Page:An attempt towards an international language.pdf/14

 Obliged to economize our leisure in order to pursue perforce the study of several languages, we are not in position to dedicate a sufficient amount of it to any one tongue, so that while on the one side it is rare to know perfectly even one’s native language, so, on the other, no speech can he brought to perfection as it should be. This is the reason why we are so often obliged to appropriate, from foreign sources, words and phrases; if we do not, we run the risk of expressing ourselves inexactly, and even of thinking incorrectly; the relative poverty of each and every language must be taken into account, from which are alien missing the richness and volume desired to be employed in one or another manner. The surest means of remedying this defect seems to me to be simply the possession of only two languages, which would allow an easy mastery, and at the some time each tongue could progress towards the highest perfectioning and development. For speech has been the chief factor and motor in Civilization; by it men have been elevated above the level of the brute; the more a language is perfect, the more accessible is a nation to Progress. Indeed, the difference of languages is one of the most fruitful sources of the dimension and differences among nations, for, of all things that impress a stranger in a foreign land, the language is at once the ﬁrst and the greatest mark of distinction between him and them; not being able to understand or be understood, we naturally shun the contact of aliens. When we meet, instead of being able to draw instruction from the mutual interchange and comparison of opinions on political and social questions, matured after a long succession of ancestors in their modern homes, as soon as we open our months the ﬁrst sound we utter shows that we are strangers, the one to the other. Any person who has had the fortune to reside in a town in which he meets citizens of nations often hostile to each other, can easily understand and appreciate the enormous service that could be rendered