Susanne Townsend, age 12, of Brampton, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

IS THERE AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE?

A language called Esperanto is now used by people in about 90 different countries, and if it can be said that an international language exists, this would certainly be it. But there is no great flocking of people at the present time to help make it a universal way of speech.

The language was devised by a Polish physician named L.I. Zamenhof who wrote under the pen name of Dr. Esperanto.

The language uses simple, uniform structures. The accent is always on the next to the last syllable of a word and each letter has only one sound. Adjectives end in a, adverbs end in a and nouns end in o. Root words are taken from Indo European languages.