International Language | Page 4

in money; but modern economics recognizes the personal and social factor, and any obstacle to research is certainly a public loss.
But important as are these various spheres of action, an even wider international contact of thought and feeling is springing up in our days. Democracy, science, and universal education are producing everywhere similarity of institutions, of industry, of the whole organization of life. Similarity of life will breed community of interests, and from this arises real converse--more give and take in the things that matter, less purely superficial dealings of the guide-book or conversation-manual type.
(2) "Business," meaning commerce, in so far as it is international, may at present be carried on mainly in half a dozen of the principal languages of Western Europe. Even so, their multiplicity is vexatious. But outside the world of business other languages are entering the field, and striving for equal rights. The tendency is all towards self-assertion on the part of the nationalities that are beginning a new era of national life and importance. The language difficulty in the Austrian Empire reflects the growing self-consciousness of the Magyars. Everywhere where young peoples are pushing their rights to take equal rank among the nations of the world, the language question is put in the forefront. The politicians of Ireland and Wales have realized the importance of language in asserting nationality, but such engineered language-agitation offers but a feeble reflex of the vitality of the question in lands where the native language is as much in use for all purposes as is English in England. These lands will fight harder and harder against the claims to supremacy of a handful of Western intruders. A famous foreign philologist,[1] in a report on the subject presented to the Academy of Vienna, notes the increasing tendency of Russian to take rank among the recognized languages for purposes of polite learning. He is well placed to observe. With Russia knocking at the door and Hungary waiting to storm the breach, what tongue may not our descendants of the next century have to learn, under pain of losing touch with important currents of thought? It is high time something were done to standardize means of transmission. Owing to political conditions, there are linguistically disintegrating forces at work, which are at variance with the integrating forces of natural tendency.
[1]Prof. Shuchardt
From an economical point of view, a considerable amount of time, effort, and money must be unreproductively invested in overcoming the "language difficulty." In money alone the amount must run into thousands of pounds yearly. Among the unreproductive investments are--the employment of foreign correspondence clerks, the time and money spent upon the installation of educational plant for their production, the time and money spent upon translations and interpreters for the proceedings of international conferences and negotiations, the time devoted by professors and other researchers (often nonlinguists in virtue of their calling) to deciphering special treatises and learned periodicals in languages not their own.[1]
[1]These are some of the actual visible losses owing to the presence of the language difficulty. No one can estimate the value of the losses entailed by the absence of free intercourse due to removable linguistic barriers. Potential (but at present non-realized) extension of goodwill, swifter progress, and wider knowledge represent one side of their value; while consequent non-realized increase in volume of actual business represents their value in money. The negative statement of absence of results from intercourse that never took place affords no measure of positive results obtainable under a better system.
The tendency of those engaged in advancing material progress, which consists in the subjection of nature to man's ends, is to adapt more and more quickly their methods to changing conditions. Has the world yet faced in a business-like spirit the problem of wiping out wastage on words?
Big industrial concerns scrap machinery while it is yet perfectly capable of running and turning out good work, in order to replace it by newer machinery, capable of turning out more work in the same time. Time is money. Can the busy world afford a language difficulty?
(3) The proposition that it is economically sounder to carry on international intercourse in one easy language than in a large number of hard ones rests upon the principle that it does not pay to do a thing a hard way, if the same results can be produced by an easy way.
The whole industrial revolution brought about by the invention of machinery depended upon this principle. Since an artificial language, like machinery, is a means invented by man of furthering his ends, there seems to be no abuse of analogy in comparing them.
When it was found that machinery would turn out a hundred pieces of cloth while the hand-loom turned out one, the hand-loom was doomed, except in so far as it may serve other ends,