The choice of the words for our neutral language is, therefore, a pure question of arithmetic. Statistics of the number of people who speak the different languages will not, however, furnish us with a complete solution of the problem. In the first place, there are to be found in the dictionaries technical words and special terms which are only known to a minority of each nation. In the second place, there occur cases where a word, though it does not belong to a language, is, nevertheless, known through one or more derivatives. For example, 100 is in English _hundred_, in German _hundert_, in Danish _hundrede_, and yet the root _cent_ (_zent_) has been long familiar to the world through the terms _per cent._ (G. _prozent_), _centesimal_, _centimetre_, _centennial_, _century_, _centenary_, G. _zentner_, Danish _centner_. In the third place, even when "the same word" belongs to several languages, it very often possesses different forms, due mostly to a different phonetic development, with the result that the choice of a proper form is very often a delicate matter. The sounds of the word "change," which the English and French write in the same way, are very different; but as we can employ neither the nasal vowel of the French nor the diphthong (_ei_) of the most usual English pronunciation, _chanj_ would appear to be the most convenient form for all. In very many cases it is possible to find a common denominator for the different forms. Had not in English and German the external form of many etymologically closely related words diverged so much that it is impossible to find a middle form (for example, water, _wasser_; tooth, _zahn_; speak, _sprechen_; soap, _seife_; week, _woche_), the Germanic element would have been the dominating one on account of the great number of those speaking these two related languages. Such being the case, the Romance element in English usually decides the matter in the majority of instances, since it coincides with the French, Spanish, and Italian, or at least with one of these languages, the result being that our language necessarily possesses a Romance form in a much higher degree than one might have thought. Another very important circumstance (which I have hinted at previously) acts in the same direction, the circumstance, namely, that numerous Latin derivatives have passed over into the Germanic languages even when the stem does not occur there. For example, German possesses the words _absentieren_, _abstinenz_, _artist_, _dentist_, _dental_, _moral_, _populär_, which greatly facilitate for a German the understanding of the words _absenta_, _abstenar_, _arto_, _dento_, _moro_, _populo_, although he does not possess them in his own language (with the exception of _pöbel_ = _populacho_).