Considerations of two orders seem now to be decisive in rejecting the claims of English and French, or, indeed, any other natural language, to be accepted as an international language: (1) The vast number of peculiarities, difficulties, and irregularities, rendering necessary so revolutionary a change for international purposes that the language would be almost transformed into an artificial language, and perhaps not even then an entirely satisfactory one. (2) The extraordinary development during recent years of the minor national languages, and the jealousy of foreign languages which this revival has caused. This latter factor is probably alone fatal to the adoption of any living language. It can scarcely be disputed that neither English nor French occupies to-day so relatively influential a position as it once occupied. The movement against the use of French in Roumania, as detrimental to the national language, is significant of a widespread feeling, while, as regards English, the introduction by the Germans into commerce of the method of approaching customers in their own tongue, has rendered impossible the previous English custom of treating English as the general language of commerce. The natural languages, it became realized, fail to answer to the requirements which must be made of an auxiliary international language. The conditions which have to be fulfilled are thus formulated by Anna Roberts:[244] "_First_, a vocabulary having a maximum of internationality in its root-words for at least the Indo-European races, living or bordering on the confines of the old Roman Empire, whose vocabularies are already saturated with Greek and Latin roots, absorbed during the long centuries of contact with Greek and Roman civilization. As the centre of gravity of the world's civilization now stands, this seems the most rational beginning. Such a language shall then have: "_Second_, a grammatical structure stripped of all the irregularities found in every existing tongue, and that shall be simpler than any of them. It shall have: "_Third_, a single, unalterable sound for each letter, no silent letters, no difficult, complex, shaded sounds, but simple primary sounds, capable of being combined into harmonious words, which latter shall have but a single stress accent that never shifts. "_Fourth_, mobility of structure, aptness for the expression of complex ideas, but in ways that are grammatically simple, and by means of words that can easily be analysed without a dictionary. "_Fifth_, it must be capable of being, not merely a literary language,[245] but a spoken tongue, having a pronunciation that can be perfectly mastered by adults through the use of manuals, and in the absence of oral teachers.