Patro nia, kiu estas en la cxielo, sankta estu via nomo; venu regeco via; estu volo via, kiel en la cxielo, tiel ankaux sur la tero. Panon nian cxiutagan donu al ni hodiaux; kaj pardonu al ni sxuldojn niajn, kiel ni ankaux pardonas al niaj sxuldantoj; kaj ne konduku nin en tenton, sed liberigu nin de la malbono.
Comparing Volapük with Idiom Neutral, even this brief specimen is enough to show the main line of improvement. The framers of the latter had realized the fact that the vocabulary is the first and paramount consideration for an artificial language. It is hopeless to expect people to learn strings of words of arbitrary formation and like nothing they ever saw. Accordingly Idiom Neutral borrows its vocabulary from natural speech, and thereby abandons a regularity which may be theoretically more perfect, but which by arbitrary disfigurement of familiar words overreaches itself, and does more harm than good.
It is very instructive to note that a body of international language specialists were brought little by little to adopt an almost exclusively Romance vocabulary, and this in spite of the fact that they started from Volapük, whose vocabulary is constructed on quite other lines. In other points their language suffers from being too exclusively inspired by Volapükist principles, so that their recognition of the necessity of an _a posteriori_ vocabulary is the more convincing.
Given, then, that vocabulary is to be borrowed and not created anew, it is obvious that the principle of borrowing must be _maximum of internationality of roots_--i.e. those words will be adopted by preference which are already common to the greatest number of chief languages. Now, by far the greater number of such international words (which are far more numerous than was thought before a special study was made of the subject) are Romance, being of Latin origin. This is the justification of the prevalence of the Romance element in any modern artificial language. It has been frequently made a reproach against Esperanto that it is a Romance language; but the unanimous verdict of the competent linguists who composed the academy for the emendation of Volapük may be taken as final. They threshed the question out once for all, and their conclusion derives added force from the fact that it is the result of conversion.