An International Language
Otto Jespersen
Published: 1928
Categorie(s): Non-Fiction, Foreign language study
Introduction
This book is to be a plea for an artificial international auxiliary language,
and it will be well at the outset to see what is implied in these adjectives.
Artificial, i.e. made consciously by one man or a group of men, in contra-
distinction to such natural languages as English, French, etc., which have
been spoken for generations and whose development has chiefly taken
place without the individuals being conscious of any changes. But the
term “artificial” is apt to create a prejudice against the language we are
to deal with, and it will be my business in this book to show how very
“natural” such a language may be; I shall therefore prefer to speak of a
“constructed” language, and instead of terming the existing languages
natural I shall use the more appropriate term national languages.
The next adjective was international. That is to say that the language is
meant to be used not by any one nation or in any one country, but by in-
dividuals who though belonging to different nationalities have
something they wanted to communicate to one another.
Third: auxiliary. This implies that our international language is meant
to be only a sort of substitute for national languages whenever these are
not capable of serving as means of communication. It is not intended that
a new language should supplant the existing languages: no one in his
sober senses would think it possible to make all nations forget their own
languages and agree on one single substitute for all purposes. But what a
great many sensible men and women in many countries do think worth
working for, is a state of things in which an educated Englishman when
meeting an educated Spaniard or Dutchman or Bulgarian would be
pretty certain to be understood if he addressed him in a constructed lan-
guage adopted for that purpose - a state of thing also in which interna-
tional conferences and congresses on political or scientific or commercial
questions would be carried on freely without need of interpreters, and
all official documents relating to more than one state would be circulated
in a single language.
What then we interlinguists are thinking of, is not what Schleyer made
the boasting motto of his Volapük, “Menade bal, püki bal” (To one hu-
man race, one language), but rather what another inventor of an artificial
language, Bollack, took as his motto: The second language to everybody.
The new interlanguage would not infringe the sacred rights of the
mother-tongue, but be used only when two or more persons ignorant of
one another’s language had occasion to talk or to write to one another.1
3
1 In this book I often use the abbreviation I.A.L. for International Aux-
iliary Language, also sometimes I.L.
4
Need for an Interlanguage
An American may travel from Boston to San Francisco without hearing
more than one language. But if he were to traverse the same distance on
this side of the Atlantic, he would have a totally different story to tell.
Suppose he started from Oslo and journeyed to the South or South-East:
he would then hear perhaps Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German,
Czecho-Slovakian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek,
and then in Egypt Arabic and a little English - twelve different lan-
guages, of which the majority would be utterly unintelligible to him.
And yet he would not have heard half of the languages spoken in
Europe. The curse of Babel is still with us. How many people have been
in situations where they have felt the barriers of language a serious
drawback, where they have been desirous to communicate freely with
someone, ask questions, obtain or impart information, etc., which has
been rendered impossible by their own and the other party’s want of suf-
ficient linguistic knowledge! It is not very pleasant to be engaged in a
discussion that interests you, if you feel that while you have the best ar-
guments the other man has the whip hand of you, because the conversa-
tion is in his native language, in which you are able to express only what
you can, while he can say everything he wants to. In scientific con-
gresses, as Professor Pfaundler says, “only very few can take part in the
discussions, and many must be well content if they are able to under-
stand the usually rapidly delivered papers. Many an important criticism
is not made because one does not possess the ability to discuss a ques-
tion in a foreign language, and does not wish to expose oneself to the
chance of a rebuff, caused not so much by ignorance of the matter in
hand as by want of facility in expression. Every member of a congress
has noticed that whenever the language employed in the papers changes,
a considerable number of the audience leave with more or less noise, in
order to avoid being compelled to listen to a paper which they do not
understand.”
Sometimes in international discussions the three chief languages are
allowed, and each separate speech has to be translated into the two oth-
ers. I was present at such a congress in Copenhagen in 1910 and saw
how intolerable this dragging repetition must necessarily be, not least to
those who like myself understood English, French and German with per-
fect ease: anything like a real vivid discussion was excluded by the inev-
itable delays - not to mention the inadequacy of many of the extempore
translations.
5
With regard to printed works matters are somewhat better, but not
quite satisfactory. Most scientific men are nowadays able to read books
and papers on their own special subject in the three chief languages,
English, German and French; but that is no longer sufficient. One of the
most important features of the last hundred years is the nationality-
movement, in politics, in literature, in art, in everything. Even small na-
tions want to assert themselves and fly their own colours on every occa-
sion, by way of showing their independence of their mightier neigh-
bours. The growing improvement in higher education everywhere has
fortunately made it possible to print books on scientific matters even in
languages spoken by comparatively small nations. But what is a benefit
to these countries themselves, may in some cases be detrimental to the
world at large, and even to authors, in so far as thoughts that deserved
diffusion all over the globe are now made accessible only to a small frac-
tion of those that should be interested in them. In my own field, I have
had occasion to see the way in which excellent work written in Danish
which might have exerted a deep influence on contemporary linguistic
thought has remained practically unknown outside of Scandinavia. (See
my book Language under Rask and Bredsdorff; I might have mentioned
Westergaard and Thomsen as well.) The late secretary of the Berlin
Academy, the eminent classical scholar H. Diels, says: “Incalculable are
the intellectual losses incurred every year in consequence of the national
hobby of small, but highly gifted scientifically active peoples who insist
that scientific works (which cannot all of them be translated) should ap-
pear in their own, narrowly circumscribed languages.” For my own part,
though I have spent most of my life studying different languages, I have
sometimes been obliged to lay aside as unread books and papers which I
should have liked very much to study, but which happened to be written
in a tongue with which I was not sufficiently familiar.
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