Page:Dr. Esperanto's International Language. Introduction and complete grammar. Por angloj. Warsaw, 1889.pdf/16

— 16 — duce the following farrago of nonsense: „I; white; not; where; I; —; stick; dispassionate; property; to have; she, they, you; —; not; —?“ I need scarcely point out that a lexicon of a modern language is usually a tome of a certain bulk, and the search for any number of words one by one is in itself a most laborious undertaking, not to speak of the different significations attaching to the same word amongst which there is but a bare possibility of the student selecting the right one. The international vocabulary, owing to the highly synthetic structure of the language is a mere leaflet, which one might carry in one’s note-book, or the waistcoat-pocket. Granted that we had a language with a grammar simplified to the utmost, and whose every word had a definite fixed meaning, the person addressed would require not only to have beforehand some knowledge of the grammar, to be able, even with the vocabulary at hand, to understand anything addressed to him, but would also need some previous acquaintance with the vocabulary itself, in order to be able to distinguish between the primitive word and its grammatically-altered derivatives. The utility, again, of such a language would wholly depend upon the number of its adepts, for when sitting, for instance, in a railway-carriage, and wishing to ask a fellow-traveller, „How long do we stop at —?“, it is scarcely to be expected that he will undertake to learn the grammar of the language before replying! By using, on the other hand, the international language, we are set in possibility of communicating directly with a person of any nationality,