The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling

294 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
analysis and comprehension. Yet the author was sure that his fan­
tastic creation would have value far into the "distant future."
Weitling believed that all words or languages developed by
accident, then became a habit, and finally were improved and re­
corded by intellectuals and professors. He later supported his thesis
by using the experience of his own children, whose speech
he observed carefully. He attributed additional alterations in the
structure and form of a language to the work of such "speech¬
matadores" as the brothers Grimm and to mere printers' errors.
English, as far as its "logic" was concerned, impressed him as one
of the best of all languages, but he regarded its pronunciation as
"one of the most difficult" and positively ugly. He could find in
no existing language the precise imagery, or the tonal and written
form, which would justify its universal acceptance. The con­
fusion of genders in English, French, and German, the three lan­
guages he knew well, irritated him. In the German language, he
found heavy borrowings from other tongues and too few terms
which referred to the better and lovelier concepts of human inter­
course. He wanted both a logical and a beautiful language, and
he hoped to break down the prejudices based on language differ­
ences which divided peoples and nations.
In addition to objectives which were related to his notions about
a race united by language into one world, Weitling wanted to
produce a new form of expression that would be easy to learn,
"shorter, richer and better sounding," without the false and com­
plicated rules which characterized all existing tongues. He ex­
pected his new invention in the field of linguistics to do for
language what a new machine does for industry, namely, to
shorten the time of production from a thousand to ten thousand
times. He was convinced that the study of language must begin
with physiology, for before one could study the causes and effects
of language, one must learn how its concepts originated. Only
then would it be possible to formulate rules which had no ex­
ceptions, to get rid of such useless impedimenta as regular and
irregular verbs, and to enable the learner to discern at once from