H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
XII. The Future of the Language1. English as a World Language
T
French | ………………… | 31,450,000 |
Russian | ………………… | 30,770,000 |
German | ………………… | 30,320,000 |
Spanish | ………………… | 26,190,000 |
English | ………………… | 20,520,000 |
English ………………… 60,000,000 German ………………… 52,000,000 Russian ………………… 45,000,000 French ………………… 45,000,000 Spanish ………………… 40,000,000
English ………………… 111,100,000 German ………………… 75,200,000 Russian ………………… 75,000,000 French ………………… 51,200,000 Spanish ………………… 42,800,000 Italian ………………… 33,400,000 Portuguese ………………… 13,000,000
English ………………… from 116,000,000 to 123,000,000 German ………………… from 75,000,000 to 80,000,000 Russian ………………… from 70,000,000 to 85,000,000 French ………………… from 45,000,000 to 52,000,000 Spanish ………………… from 44,000,000 to 58,000,000 Italian ………………… from 34,000,000 to 54,000,000
English ………………… 160,000,000 German ………………… 130,000,000 Russian ………………… 100,000,000 French ………………… 70,000,000 Spanish ………………… 50,000,000 Italian ………………… 50,000,000 Portuguese ………………… 25,000,000
English ………………… 150,000,000 German ………………… 90,000,000 Russian ………………… 106,000,000 French ………………… 47,000,000 Spanish ………………… 52,000,000 Italian ………………… 37,000,000
English ………………… 150,000,000 German ………………… 120,000,000 Russian ………………… 90,000,000 French ………………… 60,000,000 Spanish ………………… 55,000,000 Italian ………………… 40,000,000 Portuguese ………………… 30,000,000
Brackebusch, in the speculative paper just mentioned, came to the conclusion that the future domination of English would be prevented by its unphonetic spelling, its grammatical decay and the general difficulties that a foreigner encounters in seeking to master it. “The simplification of its grammar,” he said, with true philological fatuity, “is the commencement of dissolution, the beginning of the end, and its extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind is the foreshadowing of its approaching dismemberment.” But in the same breath he was forced to admit that “the greater development it has obtained” was the result of this very simplification of grammar, and an inspection of the rest of his reasoning quickly shows its unsoundness, even without an appeal to the plain facts. The spelling of a language, whether it be phonetic or not, has little to do with its spread. Very few men learn it by studying books; they learn it by hearing it spoken. As for grammatical decay, it is not a sign of dissolution, but a sign of active life and constantly renewed strength. To the professional philologist, perhaps it may sometimes appear otherwise. He is apt to estimate languages by looking at their complexity; the Greek aorist elicits his admiration because it presents enormous difficulties and is inordinately subtle. But the object of language is not to bemuse grammarians, but to convey ideas, and the more simply it accomplishes plishes that object the more effectively it meets the needs of an energetic and practical people and the larger its inherent vitality. The history of every language of Europe, since the earliest days of which we have record, is a history of simplifications. Even such languages as German, which still cling to a great many exasperating inflections, including the absurd inflection of the article for gender, are less highly inflected than they used to be, and are proceeding slowly but surely toward analysis. The fact that English has gone further along that road than any other civilized tongue is not a proof of its decrepitude, but a proof of its continued strength. Brought into free competition with another language, say German or French or Spanish, it is almost certain to prevail, if only because it is vastly easier—that is, as a spoken language—to learn. The foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of forms. He doesn’t have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is to forget grammar.
Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns, pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling himself in the slightest about accidence. “Me see she” is bad English, perhaps, but it would be absurd to say that it is obscure—and on some not too distant tomorrow it may be very fair American. Essaying an inflected language, the beginner must go into the matter far more deeply before he may hope to be understood. Bradley, in “The Making of English,” shows clearly how German and English differ in this respect, and how great is the advantage of English. In the latter the verb sing has but eight forms, and of these three are entirely obsolete, one is obsolescent, and two more may be dropped out without damage to comprehension. In German the corresponding verb, singen, has no fewer than sixteen forms. How far English has proceeded toward the complete obliteration of inflections is shown by such barbarous forms of it as Pidgin English and Beach-la-Mar, in which the final step is taken without appreciable loss of clarity. The Pidgin English verb is identical in all tenses. Go stands for both went and gone; makee is both make and made. In the same way there is no declension of the pronoun for case. My is thus I, me, mine and our own my. “No belong my” is “it is not mine,” a crude construction, of course, but still clearly intelligible. Chinamen learn Pidgin English in a few months, and savages in the South Seas master Beach-la-Mar almost as quickly. And a white man, once he has accustomed himself to either, finds it strangely fluent and expressive. He cannot argue politics in it, nor dispute upon transubstantiation, but for all the business of every day it is perfectly satisfactory.
This capacity of English for clear and succinct utterance is frequently remarked by Continental philologists, many of whom seem inclined to agree with Grimm that it will eventually supersede all of the varying dialects now spoken in Europe, at least for commercial purposes. Jespersen, in the first chapter of his “Growth and Structure of the English Language,” discusses the matter very penetratingly and at great length. “There is one impression,” he says, “that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to me positively and expressively masculine; it is the language of a grownup man and has very little childish or feminine about it. A great many things go together to produce and to confirm that impression, things phonetical, grammatical, and lexical, words and turns that are found, and words and turns that are not found, in the language.” He then goes on to explain the origin and nature of the “masculine” air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force. He says:
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:
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 ‘Werzuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst,’ and especially than the Danish ‘Dender kommer forst til molle, far forst 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 when 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-in life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon.” In these judgments another distinguished Danish philologist, Prof. Thomsen, agrees fully.
There is, of course, something to be said on the other side. “Besides a certain ungainliness [Dr. Jespersen’s masculine quality],” said a recent writer in English, “English labors under other grave disadvantages. The five vowels of our alphabet have to do duty for some twenty sounds, and, to the foreigner, there are no simple rules by which the correct vowel sounds may be gauged from the way a word is written; our orthography also reflects the chaotic period before our language was formed, and the spelling of a particular word is often unconnected with either its present pronunciation or correct derivation. And although our literature contains more great poetry than any other, and though our language was made by poets rather than by prose writers, English is not musical in the sense that Greek was, or that Italian is when sung.” But these objections have very little genuine force. The average foreigner does not learn English in order to sing it, but in order to speak it. And, as I have said, he does not learn it from books, but by word of mouth. To write it correctly, and particularly to spell it correctly, is a herculean undertaking, but very few foreigners find any need to do either. If our spelling were reformed, most of the difficulties now encountered would vanish.
Meanwhile, it remains a plain fact that, if only because of the grammatical simplicity, it is easier to obtain an intelligible working knowledge of English than of any other living tongue. This superior simplicity, added to the commercial utility of knowing the language, will probably more than counterbalance the nationalistic objections to acquiring it. In point of fact, they are already grown feeble. All over the Continent English is being studied by men of every European race, including especially the German. “During my recent stay in Berlin,” says a post-war English traveler, “nothing annoyed me more than the frequency with which my inquiries of the man in the street for direction, made in atrocious German, elicited replies in perfect English.” This writer accounts for what he observed by the fact that “the English-speaking nations own half the world,” and asks, “what language should they study but English?” But the spread of the language was already marked before the war. Another Englishman, writing in 1910, thus described its extension in the Far East, as observed during a trip to Japan:
It is an amazing thing when one thinks of it.
In Japan most of the tradespeople spoke English. At Shanghai, at Hong Kong, at Singapore, at Penang, at Colombo, at Suez, at Port Said—all the way home to the Italian ports, the language of all the ship’s traffic, the language of such discourse as the passengers held with natives, most of the language or board ship itself, was English.
The German captain of our ship spoke English more often than German. All his officers spoke English.
The Chinese man-o’-war’s men who conveyed the Chinese prince on board at Shanghai, received commands and exchanged commands with our German sailors in English. The Chinese mandarins in their conversations with the ships’ officers invariably spoke English. They use the same ideographs in writing as the Japanese, but to talk to our Japanese passengers they had to speak English. Nay, coming as they did from various provinces of the Empire, where the language greatly differs, they found it most convenient in conversation among themselves to speak English!
If, as some aver, the greatest hindrances to peaceful international intercourse are the misunderstandings due to diversity of tongues, the wide prevalence of the English tongue must be the greatest unifying bond the world has ever known.
And it grows—it grows unceasingly. At the beginning of last century English was the native speech of little more than twenty million people. At the end of the century it was spoken by 130 millions. Before the year 2000 it will probably be spoken by 250 to 500 millions.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome, the population of the Empire was less than 100 millions. To-day 350 millions own the sway of rulers who speak English.