Unwarranted Conclusions

I would like to warn against unwarranted conclusions which might be drawn from Mr, Lojkine's reference to Esperanto at the N.Z.U.S.A. Congress, as reported in your issue last week. Languages such as Esperanto are word oriented but this is a deliberate policy followed because, like the insistence on having no exceptions and rules, it maximises the ease of learning the language. A medium which is to be useful as a second language for people of diverse linguistic backgrounds and with a wide range of intellectual capacity (not merely university graduates) must be one which does not require eighteen years for a professional linguist to gain "instinctive use" of it. To learn new forms of word order is much more difficult than to learn new words for old concepts. Mr. Lojkine's remarks provide a further argument for the choice of a deliberately planned language for international use since the criteria of excellence cannot be quite the same as for a national language which is learned from birth and becomes the very basis of a person's thinking.