earlier stages of its development, when it was still ductile, was
that this pressure helped us to our present grammatical simplicity.
Whenever the political intelligence of the inhabitants of the capital
of a district raises the local dialect to a position of supremacy, so
that it spreads over the surrounding districts and casts their dialects
into the shadow, the dominant dialect is likely to lose those of its
grammatical peculiarities not to be found also in the other dialects.
Whatever is common to them all is pretty sure to survive, and what
is not common may or may not be given up. The London dialect, in its
development, felt the influence, not only of the other division of the
Midland dialect, and of the two rival dialects, one to the north of it
and the other to the south, but also of a foreign tongue spoken by all
who pretended to any degree of culture. This attrition helped English
to shed many minor grammatical complexities still retained by languages
which had not this fortunate experience in their youth.
Perhaps the late Richard Grant White was going a little too far when he
asserted that English was a grammarless tongue; but it cannot be denied
that English is less infested with grammar than any other of the great
modern languages. German, for example, is a most grammarful tongue; and
Mark Twain has explained to us (in ‘A Tramp Abroad’) just how elaborate
and intricate its verbal machinery is; and the Volapük, which was made
in Germany, had the syntactical convolutions of its inventor’s native
tongue.
By its possession of this grammatical complexity, Volapük was unfitted
for service as a world-language. A fortunate coincidence it is that
English, which is becoming a world-language by sheer force of the
energy and determination of those whose mother-speech it is, should
early have shed most of these cumbersome and retarding grammatical
devices. The earlier philologists were wont to consider this throwing
off of needless inflections as a symptom of decay. The later
philologists are coming to recognize it as a sign of progress. They are
getting to regard the unconscious struggle for short-cuts in speech,
not as degeneration, but rather as regeneration. As Krauter asserts,
“The dying out of forms and sounds is looked upon by the etymologists
with painful feelings; but no unprejudiced judge will be able to see
in it anything but a progressive victory over lifeless material.” And
he adds, with terse common sense: “Among several tools performing
equal work, that is the best which is the simplest and most handy.”
This brief excerpt from the German scholar is borrowed here from a
paper prepared for the Modern Language Association by Professor C. A.
Smith, in which may be found also a dictum of the Danish philologist
Jespersen: “The fewer and shorter the forms, the better; the analytic
structure of modern European languages is so far from being a drawback
to them that it gives them an unimpeachable superiority over the
earlier stages of the same languages.” And it is Jespersen who boldly
declares that “the so-called full and rich forms of the ancient
languages are not a beauty, but a deformity.”
In other words, language is merely an instrument for the use of man;
and like all other instruments, it had to begin by being far more
complicated than is needful. The watch used to have more than a
hundred separate parts, and now it is made with less than twoscore,
losing nothing in its efficiency and in precision. Greek and German are
old-fashioned watches; Italian and Danish and English are watches of a
later style. Of the more prominent modern languages, German and Russian
are the most backward, while English is the most advanced. And the end
is not yet, for the eternal forces are ever working to make our tongue
still easier. The printing-press is a most powerful agent on the side
of the past, making progress far more sluggish than it was before books
were broadcast; yet the English language is still engaged in sloughing
off its outworn grammatical skin. Altho in the nineteenth century the
changes in the structure of English have probably been less than in any
other century of its history, yet there have been changes not a few.
For example, the subjunctive mood is going slowly into innocuous
desuetude; the stickler for grammar, so-called, may protest in vain
against its disappearance: its days are numbered. It serves no useful
purpose; it has to be laboriously acquired; it is now a matter of
rule and not of instinct; it is no longer natural: and therefore it
will inevitably disappear, sooner or later. Careful investigation has
shown that it has already been discarded by many even among those
who are very careful of their style--some of whom, no doubt, would
rise promptly to the defense of the form they have been discarding
unconsciously. One authority declares that altho the form has seemed to
survive, it has been empty of any distinct meaning since the sixteenth
century.
This is only one of the tendencies observable in the nineteenth
century; and we may rest assured that others will become visible in
the twentieth. But when English is compared with German, we cannot
help seeing that most of this work is done already. Grammar has
been stripped to the bone in English; and for us who have to use
the language to-day it is fortunate that our remote ancestors, who
fashioned it for their own use without thought of our needs, should
have had the same liking we have for the simplest possible tool, and
that they should have cast off, as soon as they could, one and another
of the grammatical complexities which always cumber every language in
its earlier stages, and most of which still cumber German. In nothing
is the practical directness of our stock more clearly revealed than in
this immediate beginning upon the arduous task of making the means of
communication between man and man as easy and as direct as possible.
Doubly fortunate are we that this job was taken up and put through
before the invention of printing multiplied the inertia of conservatism.
It was the political supremacy of Paris which made the Parisian dialect
the standard of French; and it was the genius of Dante which made the
Tuscan dialect the standard of Italian. That the London dialect is
the standard of English is due partly to the political supremacy of
the capital and partly to the genius of Chaucer. As the French are
a home-keeping people, Paris has retained its political supremacy;
while the English are a venturesome race and have spread abroad and
split into two great divisions, so that London has lost its political
supremacy, being the capital now only of the less numerous portion of
those who have English as their mother-tongue.
It is true, of course, that a very large proportion of the inhabitants
of the United States, however independent politically of the great
empire of which London is the capital, look with affection upon the
city by the Thames. Their feeling toward England is akin to that which
led Hawthorne to entitle his record of a sojourn in England ‘Our Old
Home.’ The American liking for London itself seems to be increasing;
and, as Lowell once remarked, “We Americans are beginning to feel that
London is the center of the races that speak English, very much in the
sense that Rome was the center of the ancient world.” It was at a
dinner of the Society of Authors that he said this, and he then added:
“I confess that I never think of London, which I also confess I love,
without thinking of the palace David built, ‘sitting in the hearing of
a hundred streams’--streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity.”
While the London dialect is the stem from which the English language
has grown, the vocabulary of the language has never been limited by
the dialect. It has been enriched by countless words and phrases and
locutions of one kind or another from the other division of the Midland
dialect and from both the Northern and the Southern dialects--just
as modern Italian has not limited itself to the narrow vocabulary of
Florence. Yet in the earlier stages of the development of English the
language benefited by the fact that there was a local standard. The
attempt of all to assimilate their speech to that of the inhabitants of
London tended to give uniformity without rigidity. As men came up to
court they brought with them the best of the words and turns of speech
peculiar to their own dialect; and the language gained by all these
accretions.
Shakspere contributed Warwickshire localisms not a few, just as Scott
procured the acceptance of Scotticisms hitherto under a ban. As Spenser
had gone back to Chaucer, so Keats went to the Elizabethans and dug
out old words for his own use; and William Morris pushed his researches
farther and brought up words almost pre-Chaucerian. Every language in
Europe has been put under contribution at one time or another for one
purpose or another. The military vocabulary, for instance, reveals the
former superiority of the French, just as the naval vocabulary reveals
the former superiority of the Dutch. And as modern science has extended
its conquests, it has drawn on Greek for its terms of precision.
Under this influx of foreign words, old and new, the framework of the
original London dialect stands solidly enough, but it is visible only
to the scholarly specialist in linguistic research. But the latest
London dialect, the speech of the inhabitants of the British capital
at the end of the nineteenth century, has ceased absolutely to serve
as a standard. Whatever utility there was in the past in accepting
as normal English the actual living dialect of London has long since
departed without a protest. No educated Englishman any longer thinks of
conforming his syntax or his vocabulary to the actual living dialect
of London, whether of the court or of the slums. Indeed, so far is he
from accepting the verbal habits of the man in the street as suggesting
a standard for him that he is wont to hold them up to ridicule as
cockney corruptions. He likes to laugh at the tricks of speech that
he discovers on the lips of the Londoners, at their dropping of their
initial _h_’s more often than he deems proper, and at their more recent
substitution of _y_ for _a_--as in “tyke the cyke, lydy.”
The local standard of London has thus been disestablished in the course
of the centuries simply because there was no longer a necessity for any
local standard. The speech of the capital served as the starting-point
of the language; and in the early days a local standard of usage was
useful. But now, after English has enjoyed a thousand years of growth,
a standard so primitive is not only useless, but it would be very
injurious. Nor could any other local standard be substituted for that
of London without manifest danger--even if the acceptance of such a
standard was possible. The peoples that speak English are now too
widely scattered and their needs are too many and too diverse for any
local standard not to be retarding in its limitations.
To-day the standard of English is to be sought not in the actual living
dialect of the inhabitants of any district or of any country, but in
the language itself, in its splendid past and in its mighty present.
Five hundred years ago, more or less, Chaucer sent forth the first
masterpieces of English literature; and in all those five centuries the
language has never lacked poets and prose-writers who knew its secrets
and could bring forth its beauties. Each of them has helped to make
English what it is now; and a study of what English has been is all
that we need to enable us to see what it will be--and what it should
be. Any attempt to trammel it by a local standard, or by academic
restrictions, or by school-masters’ grammar-rules, is certain to fail.
In the past, English has shaken itself free of many a limitation; and
in the present it is insisting on its own liberty to take the short-cut
whenever that enables it to do its work with less waste of time. We
cannot doubt that in the future it will go on in its own way, making
itself fitter for the manifold needs of an expanding race which has the
unusual characteristic of having lofty ideals while being intensely
practical. A British poet it was, Lord Houghton, who once sent these
prophetic lines to an American lady:
That ample speech! That subtle speech!
Apt for the need of all and each;
Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
Wherever human feelings tend.
Preserve its force; _expand its powers_;
And through the maze of civic life,
In Letters, Commerce, even in Strife,
Forget not it is yours and ours.
The English language is the most valuable possession of the peoples
that speak it, and that have for their chief cities, not London
alone, or Edinburgh or Dublin, but also New York and Chicago, Calcutta
and Bombay, Melbourne and Montreal. The English language is one and
indivisible, and we need not fear that the lack of a local standard may
lead it ever to break up into fragmentary dialects. There is really no
danger now that English will not be uniform in all the four quarters of
the world, and that it will not modify itself as occasion serves. We
can already detect divergencies of usage and of vocabulary; but these
are only trifles. The steamship and the railroad and the telegraph
bring the American and the Briton and the Australian closer together
nowadays than were the users of the Midland dialect when Chaucer
set forth on his pilgrimage to Canterbury; and then there is the
printing-press, whereby the newspaper and the school-book and the works
of the dead-and-gone masters of our literature bind us together with
unbreakable links.
These divergencies of usage and of vocabulary--London from Edinburgh,
and New York from Bombay--are but evidences of the healthy activity of
our tongue. It is only when it is dead that a language ceases to grow.
It needs to be constantly refreshed by new words and phrases as the
elder terms are exhausted. Lowell held it to be part of Shakspere’s
good fortune that he came when English was ripe and yet fresh, when
there was an abundance of words ready to his hand, but none of them
yet exhausted by hard work. So Mr. Howells has recently recorded
his feeling that any one who now employs English “to depict or to
characterize finds the phrases thumbed over and worn and blunted with
incessant use,” and experiences a joy in the bold locutions which are
now and again “reported from the lips of the people.”
“From the lips of the people”;--here is a phrase that would have sadly
shocked a narrow-minded scholar like Dr. Johnson. But what the learned
of yesterday denied--and, indeed, have denounced as rank heresy--the
more learned of to-day acknowledge as a fact. The real language of
a people is the spoken word, not the written. Language lives on the
tongue and in the ear; there it was born, and there it grows. Man wooed
his wife and taught his children and discussed with his neighbors for
centuries before he perfected the art of writing. Even to-day the work
of the world is done rather by the spoken word than by the written. And
those who are doing the work of the world are following the example of
our remote ancestors who did not know how to write; when they feel new
needs they will make violent efforts to supply those needs, devising
fresh words put together in rough-and-ready fashion, often ignorantly.
The mouth is ever willing to try verbal experiments, to risk a new
locution, to hazard a wrenching of an old term to a novel use. The hand
that writes is always slow to accept the result of these attempts to
meet a demand in an unauthorized way. The spoken language bristles with
innovations, while the written language remains properly conservative.
Few of these oral babes are viable, and fewer still survive; while only
now and again does one of these verbal foundlings come of age and claim
citizenship in literature.
In the antiquated books of rhetoric which our grandfathers handed down
to us there are solemn warnings against neologisms--and neologism was
a term of reproach designed to stigmatize a new word as such. But in
the stimulating study of certain of the laws of linguistics, which
M. Bréal, one of the foremost of French philologists, has called
‘Semantics,’ we are told that to condemn neologisms absolutely would be
most unfortunate and most useless. “Every progress in a language is,
first of all, the act of an individual, and then of a minority, large
or small. A land where all innovation should be forbidden would take
from its language all chance of development.” And M. Bréal points out
that language must keep on transforming itself with every new discovery
and invention, with the incessant modification of our manners, of
our customs, and even of our ideas. We are all of us at work on the
vocabulary of the future, ignorant and learned, authors and artists,
the man of the world and the man in the street; and even our children
have a share in this labor, and by no means the least.
Among all these countless candidates for literary acceptance, the
struggle for existence is very fierce, and only the fittest of the new
words survive. Or, to change the figure, conversation might be called
the Lower House, where all the verbal coinages must have their origin,
while literature is the Upper House, without whose concurrence nothing
can be established. And the watch-dogs of the treasury are trustworthy;
they resist all attempts of which they do not approve. In language, as
in politics, the power of the democratic principle is getting itself
more widely acknowledged. The people blunders more often than not, but
it knows its own mind; and in the end it has its own way. In language,
as in politics, we Americans are really conservative. We are well
aware that we have the right to make what change we please, and we
know better than to exercise this right. Indeed, we do not desire to
do so. We want no more change in our laws or in our language than is
absolutely necessary.
We have modified the common language far less than we have modified
the common law. We have kept alive here many a word and many a meaning
which was well worthy of preservation, and which our kin across the
seas had permitted to perish. Professor Earle of Oxford, in his
comprehensive volume on ‘English Prose,’ praises American authors for
refreshing old words by novel combinations. When Mr. W. Aldis Wright
drew up a glossary of the words, phrases, and constructions in the
King James translation of the Bible and in the Book of Common Prayer,
which were obsolete in Great Britain in the sense that they would no
longer naturally find a place in ordinary prose-writing, Professor
Lounsbury pointed out that at least a sixth of these words, phrases,
and constructions are not now obsolete in the United States, and
would be used by any American writer without fear that he might not
be understood. As Lowell said, our ancestors “unhappily could bring
over no English better than Shakspere’s,” and by good fortune we have
kept alive some of the Elizabethan boldness of imagery. Even our
trivial colloquialisms have often a metaphoric vigor now rarely to be
matched in the street-phrases of the city where Shakspere earned his
living. Ben Jonson would have relished one New York phrase that an
office-holder gives an office-seeker, “the glad hand and the marble
heart,” and that other which described a former favorite comedian as
now having “a fur-lined voice.”
When Tocqueville came over here in 1831, he thought that we Americans
had already modified the English language. British critics, like Dean
Alford, have often animadverted upon the deterioration of the language
on this side of the Atlantic. American humorists, like Mark Twain,
have calmly claimed that the tongue they used was not English, but
American. It is English as Mark Twain uses it, and English of a force
and a clarity not surpassed by any living writer of the language; but
in so far as American usage differs from British, it was according to
the former and not according to the latter. But they differ in reality
very slightly indeed; and whatever divergence there may be is rather
in the spoken language than in the written. That the spoken language
should vary is inevitable and advantageous, since the more variation is
attempted, the better opportunity the language has to freshen up its
languishing vocabulary and to reinvigorate itself. That the written
language should widely vary would be the greatest of misfortunes.
Of this there is now no danger whatever, and never has been. The
settlement of the United States took place after the invention of
printing; and the printing-press is a sure preventive of a new dialect
nowadays. The disestablishment of the local standard of London leaves
English free to develop according to its own laws and its own logic.
There is no longer any weight of authority to be given to contemporary
British usage over contemporary American usage--except in so far as
the British branch of English literature is more resplendent with
names of high renown than the American branch. That this was the case
in the nineteenth century--that the British poets and prose-writers
outnumber and outvalue the American--must be admitted at once; that
it will be the case throughout the twentieth century may be doubted.
And whenever the poets and prose-writers of the American branch of
English literature are superior in number and in power to those of the
British branch, then there can be no doubt as to where the weight of
authority will lie. The shifting of the center of power will take place
unconsciously; and the development of English will go on just the same
after it takes place as it is going on now. The conservative forces
are in no danger of overthrow at the hands of the radicals, whether
in the United States or in Great Britain or in any of her colonial
dependencies.
Perhaps the principle which will govern can best be stated in another
quotation from M. Bréal: “The limit within which the right to innovate
stops is not fixed by any idea of ‘purity’ (which can always be
contested); it is fixed by the need we have to keep in contact with
the thought of those who have preceded us. The more considerable the
literary past of a people, the more this need makes itself felt as a
duty, as a condition of dignity and force.” And there is no sign that
either the American or the British half of those who have our language
for a mother-tongue is in danger of becoming disloyal to the literary
past of English literature, that most magnificent heritage--the
birthright of both of us.
(1899)
IV
THE LANGUAGE IN GREAT BRITAIN
There is a wide gap between the proverb asserting that “figures never
lie” and the opinion expressed now and again by experts that nothing
can be more mendacious than statistics misapplied; and the truth
seems to lie between these extreme sayings. Just as chronology is the
backbone of history, so a statement of fact can be made terser and more
convincing if the figures are set forth that illuminate it. If we wish
to perceive the change of the relative position of Great Britain and
the United States in the course of the centuries, nothing can help us
better to a firm grasp of the exact facts of the case than a comparison
of the population of the two countries at various periods.
In 1700 the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland numbered between
eight and nine millions, while the inhabitants of what is now the
United States were, perhaps, a scant three hundred thousand. In 1900,
the people of the British Isles are reckoned at some thirty-seven
millions more or less, and the people of the United States are almost
exactly twice as many, being about seventy-five millions. To project a
statistical curve into the future is an extra-hazardous proceeding; and
no man can now guess at the probable population either of the United
Kingdom or of the United States in the year 2000; but as the rate of
increase is far larger in America than in England, there is little
risk in suggesting that a hundred years from now the population of the
American republic will be at least four or five times as large as that
of the British monarchy.
Just as the center of population of the United States has been
steadily working its way westward, having been in 1800 in Maryland
and being in 1900 in Indiana, so also the center of population of the
English-speaking race has been steadily moving toward the Occident.
Just as the first of these has had to cross the Alleghanies during
the nineteenth century, so will the second of them have to cross the
Atlantic during the twentieth century. Whether this latter change shall
take place early in the century or late, is not important; one day or
another it will take place, assuredly.