Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/289

Rh tongue overbalances practical and economic considerations, and hence the Flemish, Celtic and similar "revivals."

The proportion of those speaking a certain language is no less impracticable a basis for the choice of an international auxiliary medium. Leaving out the question of Asiatic tongues, in spite of their superiority in this regard, the selection is among those same reciprocally jealous nations, namely, Russian, French, English and German. Moreover, this method would be unfair to multitudes among nations speaking other languages. For even French (in France, Belgium and Switzerland) is spoken by only about forty-five millions among the three hundred and fifty millions of Europeans, English by about forty millions, and so on. If the calculation be made upon a wider basis, and the new world and the far east included, the additional figure for English would be more than neutralized by the additional figure for Spanish tongues and the entrance of the multitudinous non-Aryan as well as Aryan languages.

Let still a different basis for the selection be offered: Let that language be chosen which is the easiest of acquirement for all peoples to whom some other language than this is the native tongue. This is even more perplexing. The people of each nation, accustomed to the national language from infancy, are unconscious of its peculiarities and irregularities, its difficulties of pronunciation, inflection and syntax, and its various idiomatic expressions. Not aware that these are difficulties, they unhesitatingly declare their own language the easiest of all. Yet English-speaking people would debar German from the choice because its mastery takes far too long, and is woefully hampered by the umlaut vowels, the three categories of grammatical gender, the complicated verb and the troublesome word-order. Similar objections exist for the Scandinavian languages, while against Russian are its additional vowels and additional consonant combinations, its perfective verbs, its seven-case substantive, with changing declensions for noun, adjective and pronoun, and three classes of formal gender, its alphabet which like Greek and German would need transliteration into the more universal and therefore also more economical Roman characters. French would be dismissed because of the "French u," the nasals, the varying verbal forms, the grammatical gender, quite as annoying as the gender of three categories in the previously mentioned languages, inasmuch as the assignment of those categories is entirely arbitrary in each from the point of view of the others, and the irregular plurals, and the many fine distinctions which make complete mastery all but hopeless. Of Spanish and Italian much the same may be said. English is quite as much out of the question as any other language. A smattering of it, as of the others, is obtainable without great difficulty, but to learn it well, to overcome all of its difficulties, is another matter. English contains three consonant sounds peculiar to English alone, the w, the sound