Independent of the above application, which one may or may not consider practical, is the internationalisation of scientific publications by means of a universally understood auxiliary language, which is becoming every day more urgently necessary.
This problem, too, cannot be attacked until the concepts of all the sciences in question have received their proper designations. The existing dictionaries of international auxiliary languages contain mostly the expressions of daily life, so that at present these languages are mainly applicable only for such communications. Some success can indeed be obtained in the expression of the higher trains of thought of philosophical reasoning, but here already considerable uncertainty exists. It is clear, for instance, that a paper in organic chemistry can only be successfully written in the international language after the translations of the different names for substances occurring in different languages have been mutually agreed upon.
Consequently the working out of the concepts of the different sciences and the determination of their international designations is the very first task which must be performed before the further objects, international literature and international oral intercourse in science, can be considered. It is the duty therefore of the representatives of science who have joined the Uniono di l'Amiki di la Linguo Internaciona to apply themselves in the first place to this problem, since the further success of the whole question depends entirely on its at least provisional solution.
The first principle which must guide this work is undoubtedly the general principle of maximum internationality, which has been used in the construction of the auxiliary language. Its application is rendered easy by the fact that, owing to the use of Greek and Latin roots for the designation of scientific concepts, there is already present a far-reaching internationality, which must naturally be retained.
In the second place, it will not always be possible to employ in science the same expressions that are used in ordinary speech, because the effect of the latter is to produce a blunting of the precise connotation of concepts; whilst science, on the other hand, requires clearly defined concepts, to which must correspond equally distinct expressions.
In the third place, those words which occur frequently in combinations must be chosen as short as possible. Here I would not shrink from a very considerable mutilation of the most international forms. Such long names as wasserstoff or "hydrogen" cannot be permitted, and must be reduced to monosyllabic forms. Every chemical author must have been times without number annoyed by the terms of three and four syllables for the commonest elements, and this defect is common to all languages. The objection against such an artificial abbreviation, which is valid for the language of daily life, namely, that it increases the difficulty of the language for those of little education, does not hold in the case of science, since it is a matter of indifference to the beginner whether he learns the new name oxygen or oxo (or any other similar abbreviation), because in any case he must learn it by heart. Such a procedure satisfies also the second condition, as it facilitates most easily the giving of a special form to scientific terms, which is different from that of ordinary life.
In the fourth place, it will be advisable in cases where universally known symbols exist, which consist of letters or have been derived from these (such as certain mathematical symbols), to choose the name so that it begins with the same letter. For example, the constant of gravitation is now universally denoted by g, and the corresponding international word should therefore begin with G. It appears to me doubtful, however, whether this principle can be generally carried out. I have examined the names of the chemical elements with this intent, and have arrived at the conclusion that it would not work without doing considerable violence to general usage. For example, it would be scarcely possible to find an international name for chlor (chlorine) which, corresponding to the chemical symbol Cl, would begin with C, for the latter letter is pronounced ts, whilst the word chlor (with corresponding terminations) is international, and, according to its sound, must be written like kloro or in some similar way.
These are the formal suggestions which I should like to make with reference to the problem in hand; they are only intended to indicate how one might proceed, and are not to be regarded as either exhaustive or infallible. There arises now the second question as to how such work is to be organised.
As the same concepts occur in several related sciences, and must receive the same designations, it would not be practicable to entrust the construction of the vocabularies to special commissions for each particular science. It would be more advisable to appoint a certain number of persons to collect the material and to make out lists of the concepts for which terms are required, and then to appoint commissions representing a whole group of sciences to discuss the necessary principles, after which the details could be worked out and finally subjected to the examination and approval of the whole body. To make matters at once more definite, I think the exact sciences ought to be first taken into consideration, for in their case the fixation of concepts is most highly developed. There is no need for a replacement of the well-known Latin nomenclature employed in the descriptive sciences, nor would any attempt in this direction have any likelihood of success. We must look rather to the distant future, when all other sciences will have already adapted themselves to the international idiom for the translation of the Latin names into the forms of the international language (retaining the stems, however) in order to produce for æsthetic reasons a uniform system throughout the whole of science.
On the other hand, I consider it absolutely necessary to subject the concepts of logic and the theory of cognition to the same process of scientific delimitation and fixation. In the first place, these sciences belong, at least theoretically, to the exact sciences; and, in the second place, work in these departments of knowledge is rendered extraordinarily difficult by the fact that their concepts are expressed in the terms used in daily life, whose elastic nature constantly frustrates exact work.