In the preface to his famous dictionary Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote: “Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.” If that be true, it is not strange that man should so constantly seek to improve the instrument. We have the selective process by which worn-out words and idioms are dropped into the limbo of archaism and new coinages come into use. Then we have the attempts to supply new languages, ready-made. There was Volapük; and now comes Esperanto.
Professor J. L. Borgerhoff, of the Western Reserve University, sets forth in the Atlanta Constitution the claims of Esperanto as a world-language. After brief reference to former candidate languages, he says:
The latest attempt, and the one which bids fair to be final, is Esperanto, so called by its author, Dr. Zamenhof, a Russian physician, who under this pseudonym published scientific articles before he became famous as the inventor of an artificial language.
Zamenhof, like his predecessors in the same field, was struck by the useless wealth of idioms that divide the inhabitants of the earth and make international relations so difficult, while at the same time they are a prolific source of misunderstanding and enmity among the nations.
He was also convinced that the reason why the existing universal languages had failed in their purpose was that they were too difficult—almost as difficult as the natural ones. The cause of their difficulty lay in the grammar, which was too intricate, and in the vocabulary, which was far too varied. He forthwith composed a grammar which was simplicity itself; this he did by setting aside all rules not strictly needed for the construction of a logical sentence and by eliminating all exceptions. The few remaining grammatical principles may be learned in half an hour.
His next concern was the vocabulary. What makes the acquisition of a foreign vocabulary so hard to students is the variety of roots, the great number of different words. To take an instance from English, to express the various ideas suggested by the one conception of death, we have: dead, to die, deadly, and deathly, mortal, to kill, to murder, to assassinate, to suicide, to commit homicide, etc. What a cumbersome luxury of roots, and how discouraging to the foreigner who wishes to learn this language!
Number of Roots Reduced.
And yet English is one of the easiest of all European tongues. How to reduce this number of roots was the great problem before Zamenhof. He therefore took one out of a number, and by means of a system of suffixes and prefixes he made this one root do duty for all the others.
In this manner the Esperanto dictionary contains only about two thousand roots, yet they are sufficient to form, by means of derivation, a vocabulary large enough for all purposes.
But what makes matters simpler still, he chose his two thousand roots in such a manner that they appear familiar to all educated persons of European civilization, by selecting first those terms which are already in universal usage, like sport, toilet, train; then by taking words common to two or three leading languages, and finally by adding to these a small number of roots not international, but picked out judiciously from various idioms, so that any one, be he Slav, Teuton, or Latin, finds that Esperanto has a familiar appearance.