Interglossa, page 15

of China, and does not confront the Japanese or the Bantu with the arbitrary difficulties inherent in any agglutinative language based on Aryan models. In short, any language designed like V or E imposes the grammatical idiosyncrasies of a particular language family on everybody who uses it. Unlike its predecessors, designed exclusively, and admittedly,¹ to meet the taste of Western Europe and the English-speaking peoples, Interglossa is for a world in which China, Japan, and eventually the peoples of Africa, will march in step with the U.S.S.R. and with western civilization.²

(ii) Interglossa has a very rigid and straightforward word-order, with features designed to limit recourse to congested expressions. The pattern is the same for statements, questions, requests, commands, and for all classes of subordinate (including relative) clauses. The verbal stock-in-trade of Interglossa includes a small battery of empty words to act as signposts of sentence-landscape. For the same reason, certain classes of words have a characteristic final syllable, but these classes do not correspond to arbitrary non-semantic categories (parts of speech) defined by flexions. Interglossa has no flexions.

(iii) Interglossa has a vocabulary based on internationally current roots. It therefore has a Greek content enormous in comparison with that of earlier projects. Its very name symbolizes the fact that it is a Latin-Greek hybrid, as Novial is a Latin-Teutonic hybrid. Since we have many Latin-Greek alternatives in current international technical terms, it is possible to combine the claims of word-economy vis-à-vis self-expression (see pp. 22-23) with the advantages of a residual battery of synonyms for stylistic purposes.

Each word has a number, and if Interglossa sufficiently interests the public it will be easy to test out the claims to priority of two or more synonyms for each numbered pigeon-hole in the semantic schema which follows. Designing all the details of a fully-fledged interlanguage is not a one-man job. Mass observation on the basis of question-

¹ See Jespersen, An International Language, p. 53 and elsewhere.

² An isolating language has a further advantage. It is easy to make every element explicit through visual aids. Thus freedom from lifeless affixes simplifies the task of instruction through the medium of the universal picture-language isotype without recourse to exposition in the home vernacular. We can therefore contemplate production of manuals for a world-wide market. The history of Japanese writing sufficiently shows the difficulties which beset the attempt to adapt a pictographic script to a language of the agglutinative type.