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 interest, and showed me that suffixes would give me power to make out of one word other words which need not be separately learned. This thought began to take complete possession of me, and all at once I began to feel the ground beneath my feet. A ray of light had fallen upon the terrible giant dictionaries, and they began to shrink rapidly before my eyes.

«The problem is solved,' I said then. I seized this idea of suffixes, and began to work hard in this direction. I understood how great a significance the full use of this power would have for the language. . . . Soon after that I had written the whole grammar and a small dictionary. . ..

“ Here is an appropriate place for me to say a few words about the material for the dictionary. Much earlier, when I had examined and rejected every non-essential from the grammar, I had desired to exercise the principles of economy for the words also. Convinced that it was a matter of indifference what form any particular word took, so long as it was agreed that it should express a given idea, I simply invented words, taking care that. they should be as short as possible and should not contain an unnecessary number of letters.

“But I immediately rejected this thought, for my own personal experiments proved that these invented words were very difficult to learn, and even more so to remember. I came to the conclusion that the material for the dictionary must be Romance-Teutonic, altered only so far as regularity and other important requirements of language demanded. Standing upon this ground, I soon observed that the present languages possessed an immense supply of words already international, which were known to