PART I
THE DESIGN OF INTERGLOSSA

CHAPTER I
INTERGLOSSA AND ITS PREDECESSORS

What follows is the outline of a project for a new constructed auxiliary. The writer believes that the alternative to barbarism is repudiation of national sovereignties in greater units of democratic co-operation, and that day-to-day co-operation of ordinary human beings on a planetary scale will not be possible unless educational authorities of different nations agree to adopt one and the same second language. The hope that it will be possible to induce educational authorities to do so is not Utopian. In many countries, some instruction in a second language is already part of the school curriculum for all children.

To fulfil the purpose stated above, a universal second language must be one in which children can progress towards proficiency more rapidly than they usually do. If it is to be a natural language, some simplified form of English, such as Ogden's Basic, has no serious competitor. What is not so certain is that it would be wise to choose a natural language. There is much force in the contention that adoption of a natural language as an auxiliary would give those who habitually use it as a mother-tongue a position of undue cultural privilege, that this in its turn would breed resentment against them as a linguistic Herrenvolk, and that such resentment would eventually defeat the end in view. A satisfactory auxiliary must be everybody's language because it is also nobody's language.

Whether such arguments do, or do not, prevail, one thing is clear. In assuming the task of making it easy for others to learn English, Ogden's pioneer labours have brought into glaring relief defects of previous projects for a constructed auxiliary. If the considerations stated above turn the scales in favour of a constructed auxiliary, Ogden will not have laboured in vain. By ingenious manipulation of essentially English syntax, he has pointed to possibilities which none of the pioneers of the International Auxiliary Language movement had taken into account. Proposals put forward so far have one or other of certain drawbacks which have been