POST-WAR LANGUAGE
By PROFESSOR E. ALLISON PEERS
THE recent entry of Mexico into the War focuses attention once again on the twenty Latin-American republics, all of them alive to the dangers of Axis aggression and eleven of them now our active Allies. We may expect that still more, perhaps all, will eventually come into the War on the side of freedom, and we may be quite sure that, on the advent of peace, they will all play a prominent part in the building of the new world. The United States alone, committed both in theory and in practice to Pan- Americanism, will see to that ; and countries so rich in resources, so rapidly approaching political maturity and so passionately devoted to the freedom which they won for themselves at so great a cost, will certainly be warmly welcomed to collaboration by the British Commonwealth.
It is a striking reflection that, all the way down the Pan-American highway, which stretches for over 15,00o miles from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan, and throughout the length and breadth of the countries of America. North and South—an area many times the size of Europe—practically every individual understands, and the vast majority can speak, one of two languages: English or Spanish. Have we not in that fact a potential solution of the old problem of the International Language?
Every new war, arising in the first place from failures in mutual understanding and a lack of interpretation among the nations, raises the hope that, after it is over, some means may be found by which everybody in the world will understand everybody else ; and never has this hope been stronger than now, when there is a reasonable prospect of our being able to visit distant countries more easily than in the past. The solution may lie in an artificial language, but obviously a language which is already the native tongue of hundreds of millions and has its roots deep in past culture and history starts with a great initial advantage.
When world-freedom is won, world-indebtedness to Russia and China will be great, but greatest of all, for reasons that need no rehearsal here, will be indebtedness to the English-speaking nations everywhere. On the crest of such an overwhelming realisation as this it should not be hard to bring in English as the first modern foreign language to be taught in all other nations the world over, and also to establish it firmly as the language of international diplomacy. English, especially in its "basic" form, is the simplest of all fully-developed languages to learn to read, though much less so to speak. For speaking we can have recourse to the natural complement of English—Spanish.
The mother-tongue of nearly roo,000,000 people, most of them living in countries with immense possibilities for trade, and readily understood by some 50,000,000 people more whose native language is Portuguese, Spanish has the immense advantage of being as easy to speak as English is to read, which is saying a great deal. Its symbols correspond almost exactly to its sounds ; anyone who doubts this may consult a book of Spanish passages which prints the transcription of the International Phonetic Association opposite the Spanish text—he will find it as easy to read the one side as the other. Further, Spanish has no complicated French system of acute, grave and circumflex accents : there is only one graphic accent, used only when needed, and a child can tell why. Nor
has it as complicated inflexions or as troublesome rules for word- order as German. It represents few difficulties as to gender, for most of its nouns either end in -o and are masculine, or end in -a, d, ion, or -z and are feminine. Probably most children and many adults could learn as much as they would need for getting about the Spanish-speaking world after three or four hours' study a week for a year. For such a purpose a special intensive course would naturally be devised.
Our goal for international comprehension, then, might be this. All non-English-speaking countries to learn a basic or simplified English : wherever possible, their second modern language to be Spanish. All English-speaking countries to make their first foreign language Spanish—possibly in a simplified form for children who are non-linguistic or whose time for language-learning is short. The whole world would then have one language in common, and, even assuming that Romance countries did not also teach Spanish, as they almost certainly would, another five hundred millions of us would have a second line of attack—a language which would be understood by anything above a hundred and fifty million more. That is surely an ideal worth taking some pains to secure.
A strange ideal? No doubt: an England in which every school- boy and schoolgirl over fourteen is not struggling with French will take some getting used to. A Utopian ideal? I think not—provided 1 we are prepared to go to as much trouble and expense about peace as we have gone to about war. The real question is: Do we believe that we can pave the way to international understanding by learning to speak to each other freely? If we do, the sooner we get to work the better.
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