International Language by Walter J. Clark (the lemonade war series txt) 📕

Now, it is a remarkable fact, and a very suggestive one for those who seek to trace the connexion between the course of a nation's language and its history, that the degree of progress made by the languages of Europe along their common line of evolution does on the whole, as a matter of historical fact, correspond with the respective degree of material, social, and economic advancement attained by the nations that use them. Take this question of case endings. Russia has retained a high degree of inflection in her language, having seven cases with distinct endings. These seven cases are common to the Slav languages in general; two of them (Sorbish and Slovenish) have, like Gothic and Greek, a dual number, a feature which has long passed away from the languages of Western Europe. Again, the Slav tongues decline many more of the numerals than most Aryan languages. Germany, which, until the recent formation of the German Empire, was undoubtedly a century slow by West European time, still has four cases; or, in view of the moribund dative, should we rather say three and a half? France and England manage their affairs in a universal nominative1 (if one can give any name to a universal case), as far as nouns, adjectives, and articles are concerned. Their pronouns offer the sole survival of declension by case endings. Here France, the runner-up, is a trifle slow in the possession of a real, live dative case of the pronoun (acc. le, la, les; dat. lui, leur). England wins by a neck with one universal oblique case (him, her, them). This insidious suggestion is not meant to endanger the entente cordiale; even perfidious Albion would not convict the French nation of arrested development on the side-issue of pronominal atavism. Mark Twain says he paid double for a German dog, because he bought it in the dative case; but no nation need be damned for a dative. We have no use for the coup de Jarnac.

1Though historically, of course, the Low Latin universal case, from which many French, and therefore English, words are derived, was the accusative.

But consider the article. Here, if anywhere, is a test of the power of a language to move with the times. For some reason or other (the real underlying causes of these changes in language needs are obscure) modern life has need of the article, though the highly civilized Romans did very well without it. So strong is this need that, in the middle ages, when Latin was used as an international language by the learned, a definite article (hic or τό) was foisted into the language. How is it with the modern world? The Slavs have remained in this matter at the point of view of the ancient world. They are articleless. Germany has a cumbrous three-gender, four-case article; France rejoices in a two-gender, one-case article with a distinct form for the plural. The ripe product of tendency, the infant heir of the eloquent ages, to whose birth the law of Aryan evolution groaned and travailed until but now, the most useful, if not the "mightiest," monosyllable "ever moulded by the lips of man," the "the," one and indeclinable, was born in the Anglo-Saxon mouth, and sublimed to its unique simplicity by Anglo-Saxon progress.

The general law of progress in language could be illustrated equally well from the history of genders as exhibited in various languages. We are here only dealing with Aryan languages, but, merely by way of illustration, it may be mentioned that a primitive African language offers seven "genders," or grammatical categories requiring the same kind of concords as genders. In Europe we pass westward from the three genders of Germany, curving through feminine and masculine France (place aux dames!) to monogendric Britain. Only linguistic arbitrary gender is here referred to; this has nothing to do with suffragettes or "defeminization."

Again, take agreement of adjectives. In the ancient world, whether Greek, Latin, Gothic, or Anglo-Saxon, adjectives had to follow nouns through all the mazes of case and number inflection, and had also to agree in gender. In this matter German has gone ahead of French, in that its adjectives do not submit to change of form in order to indicate agreement, when they are used predicatively (e.g. "ein guter Mann"; "der gute Mann"; but "der Mann ist gut"). But English has distanced the field, and was alone in at the death of the old concords, which moistened our childhood's dry Latin with tears.

Whatever test be applied, the common tendency towards simplification, from synthesis to analysis, is there; and in its every manifestation English has gone farthest among the great literary languages. It is necessary to add this qualification—"among the great literary languages"—because, in this process of simplification, English has a very curious rival, and possibly a superior, in the Taal of South Africa. The curious thing is that a local dialect should have shown itself so progressive, seeing that the distinctive note of most dialects is conservatism, their chief characteristics being local survivals.1 It is probable that the advanced degree of simplification attained by the Taal is the result of deliberate and conscious adaptation of their language by the original settlers to the needs of the natives. Just as Englishmen speak Pidgin-English to coolies in the East, so the old trekkers must have removed irregularities and concords from their Dutch, so that the Kaffirs could understand it. If this is so, it is another illustration of the essential feature that an international language must possess. Even the Boer farmers, under the stress of practical necessity, grasped the need of simplification.

1Of course a difference must be expected between a dialect spoken by a miscellaneous set of settlers in a foreign land and one in use as an indigenous growth from father to son. But the habitants, as the French settlers in Quebec are called, who, like the Boers, are mainly a pastoral and primitive people, have retained an antiquated form of French, with no simplification.

The natural tendency towards elimination of exceptions is also strongly marked in the speech of the uneducated. Miss Loane, who has had life-long experience of nursing work among the poorest classes in England, tabulates (The Queen's Poor, p. 112) the points in which at the present day the language of the poor differs from that of the middle and upper classes. Under the heading of grammar she singles out specially superabundance of negatives, and then proceeds: "Other grammatical errors. These are nearly all on the lines of simplification. It is correct to say 'myself, herself, yourself, ourselves.' Very well: let us complete the list with 'hisself' and 'theirselves.' Most verbs are regular: why not all? Let us say 'comed' and 'goed,' 'seed' and 'bringed' and 'teached.'" Miss Loane probably exaggerates with her "nearly all." For instance, as regards the uneducated form of the past tense of "to come," surely "come" is a commoner form than "comed." Similarly the illiterate for "I did" is "I done," not "I doed," which would be the regular simplification. But the natural tendency is certainly there, and it is strong.

Precisely the same tendency is observable in the present development of literary languages. They have all inherited many irregular verbal conjugations from the past as part of their national property, and these, by the nature of the case, comprise most of the commonest words in the language, because the most used is the most subject to abbreviation and modification. But these irregular types of inflection have long been dead, in the sense that they are fossilized survivals, incapable of propagating their kind. When a new word is admitted into the language, it is conjugated regularly. Thus, though we still say "I go—I went; I run—I ran," because we cannot help ourselves, when we are free to choose we say, "I cycle—I cycled; I wire—I wired"; just as the French say "télégraphier," and not "télégraphir," -oir, or -re.

Considering the strength of this stream of natural tendency, it seems a most natural thing to start again, for international purposes, with a form of simplified Aryan language, and, being free from the dead hand of the past, to set up the simplest forms of conjugation, etc., and make every word in the language conform to them.

Indeed, this question of artificial simplification of language has of late years emerged from the scholar's study and become a matter of practical politics, even as regards the leading national languages. Within the last few years there have been official edicts in France and Germany, embodying reforms either in spelling or grammar, with the sole object of simplifying. The latest attempt at linguistic jerrymandering has been the somewhat autocratic document of President Roosevelt. He has found that there are limits to what the American people will stand even from him, and it seems likely to remain a dead letter. But there is not the smallest doubt that the English language is heavily handicapped by its eccentric vowel pronunciation and its spelling that has failed to keep pace with the development of the language. The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the spelling and pronunciation of French. Since the whole theory of spelling—and, until a few hundred years ago, its practice too—consisted in nothing else but an attempt to represent simply and accurately the spoken word, most unprejudiced people would admit that simplification is in principle advisable. But the practical difficulties in the way of simplification of a national language are almost prohibitive. It is hard to see that there are any such obstacles in the way of the adoption of a simple and perfectly phonetic international artificial language. We dislike change because it is change, and new things because they are new. We go on suffering from a movable Easter, which most practically inconveniences great numbers of people and interests, and seems to benefit no one at all, simply because it is no one's business to change it. If once the public could be got to examine seriously the case for an artificial international language, they could hardly fail to recognize what an easy, simple, and natural thing it is, and how soon it would pay off all capital sunk in its universal adoption, and be pure profit.

Note

This seems the best place to deal with a criticism of Esperanto which has an air of plausibility. It is urged that Esperanto does not carry the process of simplification far enough, and that in two important points it shows a retrograde tendency to revert to a more primitive stage of language, already left behind by the most advanced natural languages. These points are: