Richard Chenevix Trench

“ Among those who have recently abandoned the communion of the English Church one has exprest himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in renouncing our translation, he feels himself to have forgone and lost. These are his words: “Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forgo. ”

“ The losses and diminutions of a language differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions—namely, that they are of two kinds, while its gains are only of one. Its gains are only in words; it never puts forth in the course of its evolution a new power; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in powers—in words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind it, as it travels onwards, cases which it once possessed; renounces the employment of tenses which it once used ”

“ I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our old Teuton monosyllables; therefore if I find any elegant word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man therefore is not fit to innovate. ”

“ Unquestionably it has more letters than one to express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to change—with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer to England—that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn—that the climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. ”

“ French was no longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language, required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures, which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no utterance in Saxon words. ”

“ The history of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a few fragments of its ancient inflections. Now there is no doubt that this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. ”

“ I know no better example than the French ‘prestige’ will afford. ‘Prestige’ has manifestly no equivalent in our own language; it expresses something which no single word in English, which only a long circumlocution, could express; namely, that magic influence on others, which past successes as the pledge and promise of future ones, breed. The word has thus naturally come to be of very frequent use by good English writers; for they do not feel that in employing it they are passing by as good or a better word of their own. ”

“ The soul which the word once had in its own language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus—to take first one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other to illustrate my position—the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the ‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of Chimæra? ”

“ Much is changed in it; much probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. “Change in language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and when the foundations of the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. ”

“ If you wish to convince yourselves by actual experience, of the fact which I just now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of the language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence, let it be only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject entirely of your choice, employing therein only words which are of a Latin derivation. I venture to say you will find it impossible, or next to impossible to do it; whichever way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. ”

“ On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions is [115] going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. ”

“ II GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class; for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. ”

“ The genius of a language, unconsciously presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a definite issue, will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of any association of men. For the genius of a language is the sense and inner conviction of all who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and the means by which it will best attain its objects ”

“ For in the course of a nation’s progress new ideas are evermore mounting above the horizon, while others are lost sight of and sink below it: others again change their form and aspect: others which seemed united, split into parts. ”

“ Did ‘religion’, when our translation was made, mean godliness? did it mean the sum total of our duties towards God? for, of course, no one would deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part of our Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is abundant evidence to show that ‘religion’ did not mean this; that, like the Greek θρησκεία, for which it here stands, like the Latin ‘religio’, it meant the outward forms and embodiments in which the inward principle of piety arrayed itself, the external service of God ”

“ Let me urge here the advantage of a complete collection, or one as nearly complete as the industry of the collectors would allow, of all the notices in our literature, which mark, and would serve as dates for, the first incoming of new words into the language. These notices are of the most various kinds. Sometimes they are protests and remonstrances, as that just quoted, against a new word’s introduction; sometimes they are gratulations at the same; while many hold themselves neuter as to approval or disapproval, and merely state, or allow us to gather, the fact of a word’s recent appearance. ”

“ A dead language is the contrary of all this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally incapable of gaining and of losing. ”

“ It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment and an encumbrance to it rather than a help. The Finnish language has fourteen cases. Without pretending to know exactly what it is able to effect, I yet feel confident that it cannot effect more, nor indeed so much, with its fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five. It therefore seems to me that some words of Otfried Müller, in many ways admirable, do yet exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the forms of a language. ”

“ There is perhaps no word in the whole compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its popular. ”

“ It has been well and truly said: “Every new term, expressing a fact or a difference not precisely or adequately expressed by any other word in the same language, is a new organ of thought for the mind that has learned it” [121] . The limits of their vocabulary are in fact for most men the limits of their knowledge; and in a great degree for us all. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and more distinct than our words ”

“ Time, the greatest of all innovators, manages his innovations so dexterously, spreads them over such vast periods, and therefore brings them about so gradually, that often, while effecting the mightiest changes, we have no suspicion that he is effecting any at all. Thus how imperceptible are the steps by which a foreign word is admitted into the full rights of an English one; the process [67] of its incoming often eluding our notice altogether. There are numerous Greek words, for example which, quite unchanged in form, have in one way or another ended in finding a home and acceptance among us. ”

“ Because ignorance of a word’s spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and derivation. I do not mean that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too, but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. ”

“ Loud and sudden revolutions attract and compel notice; but silent and gradual, although with issues far vaster in store, run their course, and it is only when their cycle is completed or nearly so, that men perceive what mighty transforming forces have been at work unnoticed in the very midst of themselves.
Thus, to apply what I have just affirmed to this matter of language—how few aged persons, let them retain the fullest possession of their faculties, are conscious of any difference between the spoken language of their early youth, and that of their old age ”

“ We have not always been very happy in those which we have selected for imitation or adoption. Thus we might have been satisfied with ‘manual’, and not called back from its nine hundred years of oblivion that ugly and unnecessary word ‘handbook’. And now we are threatened with ‘word-building’, as I see a book announced under the title of “Latin word-building”, and, much worse than this, with ‘stand-point’. ”

“ Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index of changes going on in society and in the minds of men, till at length everything is changed about it. ”

“ Another motive to the invention of new words, is the desire thereby to cut short lengthy [122] explanations, tedious circuits of language. Science is often an immense gainer by words, which say singly what it would have taken whole sentences otherwise to have said. Thus ‘isothermal’ is quite of modern invention; but what a long story it would be to tell the meaning of ‘isothermal lines’, all which is summed up in and saved by the word. We have long had the word ‘assimilation’ in our dictionaries; ‘dissimilation’ has not yet found its way into them, but it speedily will. ”

“ Greek Words Naturalized
Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption and naturalization of foreign words ever ceases in a language. There are periods, as we have seen, when this goes forward much more largely than at others; when a language throws open, as it were, its doors, and welcomes strangers with an especial freedom; but there is never a time, when one by one these foreigners and strangers are not slipping into it. We do not for the most part observe the fact, at least not while it is actually doing. ”

“ English a Living Language
Our own is, of course, a living language still. It is therefore gaining and losing. It is a tree in which the vital sap is circulating yet, ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. ”

“ If ‘life-guard’ was originally, as Richardson suggests, ‘leib-garde’, or ‘body-guard’, and from that transformed, by the determination of Englishmen to make it significant in English, into ‘life-guard’, or guard defending the life of the sovereign, this will be another word from the same quarter. Yet I have my doubts; ‘leibgarde’ would scarcely have found its way hither before the accession of the House of Hanover, or at any rate before the arrival of Dutch William with his memorable guards; while ‘lifeguard’, in its present shape, is certainly an older word in the language ”

“ We are now pretty well used to ‘educational’, and the word is sometimes serviceable enough; but I can perfectly remember when some twenty years ago an “Educational Magazine” was started, the first impression on one’s mind was, that a work having to do with education should not thus bear upon its front an offensive, or to say the best, a very dubious novelty in the English language [81] . These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have ‘inflexional’, ‘seasonal’, ‘denominational’, and, not content with this, in dissenting magazines at least, the monstrous birth, ‘denominationalism’ ”

“ Yet how true a moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face; there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, “Who flatters me before, spatters me behind”. ”

“ Still it is with us here only as it is with all languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words, leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this last. Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt; and, judging from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, however distant now, will arrive, when the only way of forming comparatives and superlatives in the English language will be by prefixing ‘more’ and ‘most’ ”

“ Much more is wanted here than merely to attach two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this is not to make a new word: they must really coalesce and grow together. Different languages, and even the same language at different stages of its existence, will possess this power of forming new words by the combination of old in very different degrees. The eminent felicity of the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. ”

“ In the political and social condition of America, so far removed from our own, in the many natural objects which are not the same with those which surround us here, in efforts independently carried out to rid the language of imperfections, or to unfold its latent powers, even in the different effects of soil and climate on the organs of speech, there would have been causes enough to have provoked in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of language. ”

“ A living language therefore is one which abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by living men, a vital formative energy is still at work. It is one which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth ”

“ How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of language, we, speakers of the English tongue, in the course of centuries have got rid of; how bare (whether too bare is another question) we have stripped ourselves; what simplicity for better or for worse reigns in the present English, as compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That had six declensions, our present English but one; that had three genders, English, if we except one or two words, has none; that formed the genitive in a variety of ways, we only in one ”

“ Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your attention now to those changes in spelling which are constantly going forward, at some periods more rapidly than at others, but which never wholly cease out of a language; while at the same time I endeavour to trace, where this is possible, the motives and inducements which bring them about. It is a subject which none can neglect, who desire to obtain even a tolerably accurate acquaintance with their native tongue. ”

“ For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors. ”

“ Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the basis and not the superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the elementary situations of life. And although the Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in which great philological academy no toleration is given to words in ‘osity’ or ‘ation’. ”