have to delve more deeply into semantic issues which Jespersen and his predecessors side-stepped. Inevitably, we find ourselves gravitating away from the grammatical pattern of the Aryan family to a more universal idiom with features common to Chinese. The result is that learning a language so designed is a lively training in clear thinking of a kind which anyone can usefully undertake. In fact, the grammar of Interglossa, as is largely true of Basic, is semantics. Its author does not claim that it is easy to read a page of Interglossa at sight without previous information concerning its structure. It is designed with the aim of reducing to a minimum time and effort necessary for complete mastery of self-expression. From that point of view, all that the average intelligent person can achieve by months devoted to the study of E, I, I.N., P or N should be over in the same number of days devoted to Interglossa.

Here, as elsewhere, word-economy means numerical limitation of vocables necessary for unaffected discourse about matters of common interest between people of different nationalities. A stock-in-trade of word-material limited in this way will not necessarily offer a compact means of expressing every fine distinction found in a lexicon. To avoid misunderstanding about claims put forward for our essential word-list, it is well to remind ourselves of what Ogden has stressed in the exposition of his own method for adapting English to international use. Dictionary definitions give a false impression of what precision even well-educated people do— or can— achieve when they discuss matters outside a common domain of specialist knowledge. Part of the job of a dictionary is to divulge what limitations the specialist as such imposes on familiar words in a particular field of technical discourse. Such limitations do not and cannot impose a censorship on everyday speech. English-speaking people who are not biologists use and will go on using the term bug without concern for what limitations biologists impose on it in a discussion at the Royal Society. They use and will continue to use the term adultery with little, if any, regard for its unilateral definition in canon law. Where precision is essential at this level of communication, Interglossa prescribes international technical terms if such are available, local terms for local occurrences, or failing either, small residual batteries drawn up by specialists concerned by use of internationally current roots in accordance with rules for expansion of vocabulary in Chapter X. Professor Edgar de Wahl, author of a project which he has called Occidental, and Lott, the inventor of Mundolingue, have done the necessary spade work.