I am a teacher of languages and have done nothing all my life but study and impart languages.  If I had to teach you gentlemen, say, French upon the theory that you were going on an important mission this day 12 months, and that it was absolutely necessary that you should speak French (or any other language that I could impart you) by that time, I would say it was impossible for a number of busy men to acquire a new language inside one year; that I could not guarantee useful results, but that if you would take two months to start with for the learning of Esperanto, then I might be able to teach you the other language in the rest of the time, because Esperanto is the best foundation for learning any language.  And, as I say, an English-speaking student, be he young or old, knowing Esperanto would more easily distinguish the parts of speech in English and possess a real and valuable “linguistic feeling” (which he now entirely lacks) because of his Esperanto.

The chairman.  Is Esperanto made up of the derivatives of the various languages?

Prof.  Christen.  I will explain that, if you like, in a very few words.  Esperanto is the work of a Polish scholar, Dr. Ludovico L. Zamenhof, who started with an inspired mind.  I should say he was a great genius.  He had studied a large number of languages, for, as a boy, nay, as a child in the cradle, he spoke four languages, because so many different languages were actually spoken in his home town.  Then at school he learned several more and it is due to this polyglotic experience and the evils caused daily by Babel in his own circle that as a child, almost, he conceived the idea of constructing a language that should at once and for all time put an end to a foolish and intolerable situation.  He must have been inspired in what he did, because he at once hit upon the only possible solution of the thing, and he hit upon it without knowing that scores of others, older and more learned, had tried the same thing and failed.  His first stroke of genius was in the composing of his entire vocabulary by borrowing all his words from well-known sources.  With the true insight of the genius he decided that the words of an artificial international language must be taken from international sources, and so he first of all hit upon the good idea to use first of all those words which are already common to most languages, and there are a great many more such words than we have dreamed of.  He decided that that should be the starting point of his world tongue, because everybody would know those words to start with.  Take the names of animals and produce that come from certain parts of the world and carry their names with them, such as elephant, tiger, lion, camel, and a great many more.  Take the rose:  the rose is a rose in every language; so an orange, a lemon, a nut, and tea, coffee, and tobacco, etc., are the same in most languages.  They may not be spelled the same or pronounced the same, but they are international, and therefore they are Esperanto.  That was the foundation of the vocabulary in Zamenhof’s new language—­take words that everybody would know and use them in Esperanto (6).