Science Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is doing something sly here: he grants the Esperanto-and-friends crowd a narrow victory, then turns that victory into evidence of something they probably don’t want to hear. The line sounds like mild praise - “how much in common” - but the real charge sits in the framing: “rather to be wondered at” signals skepticism, as if the surprising part isn’t that these projects might work, but that their designers keep converging on the same assumptions without admitting it.

As a linguist, Sapir is attentive to patterns that exceed any one inventor’s ego. His point isn’t just that constructed languages share word lists; it’s that they share a “spirit of procedure” - a recurring engineering mindset about what language should be: regular, transparent, streamlined, liberated from the messiness of history and the politics of accent, class, and empire. The subtext is that even when you try to build a neutral language from scratch, you smuggle in the cultural defaults of your own milieu. Vocabulary converges because the pool of “international” roots is already biased toward European prestige languages; procedure converges because the modernist dream of rational design pushes everyone toward similar solutions.

Context matters: early 20th-century internationalism is in the air, alongside nationalism and colonial power. Sapir is watching utopian linguistic projects claim universality while quietly reproducing the same gatekeeping: whose “common” becomes the baseline. His wonder is a warning that planned neutrality often masks inherited norms, and that the politics of language don’t disappear just because the grammar is neat.