THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 11581, 13 October 1900, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE.

la English to bo the universal language of the future? Several ancient and modem Ja&guageß havo aspired to that position. Assyrian. Greek, Latin, French have in tarns served 83 a diplomatic language of the world. There are many reasons which point to English as the international language "in days to come. Sir Charles Oppenheimer, in his report on the trade of Praukfort-on^Mnin, quotes from a lecture delivered in Ib9B by Dr. Dieiz, of the Berlin Ur.iwrM.y, before the Prussian Academy of {Science. Ihe Profess sor pom's to the woudeifnl diffusion of the Englwb. language U, rough Great Britain and her colonies and the United States, a circiimatenee which in itself constitutes a great claim to a still more pre-eminent pot-ition among the lan* guages of the world. But apart from this political prestige. English, thinks the Professor, is remarkably adapted by its very structure to be the 'Weltsprachn.' It has freed itself from ail snperflous bsllast of declensions and conjugations and genders. By its fusion of the Germanic and Latiu elements it represents 'two principal streams of culture." 'The young Englishman,' says Dr. Diets, 'unconsciously from early clildhood amalgamates valuable elements of cultivation dating back 1,000 years in his Germanic-Roman mixed which every other nation only acquires with great pains and at great, expense.' It is crus the English gramuier, though not so inconsistent as the French, can show no such logical structure as the German, which is essentially a homemade language. It is true also that to the Philogist the abrasion of case endings and the dropping of tense-inflex-ions apper 'unsightly o ses.' None the less, or rather the more so, from a practical pomt of view, English, thinks Dr Di'etz, is undoubtedly the language of the future. •