International Language, Past, Present & Future / With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar

by Walter John Clark

Again, take the whole question of the imitative use of language. In national literatures many a passage, poetry or prose, is heightened in effect by assonance, alliteration, a certain movement or rhythm of phrase. Subtle suggestion slides in sound through the ear and falls with mellowing cadence into the heart. Soothed senses murmur their own music to the mind; the lullaby lilt of the lay swells full the linked sweetness of the song.

The How plays fostering round the What. Down the liquid stream of lingual melody the dirge drifts dying—dying it echoes back into a ghostly after-life, as the yet throbbing sense wakes the drowsed mind once more. The Swan-song floats double—song and shadow; and in the blend—half sensuous, half of thought—man's nature tastes fruition.

Now, this verbal artistry, whereby the words set themselves in tune to the thoughts, postulates a varied vocabulary, a rich storehouse wherein a man may linger and choose among the gems

of sound and sense till he find the fitting stone and fashion it to one of those—

	jewels five-words long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever.

But the word-store of an international tongue must not be a golden treasury of art, a repository of "bigotry and virtue." On its orderly rows of shelves must be immediately accessible the right word for the right place: no superfluity, no disorder, no circumambient margin for effect. Homocea-like, it "touches the spot," and having deadened the ache of incomprehensibility, has done its task. "No flowers."

Naturally some peoples will feel themselves more cramped in a new artificial language than others. French, incomparably neat and clear within its limits, but possessing the narrowest "margin for effect," is less alien in its genius from Esperanto than is English, with its twofold harmony, its potentiality (too rarely exploited) of Romance clarity, and its double portion of Germanic vigour and feeling. Yet all languages must probably witness the obliteration of some finer native shades in the international tongue.

But we must not go to the opposite extreme, and deny to the universal language all power of rendering serious thought. Just how far it can go, and where its inherent limitations begin, is a matter of individual taste and judgment. There are Esperanto translations—and good ones—of Hamlet, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, the Aeneid of Virgil, parts of Molière and Homer, besides a goodly variety of other literature. These translations do succeed in giving a very fair idea of the originals, as any one can test for himself with a little trouble, but, as pointed out, they must come something short in beauty and variety of expression.

There is even a certain style in Esperanto itself in the hands of a good writer, of which the dominant notes are simplicity and directness—two qualities not at all to be despised. Further,

the unlimited power of word-building and of forming terse compounds gives the language an individuality of its own. It contains many expressive self-explanatory words whose meaning can only be conveyed by a periphrasis in most languages,¹ and this causes it to take on the manner and feel of a living tongue, and makes it something far more than a mere copy or barren extract of storied speech.