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the one thing needful at present is not a more highly perfected language to adopt, but the adoption of the highly perfected one we possess. By the admission of experts, no less than by the practical experience of great numbers of persons in using it over a number of years, it has been found adequate. Once found adequate, its absolute utility merely depends upon universal adoption.

With utility in direct proportion to numbers of adherents, every recruit augments its value—a thought which may well encourage waverers to make the slight effort necessary to at any rate learn to read it.

II
the question of principle—economic advantage of an international language

As stated above, the question of principle will be treated here from a purely economical point of view, since practical value, measured by saving of time, money, and effort, must be the ultimate criterion by which the success or failure of so far-reaching a reform as the introduction of an international, auxiliary language will be decided. The bearing of such a reform upon education, culture, race supremacy, etc., is not without importance; but the discussion of these points must be postponed as subsidiary.

Reduced to its simplest form, the economical argument is this:

(1) The volume of international intercourse is great and increasing.

(2) This intercourse is at present carried on in many different languages of varying degrees of difficulty, but all relatively hard of acquisition for those who do not know them as a mother-tongue. This is uneconomical.

(3) It is economically sounder to carry on international intercourse in one easy language than in a large number of hard ones.

(4) Therefore in principle an easy international language is desirable.

Let us glance at these four points a little more in detail.

No. 1 surely needs no demonstration. Every year there is more communication between men of different race and language. And it is not business, in the narrow sense of the term, that is exclusively or even chiefly affected by diversity of language. Besides the enormous bulk of pleasure travel, international congresses are growing in number and importance; municipal fraternization is the latest fashion, and many a worthy alderman, touring at the ratepayers' expense, must wish that he had some German in Berlin, or a little Italian in Milan. Indeed, it is at these points of international contact that language is a real bar, actually preventing much intercourse that would otherwise have taken place, rather than in business, which is organized in view of the difficulty. Then there is the whole realm of scientific and learned literature—work of which the accessibility to all concerned is of the first importance, but is often hindered because a translation into one language does not pay, or, if made, only reaches a limited public. Such bars to freedom of interchange cannot be reckoned in money; but modern economics recognizes the personal and social factor, and any obstacle to research is certainly a public loss.

But important as are these various spheres of action, an even wider international contact of thought and feeling is springing up in our days. Democracy, science, and universal education are producing everywhere similarity of institutions, of industry, of the whole organization of life. Similarity of life will breed community of interests, and from this arises real converse—more give and take in the things that matter, less purely superficial dealings of the guide-book or conversation-manual type.

(2) "Business," meaning commerce, in so far as it is international, may at present be carried on mainly in half a dozen of the principal languages of Western Europe. Even so, their multiplicity is vexatious. But outside the world of business other languages are entering the field, and striving for equal rights. The tendency is all towards self-assertion on the part of the nationalities that are beginning a new era of national life and importance. The language difficulty in the Austrian Empire reflects the growing self-consciousness of the Magyars. Everywhere where young peoples are pushing their rights to take equal rank among the nations of the world, the language question is put in the forefront. The politicians of Ireland and Wales have realized the importance of language in asserting nationality, but such engineered language-agitation offers but a feeble reflex of the vitality of the question in lands where the native language is as much in use for all purposes as is English in England. These lands will fight harder and harder against the claims to supremacy of a handful of Western intruders. A famous foreign philologist,1 in a report on the subject presented to the Academy of Vienna, notes the increasing tendency of Russian to take rank among the recognized languages for purposes of polite learning. He is well placed to observe. With Russia knocking at the door and Hungary waiting to storm the breach, what tongue may not our descendants of the next century have to learn, under pain of losing touch with important currents of thought? It is high time something were done to standardize means of transmission. Owing to political conditions, there are linguistically disintegrating forces at work, which are at variance with the integrating forces of natural tendency.

1Prof. Shuchardt

From an economical point of view, a considerable amount of time, effort, and money must be unreproductively invested in overcoming the "language difficulty." In money alone the amount must run into thousands of pounds yearly. Among the unreproductive investments are—the employment of foreign correspondence clerks, the time and money spent upon the installation of educational plant for their production, the time and money spent upon translations and interpreters for the proceedings of international conferences and negotiations, the time devoted by professors and other researchers (often nonlinguists in virtue of their calling) to deciphering special treatises and learned periodicals in languages not their own.1

1These are some of the actual visible losses owing to the presence of the language difficulty. No one can estimate the value of the losses entailed by the absence of free intercourse due to removable linguistic barriers. Potential (but at present non-realized) extension of goodwill, swifter progress, and wider knowledge represent one side of their value; while consequent non-realized increase in volume of actual business represents their value in money. The negative statement of absence of results from intercourse that never took place affords no measure of positive results obtainable under a better system.

The tendency of those engaged in advancing material progress, which consists in the subjection of nature to man's ends, is to adapt more and more quickly their methods to changing conditions. Has the world yet faced in a business-like spirit the problem of wiping out wastage on words?

Big industrial concerns scrap machinery while it is yet perfectly capable of running and turning out good work, in order to replace it by newer machinery, capable of turning out more work in the same time. Time is money. Can the busy world afford a language difficulty?

(3) The proposition that it is economically sounder to carry on international intercourse in one easy language than in a large number of hard ones rests upon the principle that it does not pay to do a thing a hard way, if the same results can be produced by an easy way.

The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language, like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends, there seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.

When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed, except in so far as it may serve other ends, antiquarian, aesthetic, or artistic, which are not equally well served by machinery. Similarly, to take another revolution which is going on in our own day through a further application of machinery, when it is found that corn can be reaped and threshed by machinery, that hay can be cut, made, carried, and stacked by machinery, that man can travel the high road by machinery, sooner or later machinery is bound to get the bulk of the job, because it produces the same results at greater speed and less cost. So, in the field of international intercourse, if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency and at less cost produce the same results as a multiplicity of natural ones, in many lines of human activity, and making all reserves in matters antiquarian, aesthetic, and artistic, sooner or later the multiplicity will have to go to the scrap-heap1 as cumbrous and out of date. It may be a hundred years; it may be fifty; it may be even twenty. Almost certainly the irresistible trend of economic pressure will work its will and insist that what has to be done shall be done in the most economical way.

1But only, of course, in those lines in which an international auxiliary language can produce equally good results. This excludes home use, national literature, philology, scholarly study of national languages, etc.

So much, then, for the question of principle. In treating it, certain large assumptions have been made; e.g. it is said above, "if an easy artificial language can with equal efficiency ... produce the same results," etc. Here it is assumed that the artificial language is (1) easy, and (2) that it is possible for it to produce the same results. Again, however easy and possible, its introduction might cost more than it saved. These are questions of fact, and are treated in the three following chapters under the heading of "The Question of Practice."

III
the question of practice—an international language is possible

The man who says a thing is impossible without troubling to find out whether it has been done is merely "talking through his hat," to use an Americanism, and we need not waste much time on him. Any one, who maintains that it is impossible to transact the ordinary business of life and write lucid treatises on scientific and other subjects in an artificial language, is simply in the position of the French engineer, who gave a full scientific demonstration of the fact that an engine could not possibly travel by steam.

The plain fact is that not only one artificial language, but several, already exist, which not only can express, but already have expressed all the ideas current in social intercourse, business, and serious exposition. It is only necessary to state the facts briefly.

First—Volapük.

Three congresses were held in all for the promotion of this language. The third (Paris, 1889) was the most important. It was attended by Volapükists from many different nations, who carried on all their business in Volapük, and found no difficulty in understanding one another. Besides this, there were a great many newspapers published in Volapük, which treated of all kinds of subjects.

Secondly—Idiom Neutral, the lineal descendant of Volapük.

It is regulated by an international academy, which sends round circulars and does all its business in Idiom Neutral.

Thirdly—Esperanto.

Since the publication of the language in 1887 it has had a gradually increasing number of adherents, who have used it for all ordinary purposes of communication. A great number of newspapers and reviews of all kinds are now published regularly in Esperanto in a great variety of countries. I take up a chance number of the Internacia Scienca Revuo, which happens to be on my table, and find the following subjects among the contents of the month: "Rôle of living beings in the general physiology of the earth," "The carnivorous animals of Sweden," "The part played by heredity in the etiology of chronic nephritis," "The migration of the lemings," "Notices of books," "Notes and correspondence," etc. In fact, the Review has all the appearance of an ordinary scientific periodical, and the articles are as clearly expressed and as easy to read as those in any similar review

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