BABEL OF SPEECH

Evening Star, Issue 19616, 23 July 1927, Page 13

BABEL OF SPEECH

MAN'S IMBECILITY PROVED Mr W. R, Hearst, tho famous newspaper magnate, lias Just urged the world to adopt the English language. “I believe we shall never realise universal peace until we have what amounts to a universal language,” he says. Nothing more beautifully displays the imbecility of man than the diversity of his tongues (writes H. L. Mencken, in tho‘Sunday Chronicle '1 All dogs understand one another easily and at sight; a chow and a St. Bernard, meeting for tho first '-imo, fall into amicable discourse instantly, though one nay have been born it Nanking and tho other at Zermatt. It is the same with cats, horses, cows, hull frogs, and ants. But men cling, to their discordant and preposterous dialects, and so view one another with doubt and suspicion, and work up hatreds and engage in wars. It is almost impossible to get rid of the uneasiness that a strange language engenders. Tho man speaking it inevitably seems somewhat uncouth and idiotic. MILLIONS LOST No counter interest seems _to be strong enough to neutralise this deepseated and almost instinctive linguistic hostility. The Entente Cordiale blew up on Flanders fields, with British and French soldiers ducking the same shells and jawing at one another hopelessly. Tho British came home convinced that the French were chimpanzees; the French said good-bye to them convinced that they were gorillas. The American conscripts went home disliking both, for the English of the English was almost as unintelligible to them as Lie French of the French. What it costs tho human race in hard cash to jabber in so many different tongues is hard to calculate; it must run to millions of pounds a year.

At regular intervals an optimist arises with a new and easy artificial language and proposes that everyone learn it at once, and so put an end to the loss. These schemes never take hold. A few enthusiasts are converted, but in a few years the new universal language is forgotten and another has taken its place. IS ENGLISH WINNING?

Other optimists from rime to time announce that English (it used to be Russian) is making fast progress in all directions, and that m fifty or 100 years everybody on earth will speak it, and the other languages will be abandoned. But that is immensely improbable. The fact is that English is nowhere displacing any other language. Here and there it is coming in as a second language, but nowhere is it going any further.

Even the Dutch in South Africa cling to the Taal, despite the union, just as the Canucks in Canada, cling to their had French and tho Filipinos remain faithful to Spanish. .All these peoples learn English after a fashion, but they seldom if ever think in it. Thus a man who speaks it as his native tongue remains a foreigner to them, and they dislike him.

The progress of English is mainly along the world’s trade routes. It becomes the universal language of commerce. But such languages of commerce have arisen in the past and then disappeared. They never displace the truly national languages. REVIVAL OF NATIONALISM. Even Latin could not do it. It fastened itself upon the people of France and Spain only at the cost of becoming unintelligible to genuine Romans, and this corruption had such repercussions at home that it eventually ceased to exist as a living, language. The Germanic dialects, farther north, beat it easily and completely The fact is that we are probably further from a universal language to-day that wo have been since the dawn of the Middle Ages, and that we are moving away from it instead of toward it. The revival of nationalism is everywhere working in that direction. Fifteen years ago every literate Czech transacted most of his business in German : now his children ar° studying Czech. The Walloons refuse to learn French, and talk grandly of separating themselves from Belgium. The Norwegians revive an ancient peasant dialect, and so strive to make themselves unintelligible to the Danes. The more visionary Irish plan to stamp out English in their country and return tc Gaelic And gabble of the same sort is hoard from the Slovenes, the Finns, tho Letts, the Basques, the Egyptians, and even the Corsicans. MANY DIALECTS. Moreover, there is an obvious tendency for most of the more Important languages of the world to sr.lit into dialects, especially English and Spanish. Tho Spanish spoken in Mexico, for example, now differs very considerably from the Spanish of Spain—to such an extent, indeed, that Spaniards find it very hard to understand. Its relation to correct Castilian is very much like the relation of the dialect spoken by the Appalachian mountaineers to tho ci rrect English of London. On the one hand, it is lull of archaisms, long abandoned in Spain, and on the other hand it bristles with neologisms, mainly li orrowed lrom the Indian languages or from the English. English itself seems to be breaking into dialects, despite the heroic efforts of purists to preserve its unity. In tho United States this effort is very prevalent among university pedagogues with their eyes on Oxford degrees. AMERICANISMS.

But America move - away from standard English very steadily, both in vocabulary and in pronunciation, and most English nhiloginns make no effort to deny the plain fart. Some time ago one of the most intelligent of them, Mr H. E. Palmer, linguistic arlvisei to the Japanese Government, prepared- a dictionary of English pronunciation for the use of Japanese stude,’ts. In a vocabulary of 9.645 woios he noted nearly J,OOO tha t were differently pronounced in England and America. And those wore all ordinary words; he did not include any slang, or, indeed, any other neologisms.