The English Language

by R. G. Latham

And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.'

"'I care not,' said Milton, 'to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, being content with these islands as my world.' A French Jesuit, Garnier, in 1678, laying down rules for the arrangement of a library, thought it superfluous to say anything of English books, because, as he observed, 'libri Anglicâ scripti linguâ vix mare transmittunt.' Swift, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, in his 'Proposal for correcting, improving, and

ascertaining the English Tongue,' observed, 'the fame of our writers is usually confined to these two islands." Not quite a hundred years ago Dr. Johnson seems to have entertained far from a lofty idea of the legitimate aspirations of an English author. He quotes in a number of the 'Rambler' (No. 118, May 4th, 1751), from the address of Africanus as given by Cicero, in his Dream of Scipio:—'The territory which you inhabit is no more than a scanty island inclosed by a small body of water, to which you give the name of the great sea and the Atlantic Ocean. And even in this known and frequented continent what hope can you entertain that your renown will pass the stream of Ganges or the cliffs of Caucasus, or by whom will your name be uttered in the extremities of the north or south towards the rising or the setting sun? So narrow is the space to which your fame can be propagated, and even there how long will it remain?' 'I am not inclined,' remarks Johnson, 'to believe that they who among us pass their lives in the cultivation of knowledge or acquisition of power, have very anxiously inquired what opinions prevail on the further banks of the Ganges.... The hopes and fears of modern minds are content to range in a narrower compass; a single nation, and a few years have generally sufficient amplitude to fill our imagination.' What a singular comment on this passage is supplied by the fact that the dominions of England now stretch from the Ganges to the Indus, that the whole space of India is dotted with the regimental libraries of its European conquerors, and that Rasselas has been translated into Bengalee! A few years later the great historian of England had a much clearer perception of what was then in the womb of Fate. When Gibbon, as has been already mentioned, submitted to Hume, a specimen of his intended History of Switzerland, composed in French, he received a remarkable letter in reply: 'Why,' said Hume, 'do you compose in French and carry faggots into the wood, as Horace says with regard to Romans who wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue, but have you not remarked the fate

of those two ancient languages in following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated and confined to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French therefore triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language.'

"Every year that has since elapsed has added a superior degree of probability to the anticipations of Hume. At present the prospects of the English language are the most splendid that the world has ever seen. It is spreading in each of the quarters of the globe by fashion, by emigration, and by conquest. The increase of population alone in the two great states of Europe and America in which it is spoken, adds to the number of its speakers in every year that passes, a greater amount than the whole number of those who speak some of the literary languages of Europe, either Swedish, or Danish, or Dutch. It is calculated that, before the lapse of the present century, a time that so many now alive will live to witness, it will be the native and vernacular language of about one hundred and fifty millions of human beings.

"What will be the state of Christendom at the time that this vast preponderance of one language will be brought to bear on all its relations,—at the time when a leading nation in Europe and a gigantic nation in America make use of the same idiom,—when in Africa and Australasia the same language is in use by rising and influential communities, and the world is circled by the accents of Shakspeare and Milton? At that time such of the other languages of Europe as do not extend their empire beyond this quarter of the globe will be reduced to the same degree of insignificance in comparison with English, as the subordinate languages of modern Europe to those of the state they belong to,—the Welsh to the English, the Basque to the Spanish, the Finnish to the Russian. This predominance, we may flatter ourselves, will be a more signal blessing to literature than that of any other language could possibly be. The English is essentially a

medium language;—in the Teutonic family it stands midway between the Germanic and Scandinavian branches—it unites as no other language unites, the Romanic and the Teutonic stocks. This fits it admirably in many cases for translation. A German writer, Prince Pückler Muskau, has given it as his opinion that English is even better adapted than German to be the general interpreter of the literature of Europe. Another German writer, Jenisch, in his elaborate 'Comparison of Fourteen Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe,' which obtained a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1796, assigns the general palm of excellence to the English. In literary treasures what other language can claim the superiority? If Rivarol more than sixty years back thought the collective wealth of its literature able to dispute the pre-eminence with the French, the victory has certainly not departed from us in the time that has since elapsed,—the time of Wordsworth and Southey, of Rogers and Campbell, of Scott, of Moore, and of Byron.

"The prospect is so glorious that it seems an ungrateful task to interrupt its enjoyment by a shade of doubt: but as the English language has attained to this eminent station from small beginnings, may it not be advisable to consider whether obstacles are not in existence, which, equally small in their beginnings, have a probability of growing larger? The first consideration that presents itself is that English is not the only language firmly planted on the soil of America, the only one to which a glorious future is, in the probable course of things, assured.

"A sufficient importance has not always been attached to the fact, that in South America, and in a portion of the northern continent, the languages of the Peninsula are spoken by large and increasing populations. The Spanish language is undoubtedly of easier acquisition for the purposes of conversation than our own, from the harmony and clearness of its pronunciation; and it has the recommendation to the inhabitants of Southern Europe of greater affinity to their own languages and the Latin. Perhaps the extraordinary neglect which has been the portion of this language for the last

century and a half may soon give place to a juster measure of cultivation, and indeed the recent labours of Prescott and Ticknor seem to show that the dawn of that period has already broken. That the men of the North should acquire an easy and harmonious southern language seems in itself much more probable than that the men of the south should study a northern language, not only rugged in its pronunciation, but capricious in its orthography. The dominion of Spanish in America is, however, interrupted and narrowed by that of Portuguese, and to a singular degree by that of the native languages, some of which are possibly destined to be used for literary purposes in ages to come.