erman compared with French is
an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a
hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to
sacrifice. There has been in Germany a more powerful parallel to what
one may call the "honest Saxon" movement among the English, that queer
mental twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished preface
a "Foreword," and find a pleasurable advantage over their
fellow-creatures in a familiarity with "eftsoons." This tendency in
German has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom, and checked
the development of new words of classical origin. In particular it has
stood in the way of the international use of scientific terms. The
Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community of
technical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it is
frequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of his
subject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French,
than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the same
tongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not so
immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with their
Latin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are so
many "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free to
qualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their original
intention. In the growing and changing body of science this counts for
much. The indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromised
by its everyday relations, to the end of time it drags a lengthening
chain of unsuitable associations. And the shade of meaning, the limited
qualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a mere
twist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriously
overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis.... Moreover,
against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostile
people who fear German preponderance, and who have set their hearts
against its use. In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, and
Hungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as clear
a prospect of predominance.

These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they will
perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, and
perhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about the
Rhine. Politically this region lies now in six inde