English Or American?

English Or American? /

   But as English spreads over the world, will it be able to maintain its present form? Probably not. But why should it? The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language is cherished only by pedants. Every successful effort at standardization, as Ernest Weekley has well said, results in nothing better than emasculation. "Stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis". It is the very anarchy of English, adds Claude de Crespigny, that has made it the dominant language of the world today, in its early forms it was a highly inflected tongue - indeed, it was more inflected than modern German, and almost as much so as Russian. The West Saxon dialect, for example, in the days before the Norman Conquest, had grammatical gender, and in addition the noun was inflected for number and for case, and there were five cases in all. Moreover, there were two quite different declensions, the strong and the weak, so that the total number of inflections was immense. The same ending, of course, was commonly used more than once, but that fact only added to the difficulties of the language. The impact of the Conquest knocked this elaborate grammatical structure - already weakening - into a cocked hat. The upper classes spoke French, and so the populace had English at its mercy. It quickly wore down the vowels of the endings to a neutral e, reduced the importance of their consonants by moving the stress forward to the root, and finally lopped off many inflections in toto. By the time of Chaucer (1340?—1400) English was moving rapidly toward its present form. It had already come to depend heavily upon word position for expressing meanings, and meanwhile the influence of French, which had been official from 1066 to 1362, had left it full of new words and made its vocabulary hybrid. To this day, indeed, in its vocabulary the likeness of English to French, Italian and Spanish is often more marked than its likeness to German. Once its East Midland dialect had been given preeminence over all other dialects by the importance of the city of London, it began to develop rapidly, and in the time of Shakespeare it enjoyed an extraordinarily lush and vigorous growth. New words were taken in from all the other languages of Europe and from many of those of Africa and Asia, other new words in large number were made of its own materials and almost everything that remained of the old inflections was sloughed off. Thus it gradually took on a singularly simple and flexible form, and passed ahead of the languages that were more rigidly bound by rule.

    I think I have offered sufficient evidence that the American of today is much more honestly English, in any sense that Shakespeare would have understood, than the so-called Standard English of England. It still shows all the characteristics that marked the common tongue in the days of Elizabeth I and it continues to resist stoutly the policing that ironed out Standard English in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Standard English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious. Its vocabulary is less abundant than his own, it has lost to an appreciable extent   its old capacity for bold metaphor and in   pronunciation and spelling it seems to him to be extremely uncomfortable and not a little ridiculous. When he hears a speech in its Oxford (or Public School) form he must be a Bostonian to avoid open mirth. He believes, on very plausible grounds, that American is better on all counts — clearer, more rational and, above all, more charming. And he holds not illogically that there is no reason under the sun why a dialect spoken almost uniformly by nearly 180.000,000 people should yield anything to the dialect of a small minority in a nation of 50,000,000. He sees that wherever American and this dialect come into fair competition - as in Canada, for example, or in the Far East - American tends to prevail, and that even in England many of its reforms and innovations are making steady headway, so he concludes that it will probably prevail everywhere hereafter. "When two-thuds of the people who use a certain language", says one of his spokesmen, "decide lo call it –a freight train instead of a goods train they are "right"; and the first is correct English and the second a dialed".

    Not is the American, in entertaining such notions, without English support.  The absurdities of  Standard  English  are denounced  by every English philologian, and by a great many other Englishmen. Those who accept it without cavil are simply persons who are unfamiliar with any other form of the language; the Irishman, the Scotsman, the Canadian and the Australian laugh at it along with the American - and with the Englishman who has lived in the United States. H.W.Seaman, a Norwich man who had spent ten years on American and Canadian newspapers and was in practice, when he wrote, as a journalist in London, says:

    "We are as sick and tired of this so-called English as you Americans are. It has far less right to be called Standard English speech than Yorkshire or any other country dialect has - or than any American dialect. It is as alien to us as it is to you. True, some of my neighbors have acquired it - for social or other reasons — but then some of the Saxon peasants took pains to acquire Norman French, which also was imposed upon them from above."

    Seaman describes with humor his attempts as a schoolboy to shed his native Norwich English and to acquire the prissy fashionable dialect that passes as Standard. He managed to do so and is thus able today to palaver on equal terms with "an English public-school boy, an Oxford man, a clergyman of the Establishment, an announcer of the British Broadcasting Company, or a  West End actor",  but  he confesses that  it  still strikes him, as it strikes an American, as having "a mauve, Episcopalian and ephebian ring". And he quotes George Bernard Shaw: “The English have no respect for their language. ... It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. ... An honest ant natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club."

    Basil de Seleincourt, author of "Pomona, or The Future of English^”, and J.Y.T.Greig, author of "Breaking Priscian's Head", both hope that some form of English denizened in England may eventually become the universal form of the language, but both are plainly upset by fears that American will prevail. "Right and wrong in such a matter", says de Sclincourt, "can be decided only by the event. However it be, the United Stales, obviously, is now the scene of the severest ordeals, the vividest excitements of our language. ... The contrasting and competitive use of their one language by the English and Americans gives it a new occasion for the exercise of its old and noble faculty of compromise. In a period of promise and renewal, it was beginning to grow old; the Americans are young. ... Its strong constitution will assimilate tonics as fast as friends can supply them, and take no serious harm. Changes are certainly in store for if'. Mr.Greig is rather less sanguine about the prospects of compromise between English and American. "It is possible", he says gloomily, "that in fifty or a hundred years ... American and not English will be the chief foreign language taught in the schools of Asia and the European Continent. Some Americans look forward to this without misgiving, nay, with exultation; and I for one would rather have it fall out than see perpetuated and extended that silliest … of all the English dialects, Public-School Standard".

   The defects of English, whether in its American or its British form, are almost too obvious to need rehearsal. One of the words is that the two great branches of the language differ not only in vocabulary but also in pronunciation. Thus the foreigner must make his choice, and though in most cases he is probably unconscious of it, he nevertheless makes it. The East Indian, when be learns English at all, almost always learns something approximating Oxford English, but the Latin American is very apt to learn American, and American is what the immigrant returning to Sweden or Yugoslavia, Israel or Syria, Italy of Finland, certainly takes home with him. In Russian, American has begun to challenge English, and in Japan and elsewhere in the Far East the two dialects are in bitter competition, with American apparently prevailing. This competition, which has been going on in Europe since World War I, presents a serious problem to foreign teachers of the language.

    Unluckily, neither of the great dialects of English may be described as anything approaching a perfect language. Within the limits of both there are still innumerable obscurities, contradictions and irrationalities. Those in spelling are especially exasperating. "But spelling", says Krapp, "would be only a beginning of the general house-cleaning for which our precious heritage of English speech as we know it today provides a profitable opportunity. The language is burdened with quantities of useless lumber, which from the point of view of common sense and reason might just as well be burned on the rubbish heap. ... Why should we permit an exceptional plural feet or teeth when we possess a perfectly good way of making plurals by adding s? And why should verbs like write have two past forms, wrote, and written, when most verbs of the language get along quite satisfactorily with only one?"

   There is yet another difficulty, and a very serious one. Of it Janet Rankin Aiken says:

    'This difficulty is idiom — idiom observable in a large part of what we say and write, but centering particularly in verb and preposition. It has been calculated that including all phrase constructions there are well over a hundred different forms for even a simple, regular verb like, call, besides extra or lacking forms for irregular verbs like speak, be, and set. Each of these verb forms has several uses, some as high as a dozen or more, to express permission, ability, interrogation, negation, generalization, expectation, duration, inception, and a bewildering number of other ideas. Native speakers of English have difficulty with verb constructions; how much more so the foreign student of the language!"

    Finally there are the snarls of sentence order — naturally numerous in an analytical language. Says Dr.Aiken:

    "Each of the sentence-types - declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory -has its own normal order, but there are many exceptional orders as well. In certain constructions the verb may or must come before the subject, and frequently the complement comes before the subject, or the subject is embedded in the verb phrase. All these orders, both normal and exceptional, must somehow be mastered before the student can be said to use English properly."

   Efforts to remedy the irrationalities of English spelling have been under way for many years, but so far without much success. The improvement of English in other respects much await a revolutionist who will do for it what Mark Twain tried to do for German in "The Awful German Language" - but with much less dependence upon logic. "If English is to be a continuously progressive creation", said Krapp, "then it must escape from the tyranny of the reason. ... Suppose the children of this generation and of the next were permitted to cultivate expressiveness instead of fineness of speech, were praised and promoted for doing something interesting, not for doing something correct and proper. If this should happen, as indeed it is already beginning to happen, the English language and literature would undergo such a renascence as they have never known". Meanwhile, despite its multitudinous defects, English goes on.