AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
An Existing Language?
A great many people will stop here and say: yes, we grant that it would be
desirable to have one single language used everywhere, but would it not be
best to select one of the existing languages and use that in all
communcations between two or more nations, even if no one of those
concerned knew that language as his own mother-tongue? The answer is that
a deliberate choice of any one language for such a purpose would meet with
unsurmountable difficulties on account of international jealousies.
Frenchmen and Germans alike would fight tooth and nail against a proposal
to make English a universally recognised international language, Frenchmen
and Englishmen against German, etc. - and quite naturally too, for such a
choice would mean an enormous handicapping of all other nations. Nor
would it be possible to make all nations agree on the selection of a
language of a smaller nation: visionaries have, as a matter of fact,
proposed Norwegian and Armenian! It would require a good deal of
compulsion to make people all over the world take up the study of either of
these languages, and to the nation thus put in the linguistically
most-favoured position it would be a doubtful boon to see its beloved
tongue mutilated and trampled under foot everywhere, as would inevitably be
the result.
One day, when I was discussing these matters with a famous Belgian
historian and complaining of the difficulty felt by men of science who
happened to be born in a small country, he said: Instead of writing in an
artificial language, it will be much better for you Danes to write in
French; if the matter is good enough, we shall read it with pleasure, even
if it be bad French. I replied that no one can help being to some extent
irritated to read his own language disfigured by faults in grammar and
phraseology, and that a Dane would find it much easier to learn to write
Ido (or now Novial) perfectly than to learn to write even very faulty
French; he would be spared that unpleasant feeling of inferiority which
he must always have when trying to write a serious book or paper in a
foreign national language.
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