Sometimes there exists a very troublesome rivalry between two words. In order to render the substantive "arm" (limb) the proper word would seem to be the German, English, and Scandinavian "arm," until one makes the discovery that the same root "arm" in the sense of "weapon" is still more international (E., F., I., S., supported by _armée_ G., E., F., R., _armata_ I., _armada_ S., _armieren_ G., etc.), which compels us for "arm" (limb) to have recourse to a Romance form. In other cases a more or less arbitrary change of one of the series of words appears to be the only means of avoiding confusing homonyms (namely, for door _pordo_ instead of _porto_, on account of _port_ = carry), but this procedure must be employed with great caution. Before everything else it is necessary to avoid all disguising of words, which makes them unrecognisable, aptly described by M. Blondel as a masquerade. This was set up as a general principle in Volapük, and Esperanto is by no means free from it. As an example of the conflicts which occur now and then may be quoted the expressions for the idea of "soul." "Soul" is the word which would be immediately understood by the greatest number of people, but we cannot employ the English diphthong _ōū_, as we must be very sparing in the use of diphthongs, since they cause very great difficulties in pronunciation. We cannot take over the word in the form _sol_, because we require this for the word "alone" (I. S. _solo_, internationally used in music, E. _sole_, F. _seul_). G. _seele_, supported by the Scandinavian _själ_, is not familiar to a sufficient number of people, and, besides, we require the word _sel_ for "saddle" (F. I. S.). The French word _âme_ will not do either, because it is not sufficiently well known outside France, and, besides, there is a difficulty here too, for _am-_ is absolutely required for the idea of "love" on account of F. I. S. and many derivatives in E., not to mention the god Amor. The use of the Latin _anim-_, which is the basis of the Romance forms, is impossible, since we cannot do without the adjectival termination _-al_, and _animal_ would then mean partly "relating to the soul," partly "animal," which cannot be permitted in an international language. We must resort to the device of changing _anim-_ a little, whereby we get _anmo_. This example will show how complicated the task frequently is of finding an international word which will give rise to no confusion or misunderstanding. The degree of internationality of the language of the Delegation will be evident from the statistics of Couturat; he counted the roots of the first dictionaries (5,379 in all) and found that of these the following numbers occur in the national languages:-- French 4,880, _i.e._ 91 per 100 Italian 4,454 " 83 " " Spanish 4,237 " 79 " " English 4,219 " 79 " " German 3,302 " 61 " " Russian 2,821 " 52 " "