ABSTRACT
The international language should be viewed purely as a tool of communication, like language itself. The Middle Ages were satisfied with the Latin of scholarship, at least for what concerned western Europe. It was only when nationalism in the modern sense began to lift its head, and the vernaculars had gotten to usurp the place of international diplomatic and governmental Latin, that the idea occurred to Descartes and numerous others to create a language that would serve the purpose of international exchanges. From the time when the question began to be seriously discussed, back in the seventeenth century, until the 1920’s, language scholars, in their overwhelming majority, favored the creation or adoption of a common language for world intercourse. The great linguists of the past did not hesitate to put themselves in the forefront of reform movements in language which they deemed beneficial to mankind.
