THE GRATEFUL CITY
HAS BUILT THIS MONUMENT
THAT THEIR EXAMPLE MAY SPEAK
TO COMING GENERATIONS
What is to be said is here said in the simplest way. There is no waste of words, no attempt at display. It is a model of good English, brief, clear, and strong. If a school-boy had written it, he would have thought it a fine chance for using big words. He would have said, "The citizens of Boston who sacrificed their lives," not "the men who died"; and "preserved the integrity of the Union," not "kept the Union whole"; and "erected," not "built." And some men who have written much in newspapers and books would have made the same mistake of choosing long words where short ones give the sense as well or better.
A great preacher once said that he made it a rule never to use a word of three or two syllables when a word of two syllables or one syllable would convey the thought as well; and the rule is a good one. In reading we want to get at the sense through the words; and the less power the mind has to spend on the words, the more it has left for the thought that lies behind them. Here the simple words that we have known and used from childhood are the ones that hinder us least. We see through them at once, and the thought is ours with the least possible labor.
Those who urge the use of simple English often lay stress on choosing "Saxon" rather than "Classical" words, and it is well to know what this means.
The English is a mixed language, made up from various sources. Its history is the history of the English race, and the main facts are these:
Britain was first peopled, so far as we know, by men of the Celtic (or Keltic) race, of which the native Irish are types. The names of the rivers, mountains, and other natural features of the land are mostly Celtic, just as in this country they are mostly Indian. About fifty years before the Christian era the Romans conquered Britain, and held it for about 500 years. They brought in the Latin language; but few traces of it now remain except in the names of certain towns and cities. The mass of the people kept their old Celtic tongue. Between the years 450 and 550 a.d. Britain was invaded and conquered by German tribes, chiefly Angles and Saxons. It now became Angleland, or England; and the language became what is called Anglo-Saxon, except in the mountains of Wales and of Scotland, where Celtic is found to this day. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Danes invaded England, and ruled it for a time, but they caused no great change in the language. In the year 1066 the Norman Conquest took place, and William the Conqueror became King of England. Large numbers of the Norman French came with him, and French became the language of the court and of the nobility. By degrees our English language grew out of the blending of the Anglo-Saxon of the common people and the Norman French of their new rulers, the former furnishing most of the grammar, the latter supplying many of the words. Now the French was of Latin origin, and the English thus got an important Latin or "Classical" element, which has since been increased by the adding of many Greek and Latin words, especially scientific and technical terms.
The two great events in the history of the English language, as of the English people, are the Saxon and the Norman conquests. To the former it owes its grammatical frame-work, or skeleton; to the latter much of its vocabulary, or the flesh that fills out the living body.