H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
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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 common people, and even the grotesque dialects of remote yokels, 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 subject, and is at great pains to observe and rate every fluctuation in popular usage.4 There is, besides, a constant outpouring of books by private investigators, of which “Le Langage Populaire,” by Henri Banche, is a good example.5 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 granted a subvention of 7500 kronen a year to an organization of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically.6 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.7 In
Note 4. The common notion that the Académie combats changes is quite erroneous. In the preface to the first edition of its dictionary (1694) it disclaimed any purpose “to make new words and to reject others at its pleasure.” In the preface to the second edition (1718) it confessed that “ignorance and corruption often introduce manners of writing” and that “convenience establishes them.” In the preface to the third edition (1740) it admitted that it was “forced to admit changes which the public has made,” and so on. Says D. M. Robertson, in A History of the French Academy (London, 1910): “The Academy repudiates any assumption of authority over the language with which the public in its own practise has not first clothed it. So much, indeed, does it confine itself to an interpretation merely of the laws of language that its decisions are sometimes contrary to its own judgment of what is either desirable or expedient.” [back]
Note 6.Cf. Scandinavian Studies and Notes, vol. iv, no. 3, Aug., 1917, p. 258. [back]
Note 7. This movement won official recognition so long ago as 1885, when the Storthing passed the first of a series of acts designed to put the two languages on equal footing. Four years later, after a campaign going back to 1874, provision was made for teaching the landsmaal in the schools for the training of primary teachers. In 1899 a professorship of the landsmaal was established in the University of Christiania. The school boards in the case of primary schools, and the pupils in the case of middle and high schools are now permitted to choose between the two languages, and the landsmaal has been given official status by the State Church. The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects. It was devised in 1848-50 by Ivar Aasen. Vide The Language Question, London Times, Norwegian Supplement, May 18, 1914. [back]
