This book was published in 1919 as yet another attempt to propose a world language. This particular copy was donated to a public library in 1925; but neither the donor nor anyone who referred to the book in the library seems to have got beyond page 57, since I had to slit the paper in order to read pages 58, 59, 62 and 63.Far too much of the book is given over to an attempt to trace the most ancient roots of words, mostly in Indo-European but sometimes in other languages. While there may be some genuine scholarship here, the method seems to owe more to mysticism than science.Where the author does actually describe the features of his language, he introduces as many difficulties as he removes; and he carries into the language aspects of English that are practically indefensible in a natural language, and totally out of place in a constructed language.First, he gives no thought to the repertoire of sounds that different linguistic backgrounds give us. In Lips-Kith, we must distinguish among the consonants s and th, where many languages have only one of these; and among l, n, r and w (for example the number 2 is "twi" and 3 is "tri". Oops!), where Europeans often have difficulty with r and w and Asians with l, n and r. Similarly he preserves almost intact the English vowel structure in which /i/ lengthens to /ai/ and /e/ to /i:/ (I'm probably mangling ASCII phonetics, but you should get the point). It comes as quite a surprise that /a/ lengthens not to /ei/ but to /a:/!At this point it is worth saying that nowhere in the book could I find either a list of the symbols you need to write Lips-Kith or the sounds you need to pronounce it. Scarisbrick claims that there is a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds (presumably graphemes and phonemes - there are plenty of two-letter graphemes for a start) but each of the five vowel letters performs at least two functions: there is a short vowel and a long one. The long vowel is marked with a macron (horizontal line over it), but not consistently, and the long U is often written "oo".Next, he preserves grammatical gender (M F and N) not only for nouns but for the third person of verbs. We therefore have five singular and five plural verb endings.On the subject of verbs, he has auxiliaries corresponding to English Shall and Will, and uses them to construct the future tense in exactly the same tangled way: Shall in the first person, and Will in the others (not noticing that the distinction had even in his day practically vanished, or that in Scots English Will was used for the first person and Shall for the others)Returning to grammatical gender, the author seems to believe that gender is inherent in many natural phenomena, and would like to use it for such things as electrical polarities. He has however made a concession to commonsense, and given his nouns a grammatical gender to correspond with sexual gender. However, the nouns are all formed from roots by adding a gender suffix, and Scarisbrick has straightaway made his language very difficult to bring into the machine age.If the root is of a verb, we have: Root + masculine suffix = agent; Root + feminine suffix = agent; root + neuter suffix = activity. So you cannot construct a neuter noun to be the thing that performs the action (like Typewriter, Computer and most recently Printer, all of which in English have moved in meaning from persons to things)The numbering system leaves a lot to be desired. I shall quote the first few examples (using a circumflex to represent the macron):0 = Nûn; 1 = Tûn; 2 = Twi; 3 = Tri; 4 = Pes; 5 = Pen; 6 = Sek; 7 = Sep; 8 = Nok; 9 = Nik; 10 = Tek; 11 = Tek-oon; 12 = Tek-wi; etc.Adjacent numbers are too similar. Twi and Tri are the worst, but Sek and Sep aren't much better. He could have had the decency to start each numeral with a different consonant! And note the two different spellings of the long U phoneme...Near the end, the book contains some texts translated into Lips-Kith. Ivan A Derzhanski (Journal of Planned Languages, 16th edition (1992), pp. 11-15, reproduced on the langmaker website ) has pointed out that they don't actually obey the grammar laid down in the book. Examples I've spotted: root stems without endings (rek, Tiw) being used as nouns; "wes" for was and "wess" for were - these are the present and imperfect stems of the verb to be, again without endings; and a tendency to use the past participle, rather than the past or perfect tense, whenever the English text has a verb ending in -ed.The more I study Lips-Kith, the more I am convinced that it is somewhat unsuited for its proposed rôle as a world language. Ironically, it would do quite well as a fantasy language - it even has a word for dragon (derkar)!