This entertaining book pretends to be a general defense of artificial languages and a particular defense of "Interlingua;' Peano's simplified Latin. It appears to have been written with enthusiasm, but the strange circumstance of the author having based her documentation exclusively on the articles contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica by Dr. Henry Sweet leads us to suppose that her enthusiasm is rather moderatе or fictitious. The author (and Dr. Henry Sweet) divide artificial languagеs into a prio­ri and a posteriori; that is, original and derived languages. The former are ambitious and impractical. Their superhuman goal is to classify, in a permanent fashion, all human ideas. They do not consider a definitive classification of reality to be impossible, and they plot dizzying inventories of the universe. The most illustrious of these rationalizing catalogs is undoubtedly that of John Wilkins, in 1668. Wilkins distributed the universe into forty categories, indicated by two-letter monosyllabic names. Those categories were subdivided into genuses (indicated by a consonant), and the genuses into species (indicated by a vowel). Thus de meant element, deb was fire, and deba a flame.

Two hundred years later, Letellier invented a similar process. A, in the international language he proposed, stood for animal, ab for mammal, abo for carnivore, aboj for feline, aboje for cat, abod for canine, abode for dog, abi for herbivore, abiv for equine, abive for horse, abivu for donkey. The languages composed a posteriori are less interesting. Of all of them, the most complex is Volapük. It was invented in 1879 by a German priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, in order to promote peace among nations. In 1880, he added the finishing touches and dedicated it to God. His vocabulary is absurd, but his ability to encompass many nuances in a single word merits some respect. Volapük is interminably abundant with inflections: a verb may have 505,440 different forms. (Peglidalöd, for example, means "You ought to be greeted.")

Volapük was displaced by Esperanto, Esperanto by Neutral Idiom, Neutral Idiom by Interlingua. The latter two -- "equitable, simple, and economical," according to Lugones -- are immediately comprehensible to those who know a Romance language. Here is a sentence written in Neutral Idiom:

> Idiom Neutral es usabl no sole pra skribasion, rna et pro perlasion; sikause in kongres internasional de medisinisti mi av intension sar ist idiom pro mie raport di maladrit "lupus," e mi esper esar komprended per omni medisinisti present.

[1939] [EW]