Overview
International Communication: A Symposium on the Language Problem is a short collaborative volume in which three writers — the sociologist Herbert N. Shenton, the linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, and the Danish philologist Otto Jespersen — address, from different angles, the question of how peoples speaking different languages might communicate with one another. The book is not a single author’s monograph but a symposium: a brief preface by C. K. Ogden opens the volume, and each of the three contributors supplies one essay. Sapir’s contribution is therefore one part of a three-part argument, not a work of his own throughout.
The volume’s shared subject is the “language problem” understood in a practical and social rather than a purely grammatical sense: the barrier that linguistic diversity poses to international understanding, commerce, science, and goodwill, and the possible means of lowering that barrier through an international auxiliary language. None of the contributors proposes replacing national languages; the question throughout is the deliberate adoption of a second, auxiliary medium of communication across linguistic frontiers.
Ogden’s preface and Shenton’s “A social problem”
Ogden’s short preface frames the symposium, introducing the problem and the three contributors’ distinct approaches to it. Herbert N. Shenton’s opening essay, “A social problem,” treats the absence of a common medium of international communication as a social and practical difficulty rather than a linguistic curiosity. He sets out the case for regarding the language barrier as a matter of general public concern — a problem of international relations, of the waste of effort spent on translation and on the learning of foreign languages, and of the unequal advantage enjoyed by speakers of widely used languages — and argues that it deserves the attention of social scientists and of the public, not only of professional linguists. His essay serves as the volume’s statement of the problem to which the two following essays offer expert consideration.
Sapir, “The function of an international auxiliary language”
Sapir’s essay is the most purely linguistic of the three, and the most widely cited. He begins by granting the practical case for an auxiliary language and then asks what kind of language it would need to be, and what the study of language tells us about the prospects for constructing or choosing one.
A central argument of the essay is that the choice is not, as it is often put, between a “natural” and an “artificial” language. Every language is in some measure a historical accident, and a deliberately constructed international language, once adopted and used by a community of speakers, would undergo the same processes of growth, drift, and idiomatic development as any other tongue. Sapir insists that an auxiliary language must be genuinely learnable and serviceable — simple and regular in its grammar, but not so schematic that it becomes. He also treats the objection that an invented language would be dry, mechanical, or lacking in the expressive resources and associations of a national language, arguing that such qualities attach to any language once it has a living speech community behind it.
Sapir considers and rejects the alternative of simply adopting one of the great national languages — English, French, or another — as the international medium. Such a solution, he argues, would give an unfair and psychologically resented advantage to its native speakers and would carry with it a mass of irregularity, idiom, and national association irrelevant to the auxiliary function. A neutral, deliberately chosen medium, he concludes, is both more equitable and more efficient. He also reflects on the economy of time and effort involved in language learning, and on the light that the diversity and relativity of grammatical categories throws on the whole project: since languages classify experience differently, an international language must be built on categories as simple and as widely acceptable as possible. The essay is a defense of the feasibility and desirability of an international auxiliary language, written with Sapir’s characteristic attention to the psychological and cultural dimensions of speech.
Jespersen, “Interlinguistics”
Otto Jespersen’s closing essay approaches the matter from the side of “interlinguistics” — the study of the constructed international languages themselves and of the principles on which such a language should be built. Jespersen, a lifelong advocate of an international language and himself the author of a constructed system, surveys the history and variety of the projects that have been proposed, from the early “philosophical” languages through Volapük and Esperanto to the later reformed schemes, and assesses them by the criteria he takes to be essential: maximum regularity and simplicity of grammar, an international vocabulary chosen for recognizability across the major European languages, ease of learning, and naturalness of expression. He weighs the merits and defects of the existing systems, criticizes features he regards as illogical or needlessly difficult, and sets out the design principles that an acceptable auxiliary language ought to satisfy. His essay supplies the technical and historical complement to Shenton’s social argument and Sapir’s linguistic one.
Character of the book
Taken together, the three essays move from the social case (Shenton) through the linguistic and psychological case (Sapir) to the technical and historical case (Jespersen), with Ogden’s preface tying them together. The volume is brief and programmatic rather than exhaustive; it is a compact statement of the interwar case for an international auxiliary language, argued from sociology, general linguistics, and the comparative study of constructed languages respectively. Its interest lies both in the individual arguments — particularly Sapir’s discussion of the “naturalness” of a constructed language and of the cultural neutrality of an auxiliary medium — and in the way the three contributions complement one another as a collective plea for a rational solution to the problem of international communication.
The book, therefore, presents a multifaceted argument for the necessity and practicality of a constructed international auxiliary language. It addresses the inherent complexities of intercultural communication, particularly in a rapidly globalizing world, and proposes a linguistic solution that aims to overcome the barriers posed by the diversity of natural languages. The contributors collectively advocate for a system that is not only efficient for practical communication but also psychologically and culturally neutral, thereby avoiding the imposition of one culture’s linguistic framework onto others. The work emphasizes the potential for such a language to foster greater understanding and cooperation among nations by providing a common, accessible, and unbiased medium for exchange.
