ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Evening Star, Issue 17319, 6 April 1920, Page 6

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

SHOULD BE UNIVERSAL. M. Maeterlinck lias complained to a New York journalist that, although ho reads English quite easily, he finds it difficult to speak, and still more difficult to understand when spoken. This latter difficulty—felt bv many foreigners who know English well—is largely duo to the difference between our intonation and theirs. In all Continental languages tne tendency seems to be for the better classes to equalise the syllable® ae much as /possible. In English, and particularly in the -English spoken by townspeople, tho tendency is to keep all the stress for some (generally the earlier) words in the sentence, and to leave the others to trail after them as best they, may Tins is the method adopted on the Continent by the uneducated; and hence, while an educated Frenchman talking English, seems to us to speak with tho monotonous accent of a litle child, we. on first attempting a foreign tongue, are apt to use tho intonation of a costermonger. As regards the difficulties AI. Alaeterlinck finds in speaking English, no doubt his greatest stumbling block is tho sound “ th,’° which exists in only two other European languages —Spanish and Greek. But for ail its difficulties our tongue is not without its warm admirers on the Continent. “If English were shorn of its irregularities (e.g., 1 bitten ’ instead of ‘ bited ’ and so on) and spelt phonetically, it would become the universal language within the next hundred years.” So a French philologist, M, Alexandre Weill, wrote just on half a century ago; and the replies received to a circular sent out by the Northern Peace Society show that many learned- men in various European countries would like- to seq,this prediction fulfilled. “English is a hospitable language,” says Professor Oarnoy, of Louvain University, and this was one the chief points advanced by AVeill when advocating its adoption for world-wide use. “As French writers _are generally deficient in any modern language but their own,” he wrote, “or if they know any other languages are afraid to draw on them, French is now the weakest language used by any great nation. . . . But no Frenchmen ever knew Greek and Latin better than Rabelais, Montaigne, and Amyot, who drew from these languages all that could be drawn. In the same way Voltaire and Chateaubriand owe their originality to their perfect knowledge of English. This is tho richest of all great languages, because it was the last to be formed, and for the expression of nearly every idea offers the alternative of two words—on© of Teutonic, the other of French derivation.”—‘Manchester Guardian.’