In many places in the Dictionary, I find I have used the
expression "the law of Hobson-Jobson." The name is an
adaptation from the expression used by Col. Yule and
Mr. Burnell as a name for their interesting Dictionary of
Anglo-Indian words. The law is well recognised, though it has
lacked the name, such as I now venture to give it. When a word
comes from a foreign language, those who use it, not
understanding it properly, give a twist to the word or to some
part of it from the hospitable desire to make the word at home
in its new quarters, no regard, however, being paid to the
sense. The most familiar instance in English is
<i>crayfish</i> from the French <i>ecrevisse</i>, though it is
well known that a crayfish is not a fish at all. Amongst the
Mohammedans in India there is a festival at which the names of
"Hassan" and "Hosein" are frequently called out by devotees.
Tommy Atkins, to whom the names were naught, converted them
into "Hobson, Jobson." That the practice of so altering words
is not limited to the English is shown by two perhaps not very
familiar instances in French, where "Aunt Sally" has become
<i>ane sale</i>, "a dirty donkey," and "bowsprit" has become
<i>beau pre</i>, though quite unconnected with "a beautiful
meadow." The name "Pigeon English" is itself a good example.
It has no connection with pigeon, the bird, but is an
Oriental's attempt to pronounce the word "business." It
hardly, however, seems necessary to alter the spelling to
"pidjin."
It may be thought by some precisians that all Australasian
English is a corruption of the language. So too is
Anglo-Indian, and, <i>pace</i> Mr. Brander Matthews, there are
such things as Americanisms, which were not part of the
Elizabethan heritage, though it is perfectly true that many of
the American phrases most railed at are pure old English,
preserved in the States, though obsolete in Modern England; for
the Americans, as Lowell says, "could not take with them any
better language than that of Shakspeare." When we hear railing
at slang phrases, at Americanisms, some of which are admirably
expressive, at various flowers of colonial speech, and at words
woven into the texture of our speech by those who live far away
from London and from Oxford, and who on the outskirts of the
British Empire are brought into contact with new natural
objects that need new names, we may think for our comfort on
the undoubted fact that the noble and dignified language of the
poets, authors and preachers, grouped around Lewis XIV., sprang
from debased Latin. For it was not the classical Latin that is
the origin of French, but the language of the soldiers and the
camp-followers who talked slang and picked words up from every
quarter. English has certainly a richer vocabulary, a finer
variety of words to express delicate distinctions of meaning,
than any language that is or that ever was spoken: and this is
because it has always been hospitable in the reception of new
words. It is too late a day to close the doors against new
words. This <i>Austral English Dictionary</i> merely
catalogues and records those which at certain doors have
already come in.