AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE
Objections to Constructed Languages
Objections are raised both by professional philologists (linguists) and
by laymen. Among the former I must here specially mention the two leaders
of German comparative linguistics, Brugmann and Leskien, but their attacks
were made at the time when Esperanto was beginning to gain favour, and
later languages have avoided not a few of the imperfections found fault
with by the two Leipzig professors. In 1925 Professor G. Güntert in
his Grundfragen der Sprachwissenschaft tried to reduce the whole
idea ad absurdum, but on the basis of so deficient a knowledge of
the facts of the case and with so prejudiced a mind that he proved less
than nothing. It would be a very great mistake to suppose that
professional philologists as a body are against constructed languages; it
would be much more correct to say that those among them who have gone most
into the question are the best disposed to them. I may mention here
among those who have spoken in favour of the idea in abstracto,
Schuchardt, Vilh. Thomsen and Meillet - three of the greatest stars in
the philological world - and among those who have actually taken part in
the International Language Movement, Baudouin de Courtenay, Ernst Kock,
Wallensköld, Collinson and Sapir, all of them university professors.
People who hear about constructed languages will often say that such a
language must be as lifeless as a dead herring, and that we may just as
well think of setting up an homunculus made in a chemical retort and
claiming for it the qualities of a living human being. Languages are not
organisms, and their "life" is not to be compared with that of animals or
plants. Forty years ago Schuchardt was able to make short work of this
objection by showing how much in the so-called natural languages was
really artificial, that is, due to conscious endeavours and conscious
selection, and yet was just as capable of "living" as anything else. What
we have to do is to study existing languages and their history so as to
find out the actual laws of their development and then build on what has
most vitality.
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James Chandler 1997.