ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA.
The preservation of a pure English diction is not sufficiently aimed at in America. Some are so entirely Britannic, as to receive every thing for legal tender in letters, which comes across the water. This is thenceforward duly 'marqué au coin.' Others are so patriotically republican, as to set about the task of nursing the countless brood of cis-Atlantic words, into literary respectability. Both are in error. It is not enough to avoid Amercanisms; nor is it expedient to manufacture a pye-bald dialect, of vulgarisms and provincialisms, for the mere satisfaction of calling it our own. In England, no less than here, the language is growing to an unhealthy exuberance, and many of the words which are fathered on the poor Americans, are distempered excrescences of the overgrown British trunk. Nothing but the appeal to a standard of former golden days of literature and classic taste, can save the noble tongue of freemen from becoming an unwieldy, cacophonious, inconsistent mass of crudities. How much more is there danger, lest the other party, by encouraging unauthorized and American inventions in language, lay the foundation for provincial dialects, which shall hopelessly diverge from one another, until the Mississippian and the Virginian shall be as diverse as were the Athenian and the Macedonian. What this difference was, may be seen at a glance even in Demosthenes on the crown; where the orator blunders in Attic, while he reads in the same breath a decree of the Byzantes in broad-mouthed Doric.
To some minds this may seem a trifling subject; like the countryman's nightingale in Catullus, 'vox et praeterea nihil.' But, as Mirabeau said, Words are things. Language and thought act reciprocally. Unity of speech presupposes unity of thinking; but it also propagates it. Where provincial dialects begin to grow into languages, there is a corresponding divergence of national feeling. In our boundless country, after all our attempts to the contrary, this diversity of language will take place. It is now taking place. We begin to distinguish by his idiom and his pronunciation, the New Englander, the Southron, and the native of the great Western Valley. And there is no possibility of avoiding a separation of greater moment, without some common and acknowledged standard to which the appeal may be made; a standard not fabricated, but adopted—which shall be maintained by men of letters, in opposition to the immensely varying license of the illiterate mass in the respective districts of America.
Such a standard exists in the authorized classics of Great Britain. If we depart from this, we not only fall to pieces at home, but eventually sever our literature from that of the mother country; a mishap to be deprecated by every man who wishes his posterity to drink at "the well-spring of English, pure and undefiled," or who desires our American authors to be honored in Great Britain. We would not be such purists in language, as to stigmatize every word not found in Johnson. There is a fastidiousness on one side, as evil as the recklessness on the other. Fox rejected all words not found in Dryden, and Bulwer speaks of one so addicted to the Saxon element of our tongue, that his English stalks abroad "as naked as a Pict." New objects are discovered in nature, new distinctions are taken in science, new relations are discerned in ancient truths, and all these justify new words. But we are not in danger of pruning too close in this land of universal license. The purity and melody of our language are threatened from the side of indiscriminate adoption of needless words and phrases. The basest provincialisms begin to install themselves in works of reputed elegance; and grammatical solecisms are daily "being engrafted" on our stock. The last phrase is here inserted as a specimen, with our challenge to all the sciolists and misses who use it, to furnish an instance of a similar construction, in any writer of merit, from Robert of Gloucester to Sir James Mackintosh.
Provincialisms are cited abroad as Americanisms. Though "I guess" is often used by Locke in the Yankee acceptation, yet even in America it is confined to a particular region, where un-English phraseology is rife. So the sad abuse of that poetical word evening to mean afternoon—an abuse which makes mere prose of such a verse as
"Like a bright exhalation in the evening,"
is confined to a 'section' of our states. Mutual recrimination and banter tend to rub off these points of vulgarity, which show themselves most in such as move in narrow circles. No one State or District can justifiably throw stones, for we all live in glass houses. We have known a New Englander laugh at the Southern use of the word clever; ignorant utterly that the latter is the only English acceptation. And in like manner we knew a vagrant word-catcher to have in his list of Virginianisms Good bye t' ye, a phrase purely Shakspearian. The Philadelphian calls a certain savoury bird a Quail; according to Wilson, he is right, and the Marylander wrong in calling it a Partridge. But the Southron makes reprisals in the case of another sort of game, for he rightly calls that a Hare which the North-man eats under the title of Rabbit. To speak of pronunciation would be endless. That of the South accords with England's best orators and dictionaries in all such words as tutor vice tootor—path, wrath, carpet, garden, &c. Yet many sedulous students of Walker never find this out. Dr. Noah Webster would fain have us believe that orthoepy demands such sounds as natur, featur, creatur. We rejoice that even in Connecticut this barbarism is growing into discredit. The learned Doctor would also improve English so as to write Savior for Saviour, Bridegoom for Bridegroom, Duelist for Duellist, and the like. We humbly crave leave to wait until any one English work can be produced in which these elegancies shall appear. It is an English, not an American language which we are called upon to nurture and perfect. Let no scholar deem it beneath his dignity to aid in the work. Then we shall no longer see such a term as firstly in a work on metaphysics, nor hear such a double adverb as illy on the floor of Congress—no longer hear of an event's transpiring, before it has become public, nor of an argument being predicated on such and such facts.
BOREALIS.