Languages for War and Peace

The list of those to whom the author is deeply indebted is long. The Japanese chapter is the personal offering of Professor Ralph Walker Scott, of Trinity College. The Malay section is the work of Dr. William Lowther. To both these sections the author's contribution was limited to details of revision and arrangement. In addition, it was deemed advisable to have most languages carefully checked by at least one cultivated native speaker, with general topics checked by scholars in the individual fields. (Many of these, experts sat in as informants on the author's courses, and to them he is doubly grateful). Furthermore, the basic vocabularies of six out of the seven major languages treated were constructed, on a model prepared by the author, with the assistance of willing collaborators, who gave unstintingly of their time and labor to the success of this. enterprise.

It is the author's desire, nevertheless, to assume personal responsibility for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in the work; this owing to the fact that space limitations and the method that necessarily had to be followed made it impossible to accept many of the excellent suggestions offered by the experts, which would have contributed enormously to the completeness of the work, but would also have lengthened it beyond the bounds deemed practical.

First Lieutenant Joseph B. Costanzo, M. I., U. S. A.; Professor Horatio Smith, of Columbia University; and Professor Harry Morgan Ayres, of Columbia, were of invaluable assistance to the author in the conception and planning of the entire work.

The first two chapters, dealing with linguistic families and linguistic geography, were painstakingly examined and revised by Professor Louis H. Gray, of Columbia's Department of Comparative Linguistics.

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