UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 174, 25 July 1935, Page 6

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

POSSIBILITIES OF ENGLISH. To put words into their right places is easier in English, we arc told, than in any other language (says "The Times"), bccaxise of "the natural structure of normal English. It is usual to regard English as a very difficult language. A great deal of its difficulty obviously comes from its spelling. Being, moreover a living language, in constant use and growth ami already known to many 1>""™ of millions, it is both fitter and more likely than any dead language revived, or any new language made up for the purpose, to become the international language. If English in a simple form were generally learned in all foreign-speaking countries, each "itercstpolitics, trade, science, the cinema, and what not—would be able to build up on that foundation, or rather to set growing from that root the English that it needed; and in no hm<r time English might become the universal means of easy international communication, in which some sec the greatest power for the future peace and prosperity of the world. The care of the purity and the power of tiip language would still remain in the Eng-lish-speaking countries; and it is there that a sound knowledge of the basic principles •would be most needed. Those principles are two—to know your meaning, and to state it as simply as possible. There is a common delusion that the "plain man" uses simple language, and that authors, literary men, destroy simplicity. That is far from the truth in these days of much hasty writing and reading. It is to the professed authors at their best that we may look for precision, for order, lor clearness: it is they who take -most pains to find the right words and to put them in thoir right places. Swift and Mr. Shaw have been commended; and. throughout a long life of devotion to English literature, a man of letters, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, has both practised and preached that as the first duty. It is among the others, among men whose chief interest is not in the expression of their thought, that language is more likely to receive indifferent usage, because they do not trouble to see that the words they use* mean exactly what they want to say.