Edwin W. Bowen

“ For philology teaches us clearly that the urban dialect, far from being the original tongue of which the rural dialects are mere corruptions, was itself once only a provincial, barbarous form of speech,—a lingo just as primitive and just as uncultivated as any of its fellows,—and that its supremacy is the result, not of any intrinsic superiority over its rivals, but of the political predominance of those who employed it as their vernacular. ”

“ When a tongue ceases to be spoken, then and only then does it cease to change and become a dead language, as, for instance, Latin and Greek. This fact of the gradual change in a living language is demonstrated through the difficulty one experiences in understanding the English of Chaucer, or even of Shakespeare, for the matter of that, although he is not so far removed from the present age. If a living tongue underwent no alteration with the lapse of years, then why should not Anglo-Saxon be as readily intelligible to us as modern English? ”

“ Americans have as much right to enrich the English vocabulary with useful words as the English people themselves. We also have as just a claim as they to revive and preserve an obsolescent phrase or idiom. Because a given English word is no longer in use and esteem in England, but is recognized as standard usage in the United States, it does not follow that it is not good English. The number of those using the English language in America far exceeds the population of England, and the English speech is just as vigorous and virile in America as it is in the parent country. ”

“ The truth is, in those good old days men paid but little attention either to pronunciation or to spelling. It is a fact not so widely known as it deserves to be, that English orthography two centuries ago was just emerging from a state of confusion and chaos; and law and order were then for the first time beginning to appear. The result is the conventional spelling which only since the eighteenth century has been stereotyped in the form now so familiar to all educated people. And not even yet, as we know, has English orthography had its perfect work. ”

“ The history of language is the history of corruptions—using that term in the sense in which it is constantly employed by those who are stigmatizing by it the new words and phrases and constructions to which they take exception. Every one of us is to-day employing expressions which either outrage the rules of strict grammar, or disregard the principles of analogy, or belong by their origin to what we now deem the worst sort of vulgarisms. These so-called corruptions are found everywhere in the vocabulary, and in nearly all the parts of speech. ”

“ The vulgar slang of the street is, of course, to be universally condemned and tabooed. Legitimate slang, on the contrary, performs an important function in the development of a living language. It is not to be inconsiderately ostracized, therefore, and put under the ban as the chief source of corruption of our vernacular, as certain of our purists, in their zeal without knowledge, tell us and attempt to maintain. It is idle for them in their self-appointed rôle of guardian of the pristine purity of the English tongue to endeavor to defend so unsound and so indefensible a thesis. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, the orthoepists themselves differ, one may reasonably infer that no statement of any one of them about the proper pronunciation of a word, however positive it may be, ought to be recognized as a binding authority. For no pronouncing dictionary is an absolutely final authority. Nor can it ever justly claim to be, since the pronouncing dictionary purports to record only such pronunciations as are sanctioned by good usage, and good usage ever varies with the living speech, which, like all living things, is always slowly changing from century to century. ”

“ Since it is true that a spoken language is ever changing and never remains fixed, how great and far-reaching must be the modification and change which our own English speech has undergone during the many generations of its history! Because our written language has experienced comparatively little alteration since the invention of printing, it does not follow that the spoken speech has remained constant and unchanged from century to century. ”

“ He says, “English is now the most barbarously spelled of any cultivated tongue in Christendom. We are weltering in an orthographic chaos in which a multitude of signs are represented by the same sound and a multitude of sounds by the same sign.” [7] There is no doubt that our spelling is exceedingly unphonetic and unscientific. In our alphabet are only twenty-six characters to represent the multiplicity of sounds which exist in the English language. The utter inadequacy of our imperfect alphabet makes its strongest appeal—albeit mute—in its vowel notation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sheridan’s dictionary may do very well; but you can not always carry it about with you; and when you want the word, you have not the dictionary. It is like the man who has a sword that will not draw. It is an admirable sword, to be sure; but while your enemy is cutting your throat, you are unable to use it. Besides, Sir, what entitles Sheridan to fix the pronunciation of English? He has, in the first place, the disadvantage of being an Irishman ”

“ We feel, somehow, instinctively that the spelling ought to be an [Pg 14] index, perhaps a reasonably trustworthy guide to the pronunciation of a word. It seems not in keeping with the eternal fitness of things, certainly contrary to our linguistic instinct and opposed to the genius of our English speech, for pronunciation to be entirely dissociated from orthography. We feel that the sound should be forever and inseparably wedded to the writing, and our linguistic sense is more or less shocked when the two are divorced. ”

“ No doubt the pedants and purists opposed this change as utterly illogical and contrary to the natural order of development and growth of our English speech; but they were gradually borne down. It is the vast body of those who use the language, the people, not the lexicographers and scholars solely or chiefly, who are the final arbiters in a matter of this kind. It is the law of speech as registered in the usage of those who employ the language that decides ultimately whether a given phrase shall survive or perish ”

“ It is the meaning men put into them that gives them all the efficacy they possess. Language does nothing more than reflect the character and the characteristics of those who speak it. It mirrors their thoughts and feelings, their passions and prejudices, their hopes and aspirations, their aims, whether high or low. In the mouth of the bombastic it will be inflated; in the mouth of the illiterate it will be full of vulgarisms ”

“ The story of Caxton, the first English printer, is well known, how the good merchant from a southern shire, when he inquired for eggs of a good wife in a northern shire, could not make himself understood, his southern dialect being mistaken for French. To be sure, the dialectal differences are not so great to-day as they were in those remote times, largely as the result of the printing-press Caxton set up in Westminster. But even yet the differences between the dialects of the extreme parts of the British Isles is so pronounced as to be a barrier to complete interchange of thought. ”

“ In childhood—in fact, in infancy—we begin the slow and painful process of acquiring a vocabulary to express our ideas and we continue the work till death, ever imitating more or less closely the habits of speech of those about us. Thus language is modified perhaps without conscious effort, upon our part. By careful speakers the purity and the propriety of our speech are safeguarded. On the other hand, our language is corrupted and debased by those of careless and slipshod habits of utterance. ”

“ Every student who has given any attention to the historical development of our speech knows that it has changed from age to age no less in form than in pronunciation. Indeed, it could not be a living tongue if it did not constantly change. The oldest form of the language which we call Anglo-Saxon gradually changed in form and sound till Middle English times, and then it continued to change even more rapidly till modern times. ”

“ Nowhere more than on the lips of the native Londoner is the purity of our noble tongue in jeopardy. Strange to say, the English vernacular of the native Londoner has, of late years, fallen into disrepute by reason of its abounding improprieties, [Pg 154] its teeming provincialisms and its solecisms. No educated man who professes English as his mother-tongue would, to-day, think of making his speech conform to the usage of London as reflected in the local dialect. ”

“ Assuredly English orthography is no criterion of received pronunciation, either in America or in England. It requires only a moment’s reflection to be convinced how misleading and deceptive is our orthography as a guide to orthoëpy. Foreigners who undertake to learn our tongue are naturally more forcibly impressed with the utter untrustworthiness of this guide. The status of our orthography has been correctly described by a prominent historian of our noble speech. ”

“ It is to be presumed that the good Britons will not be offended if we, using the same license as themselves, venture to call such expressions “Briticisms.” Let it be distinctly understood, however, that this is not intended as an opprobrious epithet, but only to signify a word or an idiom which is peculiar to Great Britain and not familiar in America. For surely the English people have the right to employ whatever terms they may choose both in their colloquial and in their written speech. ”

“ The part of Britain south of the Thames and lying toward the west was settled by the Saxons. Their dialect which scholars call the West-Saxon was quite unlike the Anglian dialect; and it is distinguished above its fellows as the dialect in which the bulk of our earliest literature is written. The West-Saxon, therefore, from the grammatical point of view is by far the most important of our early English dialects, and is recognized by scholars as the standard for inflection and idiom. But the pre-eminence of West-Saxon was of later date than that of the Northumbrian dialect. ”

“ Despite the fact that such an orthoëpic authority is at best arbitrary, and somewhat artificial, it has enjoyed a kind of undisputed supremacy since the days of Dr. Johnson, the literary autocrat of the eighteenth century; and its tyranny seems not yet ended. For the English-speaking world still defers to the authority of the pronouncing dictionary and to that extent is under its thrall and has not the courage to challenge it and to assert its own independence in matters of orthoëpy. ”

“ Every writer was a law unto himself and followed the dictates of his own orthographical conscience, with no dictionary to molest or make him afraid. We find an allusion to this delightful sense of freedom in the comment which a well-known American humorist made upon Chaucer, that well of English undefiled from which so many modern writers have drunk copious draughts of inspiration. ”

“ The fact is, the vocabulary of the average educated man is so extremely limited and the vocabulary of the language so extremely copious that there are thousands of words of a technical character which even the most accomplished scholars have never once heard uttered. The average educated man who knows that English spelling is a very untrustworthy guide to pronunciation is perforce driven to consult his Webster, or his Worcester, or his Standard, or mayhap his Century. ”