Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

The French language was developed from one particular provincial dialect probably no better adapted for improvement than any one of half a dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of precision infinitely finer than any of its pristine rivals, since they had none of them the good fortune to be chosen for development. But the patois of the peasant of Normandy or of Brittany, however inadequate it may be as a means of expression for a modern man, is not a corruption of French, any more than Doric is a corruption of Attic Greek. It is rather in the position of a twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fellow, more adroit in getting the good will of their parents. It was the literary skill of the Athenians themselves, and not the superiority of the original dialect, that makes us think of Attic as the only genuine Greek, just as it was the prowess of the Romans in war and their power of governing which raised their provincial dialect into the language of Italy, and then carried it triumphant to every shore of the Mediterranean.

The history of the development of the English language is like the history of the development of Greek and Latin and French; and the English language as we speak it to-day is a growth from the Midland dialect, itself the victor of a struggle for survivorship with the Southern and Northern dialects. “With the accession of the royal house of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England,” so Professor Lounsbury tells us, “the dialect of Wessex had become the cultivated language of the whole people—the language in which books were written and laws were published.” But when the Norman conquest came, altho, to quote from Professor Lounsbury again, “the native tongue continued to be spoken by the great majority of the population, it went out of use as the language of high culture,” and “the educated classes, whether lay or ecclesiastical, preferred to write either in Latin or in French—the latter steadily tending more and more to become the language of literature as well as of polite society.” And as a result of this the West-Saxon had to drop to the low level of the other dialects; “it had no longer any preëminence of its own.” There was in England from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries no national language, but every one was free to use with tongue and pen his own local speech, altho three provincial dialects existed, “each possessing a literature of its own and each seemingly having about the same chance to be adopted as the representative national speech.”

These three dialects were the Southern (which was the descendant of Wessex, once on the way to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland (which had the sole advantage that it was a compromise between its neighbors to the north and the south). London was situated in the region of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore “the tongue mainly employed at the court” when French slowly ceased to be the language of the upper classes. As might be expected in those days before the printing-press and the spelling-book imposed uniformity, the Midland dialect was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern counties from the way it was spoken in the Western counties of the region. London was in the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and London was the capital. Probably because the speech of the Eastern division of the Midland dialect was the speech of the capital, it was used as the vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court—who happened also to be a great poet and a great literary artist. Just as Dante’s choice of his native Tuscan dialect controlled the future development of Italian, so Chaucer’s choice controlled the future development of English. It was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares, “who first showed to all men the resources of the language, its capacity of representing with discrimination all shades of human thought and of conveying with power all manifestations of human feeling.”

The same writer tells us that “the cultivated English language, in which nearly all English literature of value has been written, sprang directly from the East-Midland division of the Midland dialect, and especially from the variety of the East-Midland which was spoken at London and the region immediately to the north of it.” That this magnificent opportunity came to the London dialect was not due to any superiority it had over any other variety of the Midland dialect: it was due to the single fact that it was the speech of the capital—just as the dialect of the Île-de-France in like manner served as the stem from which the cultivated French language sprang. The Parisian dialect flourished and imposed itself on all sides; within the present limits of France it choked out the other local dialects, even the soft and lovely Provençal; and beyond the boundaries of the country it was accepted in Belgium and in Switzerland.

So the dialect of London has gone on growing and refining and enriching itself as the people who spoke it extended their borders and passed over the wide waters and won their way to far countries, until to-day it serves not merely for the cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of Montana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is adequate for the various needs of the Scotch philosopher and of the American humorist; it is employed by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the governor of Alaska, and the general in command over the Philippines. In the course of some six centuries the dialect of a little town on the Thames has become the mother-tongue of millions and millions of people scattered broadcast over the face of the earth.

If the Norman conquest had not taken place the history of the English race would be very different, and the English language would not be what it is, since it would have had for its root the Wessex variety of the Southern dialect. But the Norman conquest did take place, and the English language has for its root the Eastern division of the Midland dialect. The Norman conquest it was which brought the modest but vigorous young English tongue into close contact with the more highly cultivated French. The French spoken in England was rather the Norman dialect than the Parisian (which is the true root of modern French), and whatever slight influence English may have had upon it does not matter now, for it was destined to a certain death. But this Norman-French enlarged the plastic English speech against which it was pressing; and English adopted many French words, not borrowing them, but making them our own, once for all, and not dropping the original English word, but keeping both with slight divergence of meaning.

Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that we owe the double vocabulary wherein our language surpasses all others. While the framework of English is Teutonic, we have for many things two names, one of Germanic origin and one of Romance. Our direct, homely words, that go straight to our hearts and nestle there—these are most of them Teutonic. Our more delicate words, subtle in finer shades of meaning—these often come to us from the Latin through the French. The secondary words are of Romance origin, and the primary words of Germanic. And this—if the digression may here be hazarded—is one reason why French poetry touches us less than German, the words of the former seeming to us remote, not to say sophisticated, while the words of the latter are akin to our own simpler and swifter words.

One other advantage of the pressure of French upon English in the 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.”