AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Idiom Neutral
The first decades after the birth of Esperanto contributed several books
on the question with new "languages," most of them written by former
Volapükists, and containing vocabularies based on West-European
languages with more or less artificial grammars. None of them had any
practical influence, but those of Lott, Liptay and Heintzeler deserve
mention here,
because they show a growing conciousness, that the task is not so much to
invent a language as to find out what is already in international use, and
to utilize that to the utmost extent. All the while some members of the
Volapük Academy were patiently and steadily at work under the
presidency of W. Rosenberger of St. Petersburg, and when finally they
brought out their language under the title of Idiom Neutral (1902),
it turned out to be something as different from Volapük as day is from
night. In the vocabulary, the maximum of internationality had been aimed
at, this being calculated by counting how many of the seven principal
languages contained a particular word. The result was a language that
could be read with comparative ease by every educated person. On the
whole, we have here a very conscientious piece of work, which has deeply
influenced all subsequent schemes, though as a system it gained very few
adherents, probably because its grammar was inadequate in various points,
and because too little had been done to avoid disturbing homophones;
moreover its many consonant-groups (e.g. nostr patr "our Father")
made the language far from euphonious.
Among numerous systems of the same type, but not worked out to the same
extent as Neutral, I shall here mention only H. Molenaar's Universal
(1906).
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