PURE ENGLISH

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 July 1931, Page 6

PURE ENGLISH

WHERE IT IS SPOKEN. A correspondent of an English journal having heard said that “the purest English is spoken in the United States of America,” writes a rejoinder. He says:—“That, I venture to say, is palpably inaccurate. The purest form of any language is that spoken by the more cultured class in the country to which it belongs. English is the language of England, and though in the United States there may be people who speak it with a purity which obtained, say, a century ago, that purity is not to-day’s in its native land. And that is the standard to go by, for all languages, even the most rigid, are susceptible of change and evolution, and in the case of English the evolutionary stage which it has reached in England is the standard of the language.

“In no case, unless by a most extraordinary—almost impossible—coincidence, can a language evolve indentically in two countries over the same period of time; and it would be ludicrous if the offshoot standard, if I may so put it, were regarded as the real one. Clearly, English being the native language of England, the cultured speech of England in any given age is the true speech. “Chaucer was called the well of English pure and undefiled, but no one would claim that his language is true English to-day, any more than it could be said that the comparativecrudities of Abernethy are the true standard of medical and surgical science.”