English-speaking people

“ 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. ”

“ In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." ”

“ Another finds that they are the great English-speaking peoples, whereupon an ingenious man points out that there are people in Great Britain and its dependencies to whom the English language is not the most natural means of communication, and that not every inhabitant of the United States is a perfect master of the English tongue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The English vocabulary offers a fruitful field of study. First of all, the cast of thought that it expresses is individual. Ours is a distinct, not necessarily superior, civilization; and all the forms of intellectual activity represented by our tongue are so characteristic that one may well believe in the formative influence of a language over the people speaking it. ”

“ Those who are in contact with the French-speaking races say that French and English-speaking peoples get on well on the whole, and have an esteem for each other that makes nothing of the language barrier. ”

“ That educated Americans, and all of them accustomed to good society at home, speak the English language with as much propriety and purity as the most cultivated Englishmen, is certainly true, and it may safely be added that the masses of the people in America, born to the manner, speak it far better. ”

“ The English language, moreover, being spoken more or less over the greater part of the earth's surface, geographically speaking, the author who addresses his readers in that tongue is sustained by the flattering conviction that he will be understood by the majority of the nations of the globe! For it is not alone the educated classes of all countries that seek to master a language which possesses such a grand—all but unrivalled literature! ”

“ The important thing, as we all know, is not the exact fraction of the human race that will speak English. The important thing is that those who speak English, whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind. ”

“ It is believed that the general habit of speaking and writing English dates from only a few centuries back, and is chiefly owing to the great number of English-speaking men and women who have from time to time been added to our community by means of shipwrecks; and as, until a very recent period, men of English race formed the vast majority of the seamen and travellers of the world, this predominance of the English language among us is hardly to be wondered at. ”

“ Finally, the English-speaking race is progressive, but on its own traditional lines; its literature is deeply human, but intensely national in its expression. The abstract, analytical character of classical French, the effort to describe "man in general," and to discover truths of immediate and universal application, are lacking in English. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Despite the fact that our mother tongue is called English we have developed an American speech with its idiosyncrasies and idioms, a speech whose purity is not to be measured by its conformity to the speech of the British Isles. ”

“ implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world and to encourage in the students from the United States of North America who will benefit from the American Scholarships to be established for the reason above given at the University of Oxford under this my Will an attachment to the country from which they have sprung but without ”

“ 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! ”

“ We little think when we read or write that the words we employ are not precisely the same as those which have been in use in our mother-tongue from time immemorial. We are born into the language, so to say, and the words of our vocabulary we regard as part and parcel of our rich heritage of American liberty. Yet even the words of our English speech, like many of the institutions and customs of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, have a long history back of them, showing traces here and there of the various stages of development they have passed through. ”

“ From the wider variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be, since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at home. ”

“ But it is not for me to decide the very momentous question, as to which nation speaks the best English. The Americans generally improve upon the inventions of others; probably they may have improved upon our language. ”

“ A foreigner, unacquainted with the language, could not glean the drift of a conversation in English, except perhaps a trifle from the tone of the voices and more from the natural signs used—the smiles and frowns, the expressions of the faces, the play of eyes, lips, hands and whole body. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. ”

“ Five or six hundred years ago it was as well known to the English as any spot on the globe to which they adventured for trade or pleasure; and at this present time the advent of an Englishman is so rare in the place that, when such an apparition appears, the worthy people collect at their shop-doors to gaze at him, and the little children gather about him with gaping eyes, and examine him from head to foot, with an expression of mixed curiosity and fear. ”

“ The next generation will speak English from birth and gradually the other language will decay and perish--save as we record it for the sake of history.
“It can't be otherwise, Beatrice. The superior tongue is always bound to replace the inferior. All the science and technical work I teach these people must be explained in English.
“They have no words for all these things. Bridges, flying-machines, engines, water-pipes for the new aqueduct we're putting in to supply the colony from the big spring up back there, tools, processes, everything of importance, will enforce English. ”

“ And we know what was the opinion current amongst our neighbors the French—people of taste, acuteness, and quick literary tact—not a hundred years ago, about our great poets. The old Biographie Universelle [350] notices the pretension of the English to a place for their poets among the chief poets of the world, and says that this is a pretension which to no one but an Englishman can ever seem admissible. ”

“ A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. ”

“ It is certainly not from want of natural ability to do so, though this natural aptitude may be discounted by the difficulty most English people experience in keeping their minds concentrated. I venture to assert unhesitatingly that, with the exception of Dutch and Russian people, English folk learn foreign languages with greater ease than any other nationality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it goes on, the question as to which is to become the dominant language of the world will settle itself by a natural process, and the necessity of inventing a special form of speech will be obviated. English is to-day the chief commercial language of the world, and is fast becoming the polite tongue of Europe, a position held a century ago by French. ”

“ My knowlege of the practice of speaking in different parts of America, is derived from personal observation. My knowlege of the past and present state of the language in England, is taken from the writers who have treated expressly of the subject. [7] The authorities necessary to prove particular points will be quoted, as occasion shall require.
The talk of examining words cannot be agreeable to a writer, nor can his criticisms be very entertaining to the reader. ”

“ There can be no rational doubt, I think, that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, after all, is to interpret the ‘form and pressure’ of life—the experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race which employs it. ”

“ And, after all, how small that amount in comparison with what will be seen a hundred years hence, when many hundred millions of men are on the earth, English in speech and feeling, whatever may be their local and political distinctions! ”

“ Still the English seem to me a religious people; they have leisure enough to say grace and give thanks before and after meals, and their institutions tend to keep alive the feelings of reverence which cannot be said to be distinctive of our own people.
In coming out of the cathedral, on the Sunday I just mentioned, a gentleman addressed me as a fellow-countryman. There is something,--I will not stop now to try and define it,--but there is something by which we recognize an American among the English before he speaks and betrays his origin. ”

“ The English, in spite of their great culture, and their learning, their wonderful power of speaking foreign languages—for every one of the noblemen speaks perfectly not only Greek and Latin, but five155 or six other languages, and is well versed in astrology, music, and chess-playing—the English, I repeat, in spite of all this, have something barbarous at heart, which is awakened after they have partaken much of that nauseous potion called sack. ”

“ It is to these that foreigners desirous of learning our language most naturally recur. They constitute our ordinary standard literature, and for models in English writing the tradition, not yet obsolete, of our fathers refers us imperatively hither. ”

“ It requires an Englishman, or an American familiar with English fashions and foibles, to appreciate them. The German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Italian, or the Russian, could no more understand them without a previous initiation, or study and experience of English manners, than they could speak English without long application and practice. ”

“ Their culture generally enables the travelled English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air. Then the natural disposition is fostered by the respect which they find entertained in the world for English ability. ”

“ In most European countries men of letters, and the better class of journalists, are trained to observe the changes of the language, and to assist consciously in its development, being guided by acknowledged principles of tradition and taste. But the English language, which is now rapidly spreading over the world, is subject to no such guidance, and to very little intelligent criticism. ”