The American Language
inheritance. "The new circumstances under which we are placed," he
wrote to John Waldo from Monticello on August 16, 1813, "call for new
words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.
An American dialect will therefore be formed."
Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and
one with an expertness in the matter that the too versatile Jefferson
could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and
specific. He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy
career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of "Dissertations on
the English Language," printed in 1789 and dedicated to "His
Excellency, Benjamin Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of
the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," Webster argued that the time for
regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had
already passed, and that "a future separation of the American tongue
from the English" was "necessary and unavoidable." "Numerous local
causes," he continued, "such as a new country, new associations of
people, new combinations of ideas in arts and sciences, and some
intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new
words into the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course
of time, a language in [Pg002] North America as different from the
future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are
from the German, or from one another."[1]
Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may
have been thinking, one or both, of a remote era, not yet come to
dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of
those days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case,
they allowed far too little (and particularly Webster) for factors
that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly
in operation about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the
vast improvement in communications across the ocean, a change scarcely
in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to
London today than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during
Jefferson's presidency, and that greater proximity has produced a
steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We
latter-day Americans know a great deal more about the everyday affairs
of England than the early Americans, for we read more English books,
and have more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more
Englishmen, and go to England much oftener. The effects of this
ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in
politics, in ethics and aesthetics, and even in the minutae of social
intercourse, are also to be seen in the language. On the one hand
there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that
much of our American slang quickly passes to London and the latest
English fashions in pronunciation are almost instantaneously imitated,
at least by a minority, in New York; and on the other hand the
English, by so constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of
their firmer resolution and certitude, a somewhat sneaking respect for
their own greater conservatism of speech, so that our professors of
the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of
differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine
that the standards of English are the only reputable standards of
American.
This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of
[Pg003] language, nor has it prevented the large divergences that we
shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily
toward a highly artificial formalism, and as steadily against the
investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called,
as is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing
four-legged upon the theorizings and false inferences of English
Latinists, eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a
rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book
language which few of us ever actually speak and not many of us even
learn to write. That language, heavily artificial though it may be,
undoubtedly has notable merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness
that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its "highly
charged and heavy-shotted" periods, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, serve
admirably the obscurantist purposes of American pedagogy and of
English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for
the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by
flouting it. But to the average American, bent upon expressing his
ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain
something vague and remote, like Greek history or the properties of
the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and seldom
encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which
is not often, it is with a rather depressing sense of its
artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial
Onmun, may master the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in
it or quite feels it.
This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure
of our schools to turn out students who can put their ideas into words
with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to
teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands
quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to
translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing
consists in making the attempt, and failing through lack of practise.
Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in deliberately
throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in
the case of Lincoln, in standing unaware of them. Thus the study of
the language he is [Pg004] supposed to use, to the average American,
takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is
grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax that have always been
largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to
prevail, and on the other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his
actual speech as best he may. "Literary English," says Van Wyck
Brooks,[2] "with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is
a tradition. They persist, not as the normal expressions of a race,
... but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a
dominating class largely out of touch with a national fabric
unconsciously taking form out of school." What thus goes on out of
school does not interest the guardians of our linguistic morals. No
attempt to deduce the principles of American grammar, or even of
American syntax, from the everyday speech of decently spoken Americans
has ever been made. There is no scientific study, general and
comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the
influences lying at the root of American word-formation. No American
philologist, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober
attention to the /sermo plebeius/ of his country that he habitually
gives to the mythical objective case in theoretical English, or to the
pronunciation of Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.
§ 2
/The Academic Attitude/--This neglect of the vulgate by those
professionally trained to investigate it, and its disdainful dismissal
when it is considered at all, are among the strangest phenomena of
American scholarship. In all other countries the everyday speech of
the people, and even the speech of the illiterate, have the constant
attention of philologists, and the laws of their growth and variation
are elaborately studied. In France, to name but one agency, there is
the Société des Parlers de France, with its diligent inquiries into
changing forms; moreover, the Académie itself is endlessly concerned
with the [Pg005] subject, and is at great pains to observe and note
every fluctuation in usage.[3] In Germany, amid many other such works,
there are the admirable grammars of the spoken speech by Dr. Otto
Bremer. In Sweden there are several journals devoted to the study of
the vulgate, and the government has recently granted a subvention of
7500 /kronen/ a year to an organization of scholars called the
Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmaal, formed to investigate it
systematically.[4] In Norway there is a widespread movement to
overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national
language based upon the speech of the peasants.[5] In Spain the
Academia is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografía
and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals (the last time
in 1914), taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of
old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the
native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter
closest at hand, [Pg006] and one finds in it very excellent works
upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish
in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uraguay and even
Honduras and Costa Rica.[6] But in the United States the business has
attracted little attention, and less talent. The only existing formal
treatise upon the subject[7] was written by a Swede trained in Germany
and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary
of Americanisms[8] was written in England, and is the work of an
expatriated lawyer. Not a single volume by a native philologist,
familiar with the language by daily contact and professionally
equipped for the business, is to be found in the meagre bibliography.
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah
Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later
dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect
Society,[9] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as
Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews. But all
this preliminary work has left the main field almost uncharted.
Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American
dialect than a student of it. He introduced radical changes into its
spelling and pronunciation, but he showed little understanding of its
direction and genius. One always sees in him, indeed, the teacher
rather than the scientific inquirer; the ardor of his desire to
expound and instruct was only matched by his infinite capacity for
observing inaccurately, and his profound ignorance of elementary
philological principles. In the preface to the first edition of his
American Dictionary, published in 1828--the first in which he added
the qualifying adjective to the title--he argued eloquently for the
right of Americans to shape their own speech without regard to
English [Pg007] precedents, but only a year before this he had told
Captain Basil Hall[10] that he knew of but fifty genuine
Americanisms--a truly staggering proof of his defective observation.
Webster was the first American professional scholar, and despite his
frequent engrossment in public concerns and his endless public
controversies, there was always something sequestered and almost
medieval about him. The American language that he described and argued
for was seldom the actual tongue of the folks about him, but often a
sort of Volapük made up of one part faulty reporting and nine parts
academic theorizing. In only one department did he exert any lasting
influence, and that was in the department of orthography. The fact
that our spelling is simpler and usually more logical than the English
we chiefly owe to him. But it is not to be forgotten that the majority
of his innovations, even here, were not adopted, but rejected, nor is
it to be forgotten that spelling is the least of all the factors that
shape and condition a language.