American Language (120 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
But this, I believe, is only a hope, and no man now born will ever see it realized. The trouble with all the “universal” languages is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail to meet the needs of a highly human world. People do not yearn for a generalized articulateness; what they want is the capacity to communicate with definite other people.
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To that end even Basic, for all its deficiencies, is better than any conceivable Esperanto, for it at least springs from a living speech, and behind that speech are nearly 200,000,000 men and women, many of them amusing and some of them wise. The larger the gang, the larger the numbers of both classes. English forges ahead of all its competitors, whether natural or unnatural, simply because it is already spoken by more than half of all the people in the world who may be said, with any plausibility, to be worth knowing. After the late war I went to Berlin full of a firm determination to improve my German, always extremely anæmic. I failed to get anywhere because virtually all the Germans who interested me spoke very good English. During the same time many other men were having the same experience — one of them being John Cournos, the English novelist. “Nothing annoyed me more,” he said afterward,
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“than the frequency with
which my inquiries of the man in the street for direction, made in atrocious German, elicited replies in perfect English.” A few years later Dr. Knut Sanstedt, general secretary to the Northern Peace Union, sent a circular to a number of representative European publicists, asking them “what language, dead or living or artificial” they preferred for international communications. Not one of these publicists was a native or resident of the British Isles, yet out of fifty-nine who replied thirty voted for English. Of the six Swedes, all preferred it; of the seven Norwegians, five; of the five Hollanders, four. Among the whole fifty-nine, only one man voted for Esperanto.
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But as English spreads over the world, will it be able to maintain its present form? Probably not. But why should it? The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants. Every successful effort at standardization, as Dr. Ernest Weekley has well said, results in nothing better than emasculation.
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“Stability in language is synonymous with
rigor mortis
.” It is the very anarchy of English, adds Claude de Crespigny, that has made it the dominant language of the world today.
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In its early forms it was a highly inflected tongue — indeed, it was more inflected than modern German, and almost as much so as Russian. The West Saxon dialect, for example, in the days before the Norman Conquest, had grammatical gender, and in addition the noun was inflected for number and for case, and there were five cases in all. Moreover, there were two quite different declensions, the strong and the weak, so that the total number of inflections was immense. The same ending, of course, was commonly used more than once, but that fact only added to the difficulties of the language. The impact of the Conquest knocked this elaborate grammatical structure into a cocked hat. The upper classes spoke French, and so the populace had English at its mercy. It quickly wore down the vowels of the endings to a neutral
e
, reduced the importance of their consonants by moving the stress
forward to the root, and finally lopped off many inflections
in toto
. By the time of Chaucer (1340?–1400) English was moving rapidly toward its present form. It had already become a virtually analytical language, depending upon word position rather than upon inflection for expressing meanings, and meanwhile the influence of French, which had been official from 1066 to 1362, had left it full of new words, and made it a sort of hybrid of the Teutonic and Romance stocks. It has remained such a hybrid to this day, and in some ways, indeed, its likeness to French, Italian and Spanish is more marked than its likeness to German. Once its East Midland dialect had been given preëminence over all other dialects by Chaucer and his followers, it began to develop rapidly, and in the time of Shakespeare it enjoyed an extraordinarily lush and vigorous growth. New words were taken in from all the other languages of Europe and from many of those of Africa and Asia, other new words in large number were made of its own materials, and almost everything that remained of the old inflections was sloughed off.
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Thus it gradually took on a singularly simple and flexible form, and passed ahead of the languages that were more rigidly bound by rule.
I think I have offered sufficient evidence in the chapters preceding that the American of today is much more honestly English, in any sense that Shakespeare would have understood, than the so-called Standard English of England. It still shows all the characters that marked the common tongue in the days of Elizabeth, and it continues to resist stoutly the policing that ironed out Standard English in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Standard English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious. Its vocabulary is patently less abundant than his own, it has lost to an appreciable extent its old capacity for bold metaphor, and in pronunciation and spelling it seems to him to be extremely uncomfortable and not a little ridiculous. When he hears a speech in its Oxford (or Public-School) form he must be a Bostonian to avoid open mirth. He believes,
and on very plausible grounds, that American is better on all counts — clearer, more rational, and above all, more charming. And he holds not illogically that there is no reason under the sun why a dialect spoken almost uniformly by nearly 125,000,000 people should yield anything to the dialect of a small minority in a nation of 45,000,000. He sees that wherever American and this dialect come into fair competition — as in Canada, for example, or in the Far East — American tends to prevail,
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and that even in England many of its reforms and innovations are making steady headway, so he concludes that it will probably prevail everywhere hereafter. “When two-thirds of the people who use a certain language,” says one of his spokesmen,
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“decide to call it a
freight-train
instead of a
goods-train
they are ‘right’; and the first is correct English and the second a dialect.”
Nor is the American, in entertaining such notions, without English support. The absurdities of Standard English are denounced by every English philologian, and by a great many other Englishmen. Those who accept it without cavil are simply persons who are unfamiliar with any other form of the language; the Irishman, the Scotsman, the Canadian, and the Australian laugh at it along with the American — and with the Englishman who has lived in the United States. As an example of the last-named class I point to Mr. H. W. Seaman, a Norwich man who had spent ten years on American and Canadian newspapers and was in practice, when he wrote, as a journalist in London. He says:
I speak for millions of Englishmen when I say that we are as sick and tired of this so-called English as you Americans are. It has far less right to be called Standard English speech than Yorkshire or any other country dialect has — or than any American dialect. It is as alien to us as it is to you. True, some of my neighbors have acquired it — for social or other reasons — but
then some of the Saxon peasants took pains to acquire Norman French, which also was imposed upon them from above.
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Mr. Seaman describes with humor his attempts as a schoolboy to shed his native Norwich English and to acquire the prissy fashionable dialect that passes as Standard. He managed to do so, and is thus able today to palaver on equal terms with “an English public-school boy, an Oxford man, a clergyman of the Establishment, an announcer of the British Broadcasting Company, or a West End actor,” but he confesses that it still strikes him, as it strikes an American, as having “a mauve, Episcopalian and ephebian ring.” And he quotes George Bernard Shaw as follows:
The English have no respect for their language.… It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.… An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club.
The views of Basil de Sélincourt, author of “Pomona, or The Future of English,” and of J. Y. T. Greig, author of “Breaking Priscian’s Head,” I have quoted in previous chapters. Both cling to the hope that some form of English denizened in England may eventually become the universal form of the language, but both are plainly upset by fears that American will prevail. “Right and wrong in such a matter,” says Mr. de Sélincourt, “can be decided only by the event. However it be, the United States, obviously, is now the scene of the severest ordeals, the vividest excitements of our language.… The contrasting and competitive use of their one language by the English and the Americans gives it a new occasion for the exercise of its old and noble faculty of compromise. In a period of promise and renewal, it was beginning to grow old; the Americans are young.… Its strong constitution will assimilate tonics as fast as friends can supply them, and take no serious harm. Changes are certainly in store for it.” Mr. Greig is rather less sanguine about the prospects of compromise between English and American. “It is possible,” he says gloomily, “that in fifty or a hundred years … American and not English will be the chief foreign language taught in the schools of Asia and the European Continent. Some Americans look forward to this without misgiving, nay, with exultation; and I
for one would rather have it fall out than see perpetuated and extended that silliest and dwabliest of all the English dialects, Public-School Standard.” To which I add an extract from an English review of Logan Pearsal Smith’s “Words and Idioms” (1925), quoted by the late Brander Matthews:
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It is chiefly in America — let us frankly recognize the fact — that the evolution of our language will now proceed. Our business here is to follow sympathetically what happens there, admitting once for all that our title to decide what English is is purely honorary. The more unmistakably we make the admission, the more influence we shall have; for in language it is the
fait accompli
that counts, and in the capacity for putting new words over, the Americans, if only because they have twice the population, are bound to win every time.
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The defects of English, whether in its American or its British form, are almost too obvious to need rehearsal. One of the worst of them lies in the very fact that the two great branches of the language differ, not only in vocabulary but also in pronunciation. Thus the foreigner must make his choice, and though in most cases he is probably unconscious of it, he nevertheless makes it. The East Indian, when he learns English at all, almost always learns something approximating Oxford English, but the Latin-American is very apt to learn American, and American is what the immigrant returning to Sweden or Jugoslavia, Poland or Syria, Italy or Finland certainly takes home with him. In Russia, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 8, American has begun to challenge English, and in Japan and elsewhere in the Far East the two dialects are in bitter competition, with American apparently prevailing. That competition, which has been going on in Europe since the World War, presents a serious problem to foreign teachers of the language. Says Dr. R. W. Zandvoort of The Hague:
A generation ago, this problem had scarcely arisen. Most Continental language teachers, if interrogated on the subject, would probably have stated that they recognized one standard only, that set by educated usage in the South of England, and that, except perhaps for scientific purposes, local variants did not come within their purview. Nor was this surprising, considering
the proximity of the Continent to England, the prestige enjoyed by Southern English within the British Isles, and the distance from that other center of Anglo-Saxon culture, the United States of America. Since the Great War, however, it has become increasingly difficult for European teachers and scholars to ignore the fact that different norms of English usage are being evolved in another hemisphere, and that these norms are beginning to encroach on territory where hitherto Standard Southern English has held undisputed sway. Not that they are gready concerned about the sort of English spoken in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada; these areas as yet exert no appreciable cultural influence upon the rest of the civilized world, and as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations are more or less amenable to the linguistic authority of the mother country. So long, too, as the attitude of educated Americans towards their own form of speech was expressed in the words of Richard Grant White that “just in so far as it deviates from the language of the most cultivated society of England, it fails to be English,” there was no need for Continental language teachers to take even American English seriously. But with its world-wide dissemination through business, literature, the talking film, the gramophone record, on one hand, and the growing determination of Americans to assert their independence in matters of language on the other, the situation is taking on a different aspect.
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Unluckily, neither of the great dialects of English may be described as anything approaching a perfect language. Within the limits of both there are still innumerable obscurities, contradictions and irrationalities, many of which have been noticed in the preceding chapters. Those in spelling are especially exasperating. “Eight long vowels,” says Dr. Arthur G. Kennedy,
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“are spelled in at least sixty-six different ways; hardly a letter in the alphabet could be named which does not represent from two to eight different sounds; at least six new vowel characters and five new consonant characters are needed; nearly a fifth of the words on a printed page contain silent letters; and the spelling of many words such as
colonel, one
and
choir
is utterly absurd.” “But spelling,” says Dr. George Philip Krapp,
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