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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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.
CONTENTS.
OUR ENGLISH SPELLING OF YESTERDAY—WHY ANTIQUATED?
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.
However, the classics are not the only “dead languages.” There is a sense in which some of the modern languages may be said to be “dead.” Even our own Saxon tongue, which good King Alfred employed in all its pristine purity both in conversation and in the translations which he made for his people, is practically as “dead” as Latin or Greek, inasmuch as it is no longer possible for us to think in terms of the Anglo-Saxon or to speak with the accents and sounds of that rugged, unpolished idiom. Indeed, the speech of Chaucer and even of Shakespeare, no less than that of King Alfred, is to all intents and purposes a “dead” tongue to the English-speaking people of the twentieth century, for we no longer employ the idiom and the sound values then current. We have the language of those times, it is true, preserved in the works of Chaucer and in our rich literary heritage from the Elizabethan age, but the speech of those times—the vernacular spoken by the mellifluous-tongued and myriad-minded Shakespeare, no less than that employed by that “verray perfight gentil knight,” Chaucer—is no longer heard upon the lips of the users of English and may therefore be said to be “dead.” These authors have left us a photograph more or less faithful and true, though not a speaking likeness, of the English language then existent. How our English vernacular has changed ever since the days of the famous virgin queen, not to mention the more radical changes of the far-remote days of the ill-starred Richard II! A spoken language is constantly changing. It grows and develops, or languishes and decays, upon the lips of those who employ it as their mother-tongue, now incorporating into itself new expressions and idioms and now casting off such as are old and worn out. But it is no easy matter to fix its ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic form, or to determine its chameleon color. The spoken language is modified by each speaker who uses it as a medium for the communication of his thoughts and feelings. The words which a man employs to convey his thoughts to his fellow man have not an absolute and unvarying significance. They have only a relative meaning, not a rigid and definite signification, which is essential in the nature of the term, and they express only the ideas which the writer or speaker puts into them. The same word, as is well known, has entirely different meanings in different passages or is employed in different senses by the speaker. Hence a prolific source of ambiguity in language. In the last analysis words are only conventional signs which mean whatever the speaker and hearer agree to make them mean. Striking illustration of this fact is furnished by our current social phrases, as Professor Kittredge points out in his “Words and their Ways in English Speech.”[1] Such conventional phrases as “Not at home,” “Delighted to see you,” “Sorry to have missed you when you called” are familiar everyday expressions which have no essential fixed meaning. To be sure, they mean what their face value imports, but they are generally regarded as merely polite forms—etiquette—nothing more.