Authors: H.L. Mencken
My own experience may be added for whatever it is worth. I have visited, since the World War, sixteen countries in Europe, five in Africa, three in Asia and three in Latin-America, beside a large miscellany of islands, but I don’t remember ever encountering a situation that English could not resolve. I have heard it spoken with reasonable fluency in a Moroccan bazaar, in an Albanian fishing-port, and on the streets of Istanbul. During the war the German army of occupation in Lithuania used it as a means of communicating with the local Jews, many of whom had been in America. In part, of course, its spread has been due to the extraordinary dispersion of the English-speaking peoples. They have been the greatest travelers of modern times, and the most adventurous merchants, and the most assiduous colonists. Moreover, they have been, on the whole, poor linguists, and so they have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race. Wherever it has met with serious competition, as with French in Canada, with Spanish along our southwestern border, and with Dutch in South Africa, they have compromised with its local rival only reluctantly, and then sought every opportunity, whether fair or unfair, to break the pact. If English is the language of the sea, it is largely because there are more English ships on the sea than any other kind, and English ship-captains refuse to learn what they think of as the barbaric gibberishes of Hamburg, Rio and Marseilles.
But there is more to the matter than this. English, brought to close quarters with formidable rivals, has won very often, not by mere force of numbers and intransigence, but by the weight of its intrinsic merit. “In riches, good sense and terse convenience (
Reich-tum, Vernunft und gedrängter Fuge
),” said the eminent Jakob Grimm nearly a century ago,
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“no other of the living languages may be put beside it.” To which the eminent Otto Jespersen adds: “It seems to me positively and expressively masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man, and has very little childish or feminine about it.”
29
Dr. Jespersen then goes on to explain the origin and nature of
this “masculine” air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force. He says:
The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless consonants stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred consonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in ha
d
e, hage, li
v
lig), where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English is the
r
when
not
followed by a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely all pretensions to the rank of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciation of the South of England)
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either frankly a vowel (as in
here
) or else nothing at all (in
hart
, etc.). Each English consonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a
t
is a
t
, and a
k
is a
k
, and there is an end. There is much less modification of a consonant by the surrounding vowels than in some other languages; thus none of that palatalization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of their surroundings; and in this respect the language now has deviated widely from the character of Old English, and has become more clear-cut and distinct in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most long vowels (in
ale, whole, eel, who
, phonetically
eil, houl, ijl, huw
) counteracts in some degree this impression of neatness and evenness.
Dr. Jespersen then proceeds to consider certain peculiarities of English grammar and syntax, and to point out the simplicity and forcefulness of the everyday English vocabulary. The grammatical baldness of the language, he argues (against the old tradition in philology), is one of the chief sources of its vigor. He says:
Where German has, for instance,
alle diejenigen wilden tiere, die dort leben
, so that the plural idea is expressed in each word separately (apart, of course, from the adverb), English has
all the wild animals that live there
, where
all
, the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are alike incapable of receiving any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the greatest clearness imaginable, and all the unstressed endings
-e
and
-en
, which make most German sentences so drawling, are avoided.
The prevalence of very short words in English, and the syntactical law which enables it to dispense with the definite article in many constructions “where other languages think it indispensable,
e.g.
, ‘life is short,’ ‘dinner is ready’ ” — these are further marks of vigor and clarity, according to Dr. Jespersen. “ ‘First come, first served,’ ” he says, “is much more vigorous than the French ‘Premier venu,
premier moulu’ or ‘Le premier venu engrène,’ the German ‘Wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst,’ and especially than the Danish ‘Den der kommer først til mølle, far først malet.’ ” Again, there is the superior logical sense of English — the arrangement of words, not according to grammatical rules, but according to their meaning. “In English,” says Dr. Jespersen, “an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the immediate neighborhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb (auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; the only really important exception is where there are qualifications added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex serves the purpose of a relative clause.” In English, the subject almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows after. Once Dr. Jespersen had his pupils determine the percentage of sentences in various authors in which this order was observed. They found that even in English poetry it was seldom violated; the percentage of observances in Tennyson’s poetry ran to 88. But in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it fell to 61, in Anatole France’s prose to
66
, in Gabriele d’Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. All these things make English clearer and more logical than other tongues. It is, says Dr. Jespersen, “a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon.” In these judgments another distinguished Danish philologist, Prof. Thomsen, agrees fully.
Several years ago an American philologian, Dr. Walter Kirkconnell, undertook to count the number of syllables needed to translate the Gospel of Mark into forty Indo-European languages, ranging from Persian and Hindi to English and French.
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He found that, of all of them, English was the most economical, for it took but 29,000 syllables to do the job, whereas the average for all the Teutonic languages was 32,650, that for the Slavic group 36,500, that for the Latin group 40,200, and that for the Indo-Iranian group (Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit, etc.) 43,100. It is commonly believed that French is a terse language, and compared to its cousins, Italian and Spanish, it actually is, but compared to English it is garrulous, for it takes
36,000 syllables to say what English says in 29,000.
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Dr. Kirkconnell did not undertake to determine the average size of the syllables he counted, but I am confident that if he had done so he would have found those of English shorter, taking one with another, than those of most other languages. “If it had not been for the great number of long foreign, especially Latin, words,” says Dr. Jespersen, “English would have approached the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese.” “They are marvellous,” says Salvador de Madariaga,
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“those English monosyllables. Their fidelity is so perfect that one is tempted to think English words are the right and proper names which acts are meant to have, and all other words are pitiable failures.
34
How could one improve upon
splash, smash, ooze, shriek, slush, glide, squeak, coo?
Is not the word
sweet
a kiss in itself, and what could suggest a more peremptory obstacle than
stop?
” “The Spanish critic,” says Dean Inge, “is quite right in calling attention to the vigor of English monosyllables. No other European language has so many.”
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For these and other reasons English strikes most foreigners as an extraordinarily succinct, straightforward and simple tongue — in some of its aspects, in fact, almost as a kind of baby-talk. When they
proceed from trying to speak it to trying to read and write it they are painfully undeceived, for its spelling is almost as irrational as that of French or Swedish, but so long as they are content to tackle it
viva voce
they find it loose and comfortable, and at the same time very precise. The Russian, coming into it burdened with his six cases, his three genders, his palatalized consonants and his complicated pronouns, luxuriates in a language which has only two cases, no grammatical gender, a set of consonants which (save only
r
) maintain their integrity in the face of any imaginable rush of vowels, and an outfit of pronouns so simple that one of them suffices to address the President of the United States or a child in arms, a lovely female creature
in camera
or the vast hordes of the radio. And the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, and the Frenchman, though the change for them is measurably less sharp, nevertheless find it grateful, too. Only the Spaniard brings with him a language comparable to English for logical clarity, and even the Spaniard is afflicted with grammatic gender.
The huge English vocabulary is likely to make the foreigner uneasy, but he soon finds that nine-tenths of it lies safely buried in the dictionaries, and is never drawn upon for everyday use. On examining 400,000 words of writing by 2500 Americans Dr. Leonard P. Ayres found that the 50 commonest words accounted for more than half the total number of words used, that 250 more accounted for another 25%, and that 1000 accounted for 90%.
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That the language may be spoken intelligibly with even less than 1000 words has been argued by Dr. C. K. Ogden, the English psychologist. Dr. Ogden believes that 850 are sufficient for all ordinary purposes and he has devised a form of simplified English, called by him Basic (from
British American Scientific International Commercial
), which uses no more. Of this number, 600 are nouns, 100 are adjectives, 100 are “adjectival opposites,” 30 are verbs, and the rest are particles, etc. Two hundred of the nouns consist of the names of common objects,
e.g., bottle, brick, ear, potato
and
umbrella
; the rest are the names of familiar groups and concepts,
e.g., people, music, crime, loss
and
weather
. No noun is admitted (save for the names of a few common objects) “which can be defined in not more than ten other words.” The reduction of verbs to 30 is effected by taking advantage of one of the prime characteristics of English (and especially of American)
— its capacity for getting an infinity of meanings out of a single verb by combining it with simple modifiers. Consider, for example, the difference (in American) between
to get, to get going, to get by, to get on, to get on to, to get off, to get ahead of, to get wise, to get religion
and
to get over
. Why should a foreigner be taught to say that he has
disembarked
from a ship? Isn’t it sufficient for him to say that he
got off?
And why should he be taught to say that he has
recovered
from the flu, or
escaped
the police, or
ascended
a stairway, or
boarded
a train, or
obtained
a job? Isn’t it enough to say that he has
got over
the first,
got away
from the second,
got up
the third,
got on
the fourth, and simply
got
the fifth? The fundamental verbs of Basic are ten in number —
come, go, put, take, give, get, make, keep, let
and
do
. “Every time,” says Dr. Ogden (he is writing in Basic), “you put together the name of one of these ten simple acts (all of which are free to go in almost any direction) with the name of one of the twenty directions or positions in space, you are making a verb.” In addition to its 850 words, of course, Basic is free to take in international words that are universally understood,
e.g., coffee, engineer, tobacco, police
and
biology
, and to add words specially pertinent to the matter in hand,
e.g., chloride
and
platinum
in a treatise on chemistry. It is interesting to note that of the fifty international words listed by Dr. Ogden, no less than seven are Americanisms, new or old,
viz., cocktail, jazz, radio, phonograph, telegram, telephone
and
tobacco
, and that one more,
check
, is listed in American spelling.
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Whether Basic will make any progress remains to be seen.
38
It has been criticized on various grounds. For one thing, its vocabulary shows some serious omissions — for example, the numerals — and for another, its dependence upon verb-phrases may confuse rather than help the foreigner, whose difficulties with prepositions are notorious.
39
There is also the matter of spelling, always a cruel
difficulty to a foreigner tackling English. But Dr. Ogden waives this difficulty away. For one thing, he argues that his list of 850 words, being made up mainly of the commonest coins of speech, avoids most of them; for another thing, he believes that the very eccentricity of the spelling of some of the rest will help the foreigner to remember them. Every schoolboy, as we all know, seizes upon such bizarre forms as
through, straight
and
island
with fascinated eagerness, and not infrequently he masters them before he masters such phonetically spelled words as
first, tomorrow
and
engineer
. In my own youth, far away in the dark backward and abysm of time, the glory of every young American was
phthisic
, with the English proper name,
Cholmondeley
, a close second. Dr. Ogden proposes to let the foreigners attempting Basic share the joy of hunting down such basilisks. For the rest, he leaves the snarls of English spelling to the judgments of a just God, and the natural tendency of all things Anglo-Saxon to move toward an ultimate perfection. Unluckily, his Basic now has a number of competitors on its own ground,
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and it must also meet the competition of the so-called universal languages, beginning with Volapük (1880) and Esperanto (1887) and running down to Idiom Neural (1898), Ido (1907), Interlingua (1908), and Novial, invented by Dr. Jespersen (1928).
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Some of these languages, and notably Esperanto and Novial, show a great ingenuity, and all
of them have enthusiastic customers who believe that they are about to be adopted generally. There are also persons who hold that some such language is bound to come in soon or late, though remaining doubtful about all those proposed so far — for example, Dr. Shenton, who closes his “Cosmopolitan Conversation,” by proposing that the proponents of Esperanto, Interlingua, Novial and the rest come together in a conference of their own, and devise “a neutral, synthetic, international auxiliary language” that will really conquer the world.