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¶ "The vagaries of German word order are not a sufficient reason for the vast gulf between the language which Germans use in the home and the jargon which German scholars write. Accepted standards of such scholarly composition are also the product of a social tradition hostile to the democratic way of life. Intellectual arrogance necessarily fosters long-winded exposition. . . ."*
¶ "Those who have been brought up to speak the Anglo-American language have one great linguistic advantage. Their word equipment makes it equally easy for them to take up the study of any Teutonic or any Romance language with a background of familiar associations, because modern English is a hybrid language."
¶ "It is a commonplace that Russian collectivism originated in a country which was in a backward phase of technical and political evolution. It is also, and conspicuously, true that it originated in a country which was in a backward phase of linguistic evolution. . . . There is no royal road to fluency in a language which shares the grammatical intricacies of Sanskrit, Lithuanian, or Russian. It is therefore impossible to give the reader who wishes to learn Russian any good advice except to take the precaution of being born and brought up in Russia. . . . Shortcomings of the Russian language . . . signify . . . the existence of a powerful social obstacle to cultural relations between the Soviet Union and other countries. . . ."
The Author. Frederick Bodmer is a 50-year-old Zurich University Ph.D. He was once a London correspondent for Swiss newspapers, then spent eleven years on Cape Town University's faculty. Communication troubles between South Africa's speakers of English and Afrikaans led him to think about an interlanguage. Later he and Hogben did some motorized pub-crawling from Aberdeen to London and back, planned The Loom between drinks. Bodmer wrote the book in Hogben's Highland croft, is now working on another book in London's intellectual Bloomsbury.
*First clause of the Atlantic Charter in Interglossa: U President de United States syn duco Commissari-pe, Mr. Churchill, ge electio e regi Crati de United Kingdom, pre acte unio. In English: "The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill representing H.M. Government in the United Kingdom, being met together. . . ." *A Loom example of German word order: "These by Th. Nöldeke, History of the Koran, Göttingen, 1860, for the first time put forward basic views on the language of the Koran are in K. Voller's Spoken and Written Language in Ancient Arabia, Strasbourg, 1906, by the wrong assumption, that the variant readings of the later Koran scholars, instead of [being] peculiarities of different dialects, rather only those of the original Koran language reflected, exaggerated, and distorted."