Questions at Issue in Our English Speech

Edwin W. Bowen, Ph.D.
Author of “Makers of American Literature”
Broadway Publishing Company PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS 835 Broadway, ⁂ New York
Copyright, 1909
EDWIN W. BOWEN, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved
Practically all the matter in this collection of essays has been printed elsewhere. Four of the articles, “A Question of Preference in English Spelling,” “Authority in English Pronunciation,” “What Is Slang?” and “Briticisms versus Americanisms,” first appeared in the “Popular Science Monthly” and are here reproduced with the kind permission of the editor of that journal. The paper, “Vulgarisms with a Pedigree,” is rewritten from three brief essays on allied themes which were published in the “Atlantic Monthly” and the “North American Review.” The essay on “Our English Spelling of Yesterday—Why Antiquated?” is reprinted from the “Methodist Review.” I wish here to thank the publishers of these periodicals for permission to reprint.
There is a marked distinction between spoken and written language. In writing a system of conventional symbols is adopted to represent speech. At best such a system is ill-devised and incomplete. In many cases, as in our own tongue, the written language fairly bristles with innumerable inaccuracies and inconsistencies and with flagrant absurdities of orthography. Of course the written language is only an imperfect attempt to represent graphically the spoken speech and is a mere shadow of the real substance, of the living tongue. No system of symbols has been adopted which represent with absolute accuracy and adequacy a spoken language at all periods of its history. It is a matter of extreme doubt whether any living language is now, or ever has been, represented by its alphabet with absolute accuracy and precision. It is quite probable that no living European tongue is today represented by its alphabet with more than approximate accuracy and completeness. As for the dead languages, like the classics, we may be reasonably certain that neither the Greek nor the Latin alphabet correctly and adequately represented those respective languages at all periods of their history. The body of Latin literature now extant is but a desiccated, lifeless mummy of the living, pulsating speech which was heard upon the lips of the ancient Romans. Of that robust and vigorous Latin vernacular, as employed by Cicero and Virgil in all its purity, we have only embalmed specimens, preserved to us in the stirring rhetorical periods of that prince of Roman orators and in the stately rhythmical hexameters of that famous Mantuan bard. Quantum mutatum ab illo —how unlike the spoken language, how unlike the burning eloquence which used to thrill the populace in the ancient Roman Forum! Small wonder we are accustomed now to speak of the tongue of the ancient Roman and of the tongue of the ancient Hellene as a “dead language,” for those noble tongues perished, truly, centuries ago, when they ceased to be spoken by the inhabitants of Rome and Athens respectively.