There remains to be discussed a matter of very great importance for the phonetics of international language. Whilst all nations pronounce without difficulty a series of sounds in which the vowels alternate with single consonants, and almost all nations have no objections to certain groups of consonants which are easily pronounced (such as _tr_, _sp_, _bl_, etc.), the pronunciation of other heavier groups, especially at the end of words, presents the greatest difficulty to many nations. The French usually simplify too complicated groups by inserting an unwritten vowel (as, for example, in _Félix(e)_ _Faure_), Italians who speak English do almost the same thing in the case of such groups as _kstr_ (_Greek Street_) or _ksp_ (_sixpence_), and the phonetic usages of other nations do not permit even as many successive consonants as the Italians. In order to make matters as easy as possible for everybody, one must avoid the mistake of _Neutral Idiom_, many of whose words contained very heavy groups of final consonants, endeavouring rather to follow the example of Esperanto, which succeeded very cleverly by means of its predominance of vowel terminations in producing not only grammatical clearness, but also as easy and flowing a pronunciation as possible. In this way the language becomes musical and pleasant to the ear. We shall now proceed to the question of a vocabulary. In choosing the majority of his stems, Dr. Zamenhof had already followed the principle of maximum internationality, but the authors of _Neutral Idiom_ were the first to carry out this principle scientifically for the whole language. Their procedure was, however, somewhat superficial, since in each particular case they calculated the number of languages to which a given word was common. One must not count the languages (and Latin especially must not be counted along with the living languages), but the people who use them, for languages are not organisms which possess an individual existence independent of those who speak them. The proper rule, therefore, for determining the internationality of a word or stem is to count the number of people who understand it through their mother tongue. This definition of the principle of maximum internationality is simply a necessary consequence of the fundamental principle of the greatest facility for the greatest number. It is natural that each person would prefer the use of the greatest number of words which are familiar to him, and so, to be impartial, we must attach the same value to the individual preferences of the 120,000,000 who speak English as to those of the 75,000,000 Germans, the 70,000,000 Russians, or the 50,000,000 French or Spanish, etc. Even the languages spoken by the smaller nations must be taken into account in proportion to their numbers.