Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/288

284 middle ages are as out of the question as the "modern" Latin which for want of a better medium is forced to serve in a multitude of scientific classifications and descriptions of the present day. This too is in regard to Latin as a written language. Speaking it is a still more difficult problem, one before which even the Latin specialist is ill at ease. It is evident that the idea of bringing Latin in any shape into real use as an auxiliary language in the busy modern world is absolutely hopeless.

What is true of Latin is equally true of Greek, with its own peculiar alphabet, used by no other language, and its even greater remoteness from present European tongues, in spite of the many derivatives from it in modern vocabularies, especially in technical terminology, and in spite of the fact that the idiom developed from ancient Greek is a spoken language to-day. The languages of the past can not serve the peoples' of the present in any immediate and practical capacity.

The next alternative is the consideration of the modern and living languages. For French was the accepted language of European courts, in times not yet remote, as well as the language of diplomacy and of polite literature; although, as in the case of Latin, this language too was semi-universal among chiefly the educated and politically powerful classes. Is it feasible to restore French to that high estate from which it has now fallen? Hardly so, with English a powerful competitor, and German vying with both. From this very competition it is clear that neither French nor any other national speech can to-day or to-morrow become the accepted auxiliary language. This idea, untenable now, may find acceptance in the far future, after the establishment of international unity and understanding, and after the forgetting of international jealousies and struggles for political preferment and commercial supremacy. But at present it is plainly "Utopian. No nation of to-day will yield to any one other nation the immense commercial and political advantage given by permitting the mother-tongue of that nation to become the accepted medium for international dealings. No American or Englishman would consent to an attempt to have German used exclusively, in his intercourse with Spanish-speaking peoples, or any other peoples, nor would he consent to French for such a sole medium. No German would accept French in this capacity, or English; nor would the Frenchman be a whit more generous. This same feeling, intermingled with a host of ancient grudges, would extend to the lesser nations whose languages meet with still less consideration in such theorizing.

In days of old, that nation politically most powerful might sometimes thrust its language upon conquered peoples, by sheer force of arms. This method is rather impracticable to-day, although a hint of it remains in the ineffectual struggles of the Poles to retain their own idiom in spite of the "official" tongues established among them, or of the Boers against the "official" English. Clinging to the native