Anglicisation

“ The principle which ought to govern can be stated simply. English should be at liberty to help itself freely to every foreign word which seems to fill a want in our own language. It ought to take these words on probation, so to speak, keeping those which prove themselves useful, and casting out those which are idle or rebellious. And then those which are retained ought to become completely English, in pronunciation, in accent, in spelling, and in the formation of their plurals. ”

“ The English language stands placed, in the main, very differently: and happily does it do so, as far as force, impressiveness, and picturesque beauty are concerned. No doubt, we have many words founded on the Latin and its modern derivations; and these are far from unserviceable, inasmuch as they lend general harmony to our tongue, spoken and written. But our special strength of diction comes from the Anglo-Saxon; and fortunate is it, that that primitive form of speech still forms the chief constituent of the national language of Britain. ”

“ Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. ”

“ It must never be forgotten, however, that the whole framework of our language still remains, in every case, purely English—that is to say, Anglo-Saxon or Low Dutch—however many foreign elements may happen to enter into its vocabulary. We can frame many sentences without using one word of Romance or classical origin: we cannot frame a single sentence without using words of English origin. ”

“ The influences at work upon the English language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force, so that the changes are startling in their rapidity. English is not only the language of a nation or of a race, not even of an empire ”

“ But heap, God, thy, thigh, hang, shame, which are none of the seven spell’d by the Letters we intend should spell them: neither can any Englishman for his ears, eyes and wits, spell any of these words, and MILLIONS more like ’em, more by his 24 English Letters, make what shift he can, while Ingland is Ingland, and have both Universities, CAMBRIGE and Oxford to help him, and all the Universities beyond the Seas to help them. ”

“ How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares! ”

“ And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to understand English conditions, and the English dialect, which has more and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the separation. We have so constantly read English literature, and kept ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to them as they are with regard to us ”

“ If the formerly foreign word has been taken over and if it can therefore be utilized without hesitancy, can it be made to form its plural in accord with the customs of English. Here those who seek to make the English language truly English and to keep it truly pure, will meet with sturdy resistance. It will not be easy to persuade the literate, the men of culture, to renounce the x at the end of beaux and bureaux and to spell these plurals 'beaus' and 'bureaus'. ”

“ Remember that we hold the English tongue in trust—it belongs to the nation and not to us—and we have no more right to profane England's language by the introduction of coined words and slang expressions than we have to disendow her institutions or to pollute her rivers. ”

“ The sands of the seashore, the drops of the ocean, are few when compared to the mighty current of words which are poured into the world by millions upon millions of human tongues. It is the tie of a common language which indefinably and inexpressibly knits together all those who have inherited it. "The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and most desirable that can unite mankind." [2] The English language is a synonym of English thought, passion, pleasure, pain, suffering. It expresses all our intimate and fundamental ideas of law, religion and politics. ”

“ The 13th century, from the point of view of Biblical renderings into the vernacular, is an absolute blank. French—or rather the Anglo-Norman dialect of the period—reigned supreme amongst the upper classes, in schools, in parliament, in the courts of law and in the palace ofAnglo-Norman Period. the king. English lurked in farms and hovels, amongst villeins and serfs, in the outlying country-districts, in the distant monasteries, amongst the lower clergy, amongst the humble and lowly and ignorant. ”

“ An Englishman speaking French, or a Frenchman speaking English, has no sympathy with the customs, laws, manners, morals, legends, literature, or drama of the foreign country beyond the acquired one of scholarship. ”

“ For it was not the classical Latin that is the origin of French, but the language of the soldiers and the camp-followers who talked slang and picked words up from every quarter. English has certainly a richer vocabulary, a finer variety of words to express delicate distinctions of meaning, than any language that is or that ever was spoken: and this is because it has always been hospitable in the reception of new words. It is too late a day to close the doors against new words. ”

“ If an academy should be established for the cultivation of our stile, which I, who can never wish to see dependance multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy, let them, instead of compiling grammars and dictionaries, endeavour, with all their influence, to stop the licence of translatours, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France. ”

“ It is a recognized fact that there is a considerable variation in the English language as spoken by the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. The English people differ from the American people in the use of our common speech not only in their characteristic mode of pronunciation and orthography, but they also differ from us in no less striking a manner in the use of certain idioms and household phrases, which constitute the small change of our every-day speech. ”

“ But, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—and even much later—travelling was very difficult and expensive; working-men could not travel at all; there was little motive to travel for any one; and generations were born and died within the same village, or on one farm, or at least in one part of the ‘country-side.’ Thus different parts of this island pronounced their English in their own way; had their own grammar—that is, their own inflections; and each division of England looked upon itself as the right and correct speakers of the English tongue. ”

“ Dual Character of our LanguageIt is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak, and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. ”

“ If indeed a guardian were necessary, what Englishman would it be who would best preserve our pure English—the shepherd of Dorset or the miner of Northumberland, the Yorkshire man or the cockney? If it is not the London apprentice who is to set the standard, but the Englishman of breeding, it is hard to discover the ground whereon this Englishman can claim superiority of taste or knowledge over the other educated men to whom English is the mother-tongue, whether they were born in Scotland, Ireland, or America, in Australia, India, or Canada. ”

“ Englishmen are nation-builders; a shipload of them cast upon a desert island would form a government as instinctively and as easily as they would build themselves houses. In this respect English is like Latin; it is the language of a distinct, original political system, whose obvious advantages are enticing men to copy it all over the world.
4. Another presumption in favor of our speech arises from certain peculiarities of its grammar and of its enunciation. In its grammar, it has cast off more of the inflexional burdens than either of its competitors. ”

“ Good and well go better together than quick and quickly. The English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or, conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for the possibilities of our native resources that we are allowing these to shrink by default? ”

“ But the English spoken in the fifth century was a very different language from the English that is spoken now. It was different, yet still the same. It was different in appearance, as a child of one year old is different in looks from a man of forty; but both the English of to-day and the English of the fifth century are the same—because the one has grown out of the other, just as the tall strong man of forty has grown out of the child of one year old.
3. FAMILY.—To what family of languages does our English speech belong? It belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. ”

“ The French, all analytically, have conceived of fifty different proprieties, meeting fifty different cases, whereas the English mind, less intensely at work, has never conceived but of one—the grand propriety, for every case, it should in fairness be said, of just being English. ”

“ There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of [pg 084] England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German—nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words, lie mixed together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone it would be impossible to classify English with any other of the established stocks and stems of human speech. ”

“ We Americans, however, with our characteristic spirit of independence have made bold to break [Pg 29] away from British tradition and custom in the writing of certain English words and have introduced a few minor reforms in our spelling. But the English people have not followed our lead in this matter, being content to allow our adopted American spelling, together with our distinctive pronunciation, serve as an earmark to distinguish American from British English. ”

“ If the most eminent speakers are not to direct our practice, where shall we look for a guide? The answer is extremely easy; the rules of the language itself, and the general practice of the nation, constitute propriety in speaking. If we examin the structure of any language, we shall find a certain principle of analogy running through the whole. We shall find in English that similar combinations of letters have usually the same pronunciation; and that words, having the same terminating syllable, generally have the accent at the same distance from that termination. ”

“ We are aware that many of them imagine the language of their country to be the standard as to idiom, pronunciation, and spelling, and any English variation from their golden rule as erroneous and heterodox; but such critics are entitled to no consideration whatever. ”

“ I turn up my nose at nothing, being convinced that it is to low origins that the great lexicographers will eventually have to stoop. In truth, the innate strength of the English language, which is becoming more and more the Master Tongue of the world, lies in its homely, trivial, and democratic origin. ”

“ The English tongue, tho later in its progress towards perfection, has attained to a considerable degree of purity, strength and elegance, and been employed, by an active and scientific nation, to record almost all the events and discoveries of ancient and modern times.
This language is the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents. To cultivate and adorn it, is a task reserved for men who shall understand the connection between language and logic, and form an adequate idea of the influence which a uniformity of speech may have on national attachments. ”

“ And though, perhaps, to correct the language of nations by books of grammar, and amend their manners by discourses of morality, may be tasks equally difficult; yet as it is unavoidable to wish, it is natural likewise to hope, that your Lordship's patronage may not be wholly lost; that it may contribute to the preservation of antient, and the improvement of modern writers; that it may promote the reformation of those translators, who for want of understanding the characteristical difference of tongues, have formed a chaotic dialect of heterogeneous phrases ”

“ The language of the educated in England, however,—in other words, the language of those who aim at following the norm,—agrees in one respect, that in all an emancipation from dialect is aimed at, and, to a large extent, attained. ”