Similarly, the possession of a universally understood medium of communication will in some cases deter people from making the effort to study real language, with all the treasures of original literature to which it is the key.
"Tis true, 'tis pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true.
But—and this is the great point—it will open the cosmopolitan outlook to countless thousands who could never hope to grapple successfully with even one national language. This cannot be a small gain.
It all comes back to this—you cannot eat your cake and have it too. Il faut souffrir pour être belle. The international language has the defects of its qualities. But then its qualities are great, and the world is their sphere of utility.
XIII
objection to an international language on the ground that it will soon split up into dialects
This is a particularly unfortunate objection, because it displays a radical ignorance of the history of language, and of the conditions under which it develops.
In the first place, the whole tendency of language in the modern world is towards disappearance of local dialects, and their absorption into a uniform literary language. The dialects of England are almost dead before the onset of universal education, and the great work of Dr. Wright was only just in time to rescue them from oblivion. Even one generation hence it will be impossible to collect much of the local speech recorded in his dictionary. It is the same in Germany and everywhere, though, of course, all countries are not equally advanced in this respect. A standard form of words and grammar is fixed by print for the
literary language, and when every one can read and write, it is all up with national evolution of language, such as has produced all national languages. A gradual change of the phonetic value given to the written symbols there may be. This has been pre-eminently the case in England, though even this will now be arrested by universal education. But a change of forms or of grammar can only be indefinitely slight and gradual. When it takes place, it reflects a common advance of the literary language, and not local or dialectical variation (though the common advance may have originally spread from one locality).
In the second place, dialects are variations that spring up under the stress of local circumstance in the familiar every-day unconscious use of a common mother tongue among people of the same race and inhabiting the same district. Now, these are the very circumstances in which an auxiliary international language never can, and never will, be used. The only exception is the case of people meeting together for the conscious practice of the language or using it in jest.