Foreigners' English.
I. A good deal has been incidentally heard of the habitual infelicity of
the natives of other European countries where it has been a question of
the treatment of our language either colloquially or with a literary
object. This was a source of difficulty which must have been generally
appreciated; but no one appears to have essayed to come to the succour of
the distressed, till in 1578 Jacques Bellot, already mentioned, and the
author of a French Grammar printed in 1578, announced in 1580 _The English
Schoolmaster, for teaching strangers to pronounce English_. That such a
book was published is probable enough, but it is not at present known; and
we have meanwhile to content ourselves with speculating what kind of
affair such an undertaking could have been, where the writer was a foreign
teacher so ignorant of our language! But it was not amiss for Bellot to
try his hand in the absence of any other adventurer; nor was it till after
the Restoration that a second experiment was made in the same direction by
James Howell, the tolerably celebrated author of the _Familiar Letters_,
who brought out in 1662 _A New English Grammar, prescribing as certain
rules as the language will bear, for foreigners to learn English_. This
was nearly a century after Bellot; and Howell was both a linguist and a
scholar.
Like many other laudable endeavours, however, the proffered help was not
much appreciated; and although the Germans, Dutch, and Russians have
within the last quarter of a century made remarkable progress in the study
of English, the French and other Continental nations remain unable or
indisposed to conquer their ancient prejudices. Doubtless, the closer
affinity between the languages of Germany and the Low Countries and our
own considerably facilitated the mastery of English by the Teutonic
community; and it was principally in Flanders that the earliest attention
was paid to those highly valuable polyglot hand-books for travellers and
students, into which the English, as a rule, was admitted more on account,
probably, of its service to the foreign visitor in England than for the
sake of the Englishman abroad, as had been the case with certain early
vocabularies and primers elsewhere noticed.
In the old plays the foreigner is invariably introduced making,
consciously or otherwise, the most alarming havoc in our vocabulary and
grammar; but the dramatist seems, as a rule, to have drawn a good deal on
his own fancy instead of borrowing from life; and such is the case, it
must be said, even with Shakespear's _Dr. Caius_, who speaks broken
English, but hardly a Frenchman's broken English. The _Duke de Jarmany_ of
the same writer would probably have had the same nondescript gibberish put
into his mouth had he been brought on the stage; this sort of _dramatis
persona_ was among the comic effects.
The Mrs. Plawnish of a modern novelist thought that bad English might be
good French; but the jargon of Caius is _sui generis_; he "hacks our
English." as mine host puts it, but not naturally, although Shakespear
must have had the opportunity of studying such a character from the
original. But he even confers on the French doctor in the _Merry Wives_
the very name of an actual English one, who was living in his boyhood, and
who was not merely a contributor to literature, but a writer on
philological subjects; so that those who had been acquainted with the real
Caius were apt to feel some mystification at his dramatic presentment,
claiming a nationality which did not belong to him, and murdering a
language which was his own.
As regards the familiarity of the French and Germans with our idiom, the
position is changed; for while that of the former remains nearly
stationary, that of Germany has grown more accurate and more general.
II. But the conversance with our language in former times, even among
those who devoted their attention to philology and instruction, was
excessively scanty and inexact. If no more than a bare quotation,
example, or equivalent in English is given, the solecisms are sometimes
ludicrous in the extreme; and this branch of the subject is sufficiently
interesting and novel to induce me, before I conclude my inquiry, to shew
somewhat farther than I have done in the account of the foreign professors
of languages settled in London during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the ignorance of English exhibited by two distinct classes of
writers, namely, by foreigners occupying among us of old the position of
tutors or teachers, and by the authors of publications designed for
employment by ourselves visiting the Continent, or by our neighbours
coming hither.
The notions entertained by educated professional Frenchmen, and even by
Hollanders and Germans, about our grammar and idiom were from the outset
down nearly to the present century of the vaguest and most puerile
character. Perhaps one of the most edifying monuments of this inveterate
repugnance to the acquisition of so much as the alphabet of our poor
tongue is to be found in a volume printed at Nürnberg so late as 1744
under the title _Representation of the High-landers who arrived at the
Camp of the Confederated Army_, 1743, where beneath the first of a series
of plates occurs this elucidation: "The Highlanders in their accostumes
clothes and downwards hanging cloak." The explanatory description of the
next engraving is "A High-lander who puts on his cloak about his
schoulders, when weather is sed to rain." These solecisms of course arose
from the incompetence of the foreign artist or publisher, or both; but
even where an ignorant typographer in a Continental town was employed to
set up an English book by the author himself, the liability to blunders
was very great, and we are not to be surprised at slips of the press in
such a work as Bishop Hooper's _Declaration of the Commandments_, printed
at Zurich in 1549, when at the end the writer apprises us that "the
setters of the print understand not one word of our speech!"
The most diverting illustrations of the jargon which was intended to pass
for good conversational English abound in the pocket-guides and
dictionaries, of which some went through several editions, and were
evidently in great request by the sections of society to which they
appealed. One of them is an octoglot vocabulary, 1548, and a second a
series of Colloquies in six languages, accompanied by a dictionary, 1576.
The English examples in the latter are highly curious, as affording an
insight into our language as it was spoken at that date by foreign
students and visitors; and, in point of fact, it is hard to choose between
the two, which is the more remarkable. Let us take the Preface to the
earlier publication from an impression of 1631 before me:--
"TO THE READER.
"Beloved Reader this boocke is so need full and profitable / and the
vsance of the same so necessarie / that his goodnes euen of learned
men / is not fullie to be praised for ther is noman in France / nor in
thes Nederland / nor in Spayne / or in Italie handling in these
Netherlandes which hat not neede of the eight speaches that here in
are writen and declared: Fer whether thad any man doo marchandise / or
that hee do handle in the Court / or that hee fo lowe the warres or
that hee be a trauailling man / hy should neede to haue an
interpretour / for som of theese eight speaches. The which wee
considering have at our great cost and to your great profite / brought
the same speaches here in suchwise to gether / and set them in order /
so that you fromyence fouath shall not neede eny interpretour / but
shalbe able to speake them your self / ...."