Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

That this will put a strain on the language is indisputable. Wherever any tongue serves as a lingua franca for men of various stocks, there is an immediate tendency toward corruption. There is a constant pressure to simplify and to lop off and to reduce to the bare elements. The Pidgin-English of the Chinese coast is an example of what may befall a noble language when it is enslaved to serve many masters, ignorant of its history and careless of its idioms. Mr. Kipling’s earliest tales are some of them almost incomprehensible to readers unacquainted with the vocabulary of the competition-walla; and the reports of the British generals during the war with the Boers were besprinkled with words not hitherto supposed to be English.

Some observers see in this a menace to the integrity of the language, a menace likely to become more threatening as the British Empire spreads itself still farther over the waste places of the earth. But is there not also a danger in the integrity of English close at home—in England itself, even in London, and not afar in the remote borders of the Empire—the danger due to the prevalence of local dialects? To the student of language one of the most obvious differences between Great Britain and the United States lies in the fact that we in America have really no local dialects such as are common in England. Every county of England has an indigenous population, whose ancestors dwelt in the same place since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; and this indigenous population has its own peculiarities of pronunciation, of vocabulary, and of idiom, handed down from father to son, generation after generation. But no one of the United States was settled exclusively by immigrants from a single English county; and, therefore, no one of these local dialects was ever transplanted bodily to America. And no considerable part of the United States has a stationary population, inbreeding and stagnant and impervious to outside influences; indeed, to be nomadic, to be here to-day and there to-morrow, to be born in New England, to grow up in the middle west, to be married in New York, and to die in Colorado—is not this a characteristic of us Americans? And it is a characteristic fatal to the development of real dialects in this country such as are abundant in England. Of course we have our local peculiarities of idiom and of pronunciation, but these are very superficial indeed. Probably there has been a closer uniformity of speech throughout the United States for fifty years past than there is even to-day in Great Britain, where the Yorkshireman cannot understand the cockney, and where the Scot sits silent in the house of the Cornishman.

This uniformity of speech throughout the United States is, perhaps, partly the result of Noah Webster’s ‘Spelling-Book.’ It has certainly been aided greatly by the public-school system, firmly established throughout the country, and steadily strengthening itself. The school system of the United Kingdom is younger by far; it is not yet adequately organized; it has still to be adjusted to its place in a proper scheme of national education. In the higher institutions of learning in England, at Oxford and at Cambridge, there is no postgraduate work in English; and whatever instruction an undergraduate may get there in English literature is incidental, not to say accidental.

Probably there is no connection between this lack of university instruction in English and a carelessness in the use of the language which strikes us unpleasantly, not merely in the unpremeditated letters of scholarly Englishmen, but sometimes even in their more academic efforts. Jowett’s correspondence, for example, and Matthew Arnold’s, offer examples of a slovenliness of phrase not to be found in Lowell’s letters or in Emerson’s.

Certain Briticisms are very prevalent, not merely among the uneducated, but among the more highly cultivated. Directly is used for as soon as by Archbishop Trench (the author of a lively little book on words) and by Mr. Courthope (the Oxford professor of poetry). Like is used for as—that is, “like we do”—by Charles Darwin, and in more than one volume of the English Men of Letters series, edited by Mr. John Morley. The elision of the initial h, which the British themselves like to think a test of breeding, is discoverable far more often than they imagine on the lips of those who ought to know better. It is said that Lord Beaconsfield, for example, sometimes dropped his h’s, and that he once spoke of “the ’urried ’Udson.” And if we may rely on the evidence of spelling, the British often leave the h silent where we Americans sound it. They write an historical essay from which it is a fair inference that they pronounce the adjective ’istorical. In Mr. Kipling’s ‘From Sea to Sea’ he writes not only an hotel and an hospital, but also an hydraulic.

Thus we see that the immense size and variegated population of the British Empire may be considered as a menace to the integrity of the English language in the British Isles; and that a second source of danger is to be discovered in the local dialects of Great Britain; and, finally, that there is observable in England even now a carelessness in the use of the language and a willingness to innovate both in vocabulary and in idiom.

But however formidable these three tendencies may look when massed together, there is really no weight to be attached to any of them singly or to all of them combined. The language has already for two centuries been exposed to contact with countless other tongues in America and Asia and Africa without appreciable deterioration up to the present time; and there is no reason to fear that this contact will be more corrupting in the twentieth century than it has been in the nineteenth. On the contrary, it will result rather in an enrichment and refreshment of the vocabulary. The danger from the local dialects of Great Britain, instead of increasing, is decreasing day by day as the facilities for travel improve and as the schoolmaster is able to impose his uniform English upon the young. Lastly, the willingness to use new words not authorized by the past of the language is in itself not blameworthy; it may be indeed commendable when it is restrained by a conservative instinct and controlled by reason.

The Briticisms that besprinkle the columns of London newspapers are like the Americanisms to be seen in the pages of the New York newspapers in that they are evidences of vitality, of the healthiness of the language itself. In Latin it may be proper enough for us to set up a Ciceronian standard and to reject any usage not warranted by the masterly orator; but in English it is absurd to declare any merely personal standard and to reject any term or any idiom because it was unknown to Chaucer or to Shakspere, to Addison or to Franklin, to Thackeray or to Hawthorne. Latin is dead, and the Ciceronian decision as regards the propriety of any usage may be accepted as final. English is a living tongue, and the great writers of every generation make unhesitating use of words and of constructions which the great writers of earlier generations were ignorant of or chose to ignore.

The most of these British innovations, both of to-day and of to-morrow, will be individual and freakish; and, therefore, they will win no foothold even in the British vocabulary. But a few of them will prove their own excuse for being, and these will establish themselves in Great Britain. The best of them, those of which the necessity is indisputable, will spread across the Atlantic and will be welcomed by the main body of users of English over here—just as certain American innovations and revivals were hospitably received in England when only the smaller branch of the English-speaking race was on the American side of the ocean. And, of course, the new terms which spring into existence in the United States after the literary center of the language has crossed the Atlantic will be carried over to England in books and in periodicals.

When the bulk of contemporary English literature is produced by American authors, and when the British themselves have accepted the situation and resigned themselves at last to the departure of the literary supremacy of London, then the weight of American precedent will be overwhelming. Without knowing it, British readers of American books will be led to conform to American usage; and American terms will not seem outlandish to them, as these words and phrases do even now, when comparatively few American authors are read in Great Britain. And these American innovations will be very few, for the conservative instinct is in some ways stronger in the United States than it is in Great Britain, due perhaps partly to the more wide-spread popular education here, which gives to every child a certain solidarity with the past.