37. Victor Hely, 1905—Esquisse d'une grammaire de la langue Internationale, 1st part: Les mots et la syntaxe (Langres).
38. Max Wald, 1906—Pankel (Weltsprache), die leichteste und kürzeste Sprache für den internationalen Verkehr. Grammatik und Wörterbuch mit Aufgabe der Wortquelle (Gross-Beeren).
39. Greenwood, 1906—Ekselsiore, the New Universal Language for All Nations: a Simplified, Improved Esperanto (London, Miller & Gill); Ulla, t ulo lingua ä otrs (The Ulla Society, Bridlington, 1906).
40. Trischen, 1907—Mondlingvo, provisorische Aufstellung einer internationalen Verkehrssprache (Pierson, Dresden).
III
the earliest british attempt
A perusal of the foregoing list shows that in the early days of the search for an international language the British were well to the fore. Of the British pioneers in this field the first two were Scots—a fact which accords well with the traditional enterprise north of the Tweed, and readiness to look abroad, beyond their own noses, or, in this case, beyond their own tongues. It is likewise remarkable that the British have almost dropped out of the running in recent times, as far as origination is concerned. Is this fact also typical, a small symptom of Jeshurun's general fatness? Does it reflect a lesser degree of nimbleness in moving with the spirit of the times?
Anyhow, in this case the Briton's content with what he has got at home is well grounded. He certainly possesses a first-class language. As a curious example of the quaint use of it by a scholar and clever man in the middle of the seventeenth century, the following account of Sir Thomas Urquhart's book may be of some interest.
Sir Thomas is well known as the translator of Rabelais; and evidently something of the curious erudition, polyglotism, and quaintness of conceit of his author stuck to the translator. This book is the rarest of his tracts, all of which are uncommon, and has been hardly more than mentioned by name by the previous writers on the subject.