Page:Dr. Esperanto's International Language. Introduction and complete grammar. Por angloj. Warsaw, 1889.pdf/15

— 15 — guage, look for the words required, in the vocabulary itself; and for the terminations necessary to distinguish the grammatical forms, look in the grammatical appendix, under the respective headings of the parts of speech which you desire to express“. Since the explanation of the whole grammatical structure of the language is comprised in a few lines,—as a glance at the grammar will show,—the finding of the required terminations occupies no longer time than the turning up a word in the dictionary.

I would now direct the attention of my readers to another matter, at first sight a trifling one, but, in truth, of immense importance. Everyone knows the impossibility of communicating intelligibly with a foreigner, by the aid of even the best of dictionaries, if one have no previous acquaintance with the language. In order to find any given word in a dictionary, we must know its derivation, for when words are arranged in sentences, nearly every one of them undergoes some grammatical change. After this alteration, a word often bears not the least resemblance to its primary form, so that without knowing something of the language beforehand, we are able to find hardly any of the words occurring in a given phrase, and even those we do find will give no connected sense. Suppose, for example, I had written the simple sentence adduced above, in German: „Ich weiss nicht wo ich den Stock gelassen habe; haben Sie ihn nicht gesehen?“ Anyone who did not speak or understand German, after searching for each word separately in a dictionary, would pro-