hundreds of others on the lips of every schoolchild to-day come almost exclusively from Latin or Greek, more especially from Greek.

To the extent that Latin roots predominate in all the projects mentioned, all of them, like English itself, have a large stock-in-trade of truly international roots for which the beginner can readily make associations. The fact remains that most artificial languages have a large stock of national words presumably included to propitiate national sentiment of one sort or another. Thus NoviaI, the latest arrival, is essentially— like English— a Latin-Teutonic hybrid, and the Teutonic ingredients are sheer dead-weight to anyone who does not speak German, Dutch or a Scandinavian dialect. The same criticism does not apply to the flexionless, but otherwise scholarly, Latin of Peano. With due regard to the number of borrowed Greek words in classical Latin, P is open to a criticism applicable to every constructed language yet devised. None of them contains as high a proportion of Greek roots as English itself.

A truly international vocabulary must be the offspring of technology, and technology increasingly turns to Greek rather than to Latin for new material. Of the many who know that micro- means small, few know that parvus means the same. Current articles on nutrition and psychology in any woman's journal, or on photography and radio in any schoolboy's magazine, illustrate the daily invasion of everyday speech by Greek roots. Peano apart, authors who have put forward plans for constructed auxiliaries lived at a time— or like Jespersen formed their views at a time— when few scientists and technicians, still fewer linguists, anticipated the present tempo of infiltration of Greek roots into everyday life. Consequently artificial languages so far proposed scarcely touch the fringe of the problem of word-familiarity. In the simplest possible terms, our task is to assemble a vocabulary based on internationally current roots of which the semantic content is as transparent as that of geo-, aer-, tele-, phon-, graph-, micro-, phot- and the like. The possibility of achieving this result gives the problem of word-economy a new impetus. The success of our efforts in part depends on keeping the number of words required within the limits of equipment at our disposal.

The mere fact that there is already an international vocabulary of medicine, of agriculture, of horticulture, of navigation, of mensuration, of astronomy, of chemical manufacture, of engineering, of cartography and of mathematics, or that the number of such terms in everyday speech has increased by