attached a corresponding word, like a label, on a perfectly regular and logical system. Words would thus be self-explanatory to any person who had grasped the system, and would serve as an index or key to the things they represented. Language thus became a branch of philosophy as the men of the time conceived it, or at all events a useful handmaid. Thus arose the idea of a "philosophical language."
A very simple illustration will serve to show what is meant. Go into a big library and look up any work in the catalogue. You will find a reference number—say, 04582.g. 35,c. If you learnt the system of classification of that library, the reference number would explain to you where to find that particular book out of any number of millions. The fact of the number beginning with a "0" would at once place the book in a certain main division, and so on with the other numbers, till "g" in that series gave you a fairly small subdivision. Within that, "35" gives you the number of the case, and "c" the shelf within the case. The book is soon run to earth.
Just so a word in a philosophical language. Suppose the word is brabo. The final o shows it to be a noun. The monosyllabic root shows it to be concrete. The initial b shows it to be in the animal category. The subsequent letters give subdivisions of the animal kingdom, till the word is narrowed down by its form
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