international purposes, and it is possible to point to the enormous
territory of Russia, its growing power and the fact that Russian is the
real or official language of a larger number of people than any other
language except English. But Russian is so unlike the Latin and Teutonic
tongues, used by the majority of European peoples; it is so complicated,
so difficult to acquire, and, moreover, so lacking in concision that it
has never had many enthusiastic advocates.
The virtues and defects of Spanish, which has found many enthusiastic
supporters, are of an opposite character. It is an admirably vigorous
and euphonious language, on a sound phonetic basis, every letter always
standing for a definite sound; the grammar is simple and exceptionally
free from irregularities, and it is the key to a great literature.
Billroth, the distinguished Austrian surgeon, advocated the adoption of
Spanish; he regarded English as really more suitable, but, he pointed
out, it is so difficult for the Latin races to speak non-Latin tongues
that a Romance language is essential, and Spanish is the simplest and
most logical of the Romance tongues.[237] It is, moreover, spoken by a
vast number of people in South America and elsewhere.
A few enthusiasts have advocated Greek, and have supported their claim
with the argument that it is still a living language. But although Greek
is the key to a small but precious literature, and is one of the sources
of latter-day speech and scientific terminology, it is difficult, it is
without special adaptation to modern uses, and there are no adequate
reasons why it should be made an international language.
Latin cannot be dismissed quite so hastily. It has in its favour the
powerful argument that it has once already been found adequate to serve
as the universal language. There is a widespread opinion to-day among
the medical profession--the profession most actively interested in the
establishment of a universal language--that Latin should be adopted, and
before the International Medical Congress at Rome in 1894, a petition to
this effect was presented by some eight hundred doctors in India.[238] It
is undoubtedly an admirable language, expressive, concentrated, precise.
But the objections are serious. The relative importance of Latin to-day
is very far from what it was a thousand years ago, for conditions have
wholly changed. There is now no great influence, such as the Catholic
Church was of old, to enforce Latin, even if it possessed greater
advantages. And the advantages are very mixed. Latin is a wholly dead
tongue, and except in a degenerate form not by any means an easy one to
learn, for its genius is wholly opposed to the genius even of those
modern languages which are most closely allied to it. The world never
returns on its own path. Although the prestige of Latin is still
enormous, a language could only be brought from death to life by some
widespread motor force; such a force no longer exists behind Latin.
There remain English and French, and these are undoubtedly the two
natural languages most often put forward--even outside England and
France--as possessing the best claims for adoption as auxiliary
international mediums of communication.
English, especially, was claimed by many, some twenty years ago, to be
not merely the auxiliary language of the future, but the universal
language which must spread all over the world and supersede and drive
out all others by a kind of survival of the fittest. This notion of a
universal language is now everywhere regarded as a delusion, but at that
time there was still thought by many to be a kind of special procreative
activity in the communities of Anglo-Saxon origin which would naturally
tend to replace all other peoples, both the people and the language
being regarded as the fittest to survive.[239] English was, however,
rightly felt to be a language with very great force behind it, being
spoken by vast communities possessing a peculiarly energetic and
progressive temperament, and with much power of peaceful penetration in
other lands. It is generally acknowledged also that English fully
deserves to be ranked as one of the first of languages by its fine
aptitude for powerful expression, while at the same time it is equally
fitted for routine commercial purposes. The wide extension of English
and its fine qualities have often been emphasized, and it is unnecessary
to dwell on them here. The decision of the scientific societies of the
world to use English for bibliographical purposes is not entirely a
tribute to English energy in organization, but to the quality of the
language. One finds, indeed, that these facts are widely recognized
abroad, in France and elsewhere, though I have noted that those who
foretell the conquest of English, even when they are men of intellectual
distinction and able to read English, are often quite unable to speak it
or to understand it when spoken.
That brings us to a point which is overlooked by those who triumphantly
pointed to the natural settlement of this question by the swamping of
other tongues in the overflowing tide of English speech. English is the
most concise and laconic of the great languages. Greek, French and
German are all more expansive, more syllabically copious. Latin alone
may be said to equal, or surpass English in concentration, because,
although Latin words are longer on the average, by their greater
inflection they cover a larger number of English words. This power of
English to attain expression with a minimum expenditure of energy in
written speech is one of its chief claims to succeed Latin as the
auxiliary international language. But it furnishes no claim to
preference for actual speaking, in which this economy of energy ceases
to be a supreme virtue, since here we have also to admit the virtues of
easy intelligibility and of persuasiveness. Greek largely owed its
admirable fitness for speech to the natural richness and prolongation of
its euphonious words, which allowed the speaker to attain the legitimate
utterance of his thought without pauses or superfluous repetition.
French, again, while by no means inapt for concentration, as the
_pensée_ writers show, most easily lends itself to effects that are
meant for speech, as in Bossuet, or that recall speech, as in Mme de
Sevigné in one order of literature, or Renan in another. But at Rome, we
feel, the spoken tongue had a difficulty to overcome, and the
mellifluously prolonged rhetoric of Cicero, delightful as it may be,
scarcely seems to reveal to us the genius of the Latin tongue. The
inaptitude of English for the purposes of speech is even more
conspicuous, and is again well illustrated in our oratory. Gladstone was
an orator of acknowledged eloquence, but the extreme looseness and
redundancy into which his language was apt to fall in the effort to
attain the verbose richness required for the ends of spoken speech,
reveals too clearly the poverty of English from this point of view. The
same tendency is also illustrated by the vain re-iterations of ordinary
speakers. The English intellect, with all its fine qualities, is not
sufficiently nimble for either speaker or hearer to keep up with the
swift brevity of the English tongue. It is a curious fact that Great
Britain takes the lead in Europe in the prevalence of stuttering; the
language is probably a factor in this evil pre-eminence, for it appears
that the Chinese, whose language is powerfully rhythmic, never stutter.
One authority has declared that "no nation in the civilized world speaks
its language so abominably as the English." We can scarcely admit that
this English difficulty of speech is the result of some organic defect
in English nervous systems; the language itself must be a factor in the
matter. I have found, when discussing the point with scientific men and
others abroad, that the opinion prevails that it is usually difficult to
follow a speaker in English. This experience may, indeed, be considered
general. While an admirably strong and concise language, English is by
no means so adequate in actual speech; it is not one of the languages
which can be heard at a long distance, and, moreover, it lends itself in
speaking to so many contractions that are not used in writing--so many
"can'ts" and "won'ts" and "don'ts," which suit English taciturnity, but
slur and ruin English speech--that English, as spoken, is almost a
different language from that which excites admiration when written. So
that the exclusive use of English for international purposes would not
be the survival of the fittest so far as a language for speaking
purposes is concerned.
Moreover, it must be remembered that English is not a democratic
language. It is not, like the chief Romance languages and the chief
Teutonic languages, practically homogeneous, made out of one block. It
is formed by the mixture of two utterly unlike elements, one
aristocratic, the other plebeian. Ever since the Norman lord came over
to England a profound social inequality has become rooted in the very
language. In French, _boeuf_ and _mouton_ and _veau_ and _porc_ have
always been the same for master and for man, in the field and on the
table; the animal has never changed its plebeian name for an
aristocratic name as it passed through the cook's hands. That example is
typical of the curious mark which the Norman Conquest left on our
speech, rendering it so much more difficult for us than for the French
to attain equality of social intercourse. Inequality is stamped
indelibly into our language as into no other great language. Of course,
from the literary point of view, that is all gain, and has been of
incomparable aid to our poets in helping them to reach their most
magnificent effects, as we may see conspicuously in Shakespeare's
enormous vocabulary. But from the point of view of equal social
intercourse, this wealth of language is worse than lost, it is
disastrous. The old feudal distinctions are still perpetuated; the "man"
still speaks his "plain Anglo-Saxon," and the "gentleman" still speaks
his refined Latinized speech. In every language, it is true, there are
social distinctions in speech, and every language has its slang. But in
English these distinctions are perpetuated in the very structure of the
language. Elsewhere the working-class speak--with a little difference in
the quality--a language needing no substantial transformation to become
the language of society, which differs from it in quality rather than in
kind. But the English working man feels the need to translate his common
Anglo-Saxon speech into foreign words of Latin origin. It is difficult
for the educated person in England to understand the struggle which the
uneducated person goes through to speak the language of the educated,
although the unsatisfactory result is sufficiently conspicuous. But we
can trace the operation of a similar cause in the hesitancy of the
educated man himself when he attempts to speak in public and is
embarrassed by the search for the set of words most suited for dignified
purposes.
Most of those who regarded English as the coming world-language admitted
that it would require improvement for general use. The extensive and
fundamental character of the necessary changes is not, however,
realized. The difficulties of English are of four kinds: (1) its special
sounds, very troublesome for foreigners to learn to pronounce, and the
uncertainty of its accentuation; (2) its illogical and chaotic spelling,
inevitably leading to confusions in pronunciation; (3) the grammatical
irregularities in its verbs and plural nouns; and (4) the great number
of widely different words which are almost or quite similar in
pronunciation. A vast number of absurd pitfalls are thus prepared for
the unwary user of English. He must remember that the plural of "mouse"
is "mice," but that the plural of "house" is not "hice," that he may
speak of his two "sons," but not of his two "childs"; he will
indistinguishably refer to "sheeps" and "ships"; and like the preacher a
little unfamiliar with English who had chosen a well-known text to
preach on, he will not remember whether "plough" is pronounced "pluff"
or "plo,"[240] and even a phonetic spelling system would render still more
confusing the confusion between such a series of words as "hair,"
"hare," "heir," "are," "ere" and "eyre." Many of these irregularities
are deeply rooted in the structure of the language; it would be an
extremely difficult as well as extensive task to remove them, and when
the task was achieved the language would have lost much of its character
and savour; it would clash painfully with literary English.
Thus even if we admitted that English ought to be the international
language of the future, the result is not so satisfactory from a British
point of view as is usually taken for granted. All other civilized
nations would be bilingual; they would possess the key not only to their
own literature, but to a great foreign literature with all the new
horizons that a foreign literature opens out. The English-speaking
countries alone would be furnished with only one language, and would
have no stimulus to acquire any other language, for no other language
would be of any practical use to them. All foreigners would be in a
position to bring to the English-speaking man whatever information they
considered good for him. At first sight this seems a gain for the
English-speaking peoples, because they would thus be spared a certain
expenditure of energy; but a very little reflection shows that such a
saving of energy is like that effected by the intestinal parasitic worm
who has digested food brought ready to his mouth. It leads to
degeneracy. Not the people whose language is learnt, but the people who
learn a language reap the benefit, spiritual and material. It is now
admitted in the commercial world that the ardour of the Germans in
learning English has brought more advantage to the Germans than to the
English. Moreover, the high intellectual level of small nations at the
present time is due largely to the fact that all their educated members
must be familiar with one or two languages besides their own. The great
defect of the English mind is insularity; the virtue of its boisterous
energy is accompanied by lack of insight into the differing virtues of
other peoples. If the natural course of events led to the exclusive use
of English for international communication, this defect would be still
more accentuated. The immense value of becoming acquainted with a
foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of
tradition and thought and feeling. Before we know a new language truly,
we have to realize that the words which at first seem equivalent to
words in our own language often have a totally different atmosphere, a
different rank or dignity from that which they occupy in our own
language. It is in learning this difference in the moral connotation of
a language and its expression in literature that we reap the real
benefit of knowing a foreign tongue. There is no other way--not even
residence in a foreign land if we are ignorant of the language--to take
us out of the customary circle of our own traditions. It imparts a
mental flexibility and emotional sympathy which no other discipline can
yield. To ordain that all non-English-speaking peoples should learn
English in addition to their mother tongue, and to render it practically
unnecessary for English-speakers (except the small class of students) to
learn any other language, would be to confer an immense boon on the
first group of peoples, doubling their mental and emotional capacity; it
is to render the second group hidebound.
When we take a broad and impartial survey of the question we thus see
that there is reason to believe that, while English is an admirable
literary language (this is the ground that its eulogists always take),
and sufficiently concise for commercial purposes, it is by no means an
adequate international tongue, especially for purposes of oral speech,
and, moreover, its exclusive use for this purpose would be a misfortune
for the nations already using it, since they would be deprived of that
mental flexibility and emotional sympathy which no discipline can give
so well as knowledge of a living foreign tongue.
Many who realized these difficulties put forward French as the auxiliary
international language. It is quite true that the power behind French is
now relatively less than it was two centuries ago.[241] At that time
France by its relatively large population, the tradition of its military
greatness, and its influential political position, was able to exert an
immense influence; French was the language of intellect and society in
Germany, in England, in Russia, everywhere in fact. During the
eighteenth century internal maladministration, the cataclysm of the
Revolution, and finally the fatal influence of Napoleon alienated
foreign sympathy, and France lost her commanding position. Yet it was
reasonably felt that, if a natural language is to be used for
international purposes, after English there is no practicable
alternative to French.
French is the language not indeed in any special sense of science or of
commerce, but of the finest human culture. It is a well-organized
tongue, capable of the finest shades of expression, and it is the key to
a great literature. In most respects it is the best favoured child of
Latin; it commends itself to all who speak Romance languages, and, as
Alphonse de Candolle has remarked, a Spaniard and an Italian know
three-quarters of French beforehand, and every one who has learnt Latin
knows half of French already. It is more admirably adapted for speaking
purposes than perhaps any other language which has any claim to be used
for international purposes, as we should expect of the tongue spoken by
a people who have excelled in oratory, who possess such widely diffused
dramatic ability, and who have carried the arts of social intercourse to
the highest point.
Paris remains for most people the intellectual capital of Europe; French
is still very generally used for purposes of intercommunication
throughout Europe, while the difficulty experienced by all but Germans
and Russians in learning English is well known. Li Hung Chang is
reported to have said that, while for commercial reasons English is far
more widely used in China than French, the Chinese find French a much
easier language to learn to speak, and the preferences of the Chinese
may one day count for a good deal--in one direction or another--in the
world's progress. One frequently hears that the use of French for
international purposes is decaying; this is a delusion probably due to
the relatively slow growth of the French-speaking races and to various
temporary political causes. It is only necessary to look at the large
International Medical Congresses. Thus at one such Congress at Rome, at
which I was present, over six thousand members came from forty-two
countries of the globe, and over two thousand of them took part in the
proceedings. Four languages (Italian, French, German and English) were
used at this Congress. Going over the seven large volumes of
Transactions, I find that fifty-nine communications were presented in
English, one hundred and seventy-one in German, three hundred and one
in French, the rest in Italian. The proportion of English communications
to German is thus a little more than one to three, and the proportion of
English to French less than one to six. Moreover, the English-speaking
members invariably (I believe) used their own language, so that these
fifty-nine communications represent the whole contribution of the
English-speaking world. And they represent nothing more than that;
notwithstanding the enormous spread of English, of which we hear so
much, not a single non-English speaker seems to have used English. It
might be supposed that this preponderance of French was due to a
preponderance of the French element, but this was by no means the case;
the members of English-speaking race greatly exceeded those of
French-speaking race. But, while the English communications represented
the English-speaking countries only, and the German communications were
chiefly by German speakers, French was spoken not only by members
belonging to the smaller nations of Europe, from the north and from the
south, by the Russians, by most of the Turkish and Asiatic members, but
also by all the Mexicans and South Americans. These figures may not be
absolutely free from fallacy, due to temporary causes of fluctuation.
But that they are fairly exact is shown by the results of the following
Congress, held at Moscow. If I take up the programme for the department
of psychiatry and nervous disease, in which I was myself chiefly
interested, I find that of 131 communications, 80 were in French, 37 in
German and 14 in English. This shows that French, German and English
bear almost exactly the same relation to one another as at Rome. In
other words, 61 per cent of the speakers used French, 28 per cent
German, and only 11 per cent English.
If we come down to one of the most recent International Medical
Congresses, that of Lisbon in 1906, we find that the supremacy of
French, far from weakening, is more emphatically affirmed. The language
of the country in which the Congress was held was ruled out, and I find
that of 666 contributions to the proceedings of the Congress, over 84
per cent were in French, scarcely more than 8 per cent in English, and
less than 7 per cent in German. At the subsequent Congress at Budapesth
in 1909, the French contributions were to the English as three to one.
Similar results are shown by other International Congresses. Thus at the
third International Congress of Psychology, held at Munich, there were
four official languages, and on grounds of locality the majority of
communications were in German; French followed with 29, Italian with 12,
and English brought up the rear with 11. Dr. Westermarck, who is the
stock example of the spread of English for international purposes, spoke
in German. It is clearly futile to point to figures showing the prolific
qualities of English races; the moral quality of a race and its language
counts, as well as mere physical capacity for breeding, and the moral
influence of French to-day is immensely greater than that of English.
That is, indeed, scarcely a fair statement of the matter in view of the
typical cases just quoted; one should rather say that, as a means of
spoken international communication for other than commercial purposes,
English is nowhere.
There is one other point which serves to give prestige to French: its
literary supremacy in the modern world. While some would claim for the
English the supreme poetic literature, there can be no doubt that the
French own the supreme prose literature of modern Europe. It was felt by
those who advocated the adoption of English or French that it would
surely be a gain for human progress if the auxiliary international
languages of the future should be one, if not both, of two that possess
great literatures, and which embody cultures in some respects allied,
but in most respects admirably supplementing each other.[242]
The collapse of Volapük stimulated the energy of those who believed that
the solution of the question lay in the adoption of a natural language.
To-day, however, there are few persons who, after carefully considering
the matter, regard this solution as probable or practicable.[243]