In these days of the printing-press and of the schoolmaster any radical modification of the mother-tongue is increasingly difficult, so that it is highly improbable that Russian can now ever shake off these grammatical encumbrances that really unfit it for use as a world-language to be acquired by all men. Russian is one of the most backward of modern languages in its progress toward grammatical simplicity; and English is one of the most forward. Italian is also a language which had the good fortune partly to reform its grammar before the invention of printing made the operation almost impossible; and Italian is like English in that it is a very easy language to learn by word of mouth, as the rules of grammar we must needs obey are very few,—tho in this respect English is superior even to Italian. If English is hard to learn when it is taught by the eye instead of the ear, this is because of our cumbersome and antiquated spelling; here the Italian is far better off than the English.
Indeed, it is not a little strange that the English language, which is one of the most advanced in grammatical simplicity, is one of the most belated in orthographic simplicity. In no other modern language is the system of spelling—if system that can be called which has no rule or reason—more arbitrary and more chaotic than in English; and no other peculiarity of our language does more to retard its diffusion than its wantonly foolish orthography.
Probably much of the violent opposition to the simplification of our spelling is due to the fanatic zeal of the phonetic reformers, who have frightened away all the timid respecters of tradition by their rash insistence upon the immediate adoption of some brand-new and comprehensive scheme. The English-speaking peoples are essentially conservative and unfailingly opportunist; they abhor all radical remedies. They are wont to remove ancient abuses piecemeal, and not root and branch. The most they can be got to do in the immediate future is to follow the example of the Italians, and to lop off gradually the most flagrant inconsistencies and absurdities of our present spelling, here a little and there a little, going forward hesitatingly, but never stopping.
In this good work of injecting a little more sense into our orthography, as in the other good work of still further simplifying our grammar as occasion serves and opportunity offers, we Americans may have to take the lead. The English language is ours by inheritance, and our interest in it is as deep and as wide as that of our British cousins. As Mark Twain has put it, with his customary shrewdness, it is “the King’s English” no longer, for it has gone into the hands of a company, and a majority of the stock is held on our side of the Atlantic.
We Americans must awake to a sense of our responsibility as the chief of the English-speaking peoples. The tie that binds the British colonies to the British crown is strong only because it is loose; and in Australia and in Canada the conditions of life resemble those of the United States rather than those of Great Britain. The British Isles are the birthplace of our race, but they no longer contain the most important branch of the English-speaking peoples. On both sides of the Atlantic, and afar in the Pacific also, and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, are “the subjects of King Shakspere,” the students of Chaucer and Dryden, the readers of Scott and Thackeray and Hawthorne; but most of them, or at least the largest single group, will be in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, as they are at the end of the nineteenth.
No one has more clearly seen the essential unity of the English-speaking race, and no one has more accurately stated the relation of the American branch of this race to the British branch, than the late John Richard Green. In his chapter on the independence of America, he recorded the fact that since 1776 “the life of the English people has flowed not in one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little sign of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed the face of the world. In wealth and material energy, as in numbers, it far surpasses the mother-country from which it sprang. It is already the main branch of the English people; and in the days that are at hand the main current of that people’s history must run along the channel, not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the Mississippi.”
When English becomes the world-language,—if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of honor and usefulness,—it will be the English language as it is spoken by all the branches of the English race, no doubt; but the dominant influence in deciding what the future of that language shall be must come from the United States. The English of the future will be the English that we shall use here in the United States; and it is for us to hand it down to our children fitted for the service it is to render.
This task is ours, not to be undertaken boastfully or vaingloriously or in any spirit of provincial self-assertion, on the one hand, or of colonial self-depreciation on the other, but with a full sense of the burden imposed upon us and of the privilege that accompanies it. It is our duty to do what we can to keep our English speech fresh and vigorous, to help it draw new life and power from every proper source, to resist all the attempts of pedants to cramp it and restrain its healthy growth, and to urge along the simplification of its grammar and its orthography, so that it shall be ready against the day when it is really a world-language.
(1898)