_Lingua Anglicana_
Apelles, striving to paint Venus’ face,
Before him ranged the Virgins of the place.
Whate’er of good or fair in each was seen,
He thence transferred to make the Paphian Queen;
His work, a paragon we well might call,
Derived from many, but surpassing all.
Such as that Venus, in whose form was found
The gathered graces of the Virgins round,
The English language shows the magic force
Of blended beauties cull’d from every source.
_The Alphabet_
“The Egyptian Origin of our Alphabet” was the subject of a paper read
before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. Charles E. Moldeuke, the
Egyptologist. Two large charts on the wall showed in forty parallel
columns the evolution of the various letters of the alphabet from the
Egyptian hieroglyph through the Phœnician, Hebrew, and Greek to the
Latin forms.
The common opinion, said the lecturer, that the Phœnicians invented the
alphabet, is entirely unfounded; they merely adopted twenty-two letters
from the Egyptians in 600 B.C. and then spread them as their own
alphabet through Greece and Italy. The letters we use now go back to
Egypt before the time of Moses and have represented practically the
sounds in the same order for six thousand years.
_Phonetic Changes_
No nation keeps the sound of its language unaltered through many
centuries; sounds change as well as grammatical forms, though they may
endure longer, so that the symbols do not retain their proper values;
often, too, several different sounds come to be denoted by the same
symbol; and in strictness the alphabet should be changed to correspond
to all these changes. But little inconvenience is practically caused by
the tacit acceptance of the old symbol to express the new sound; indeed,
the change in language is so gradual that the variations in the values
of the symbols is imperceptible. It is only when we attempt to reproduce
the exact sounds of the English language of less than three centuries
ago that we realize the fact that if Shakespeare could now stand on our
stage he would seem to us to speak in an unknown tongue; though one of
his plays, when written, is as perfectly intelligible now as then.
Professor W. D. Whitney remarks that the intent of the alphabet is to
furnish a sign for every articulate sound of the spoken language,
whether vowel or consonant; and its ideal is realized when there are
practically just as many written characters as sounds, and each has its
own unvarying value, so that the written language is an accurate and
unambiguous reflection of the spoken. This state of things is not wont
to prevail continuously in any given language; for, in the history of a
literary language, the words change their mode of utterance, or their
spoken form, while their mode of spelling, or their written form,
remains unaltered; so that the spelling comes to be historical instead
of phonetic, or to represent former instead of present pronunciation.
Such is, to a certain extent, the character of our English spelling, but
very incompletely and irregularly, and with intermixture of
arbitrariness and even blunders of every kind; it is an evil that is
tolerated, and by many even clung to and extolled, because it is
familiar, and a reform would be attended with great difficulties, and
productive for a time of yet greater inconvenience.
_Americanisms_
Richard Grant White classifies so-called Americanisms as follows: