Spokil, an International Language

Abstract

THIS work consists of eight pages of preface, of eighteen pages of “grammar,” of forty-four pages of exercises, and of 203 pages of a “Spokil”—French dictionary. The language consists of two kinds of words; those borrowed from existing languages with slight modifications and those coined on a system. The system is ingenious, but, in the opinion of the reviewer, quite unworkable. To take an instance:—To the letter “P” is attached various ideas; for example, those of motion, the foot, weight and the preposition “after.” Thus we find Pimo, heavy; Pino, light; for the letter n contradicts the letter m; Peme, to lead; Pene, to come; the idea of “leading” being antithetical to that of “coming”; Pleal, wood; and Plealta, absence of wood; the idea of absence or default arising from the affix “ta”; and so on. As in Esperanto, different parts of speech are distinguished by different vowels, as, for example, Arta, dirt, or a dirty object; Arte, to dirty; Arto, dirty; and Artu, dirtily. The language is in what may be termed the agglutinative stage; for we have Apafil, derived from Ap, to lead, af, off, and il, agent; the whole word means an abductor. It may interest chemists to know that the future name of butylene is to be eul vokilo; for e stands for carbon, u for hydrogen, l is terminative; vo means four, ki eight, and lo is the termination of a noun (?). English plurals in s are borrowed; likewise our classification of genders. The definite and indefinite articles are retained in the singular and plural, the latter in the plural in the sense of “the ones”; and the French “du” and “des” also appear in both numbers.