Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

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: