English

• English as a World Language
• Rules of English
• Ze Uro-Drem
• Hints on pronunciation for foreigners
• My wrod!

This newspaper article was published in the 1950s but still makes fascinating reading today. If you know exactly when and where it first appeared, I’d like to hear from you.

English as a World Language
Cannot Be Excelled

By R A Piddington

ONLY the most rabid nationalist maintains nowadays that his own country is quite perfect, but it is still a common foible, even of the educated man, to regard his own language as flawless.

Our native tongue must always seem clearer and simpler to us than all others. Is it possible, however, to reach an objective judgment on the merits and failings of the chief languages of the world?

The attempt at least is fascinating. French has been generally admired ever since the Academy began its horticultural care of the language in 1634. For 250 years the language of diplomacy, French long enjoyed a well earned reputation for elegance and clarity. Even today it is often said that French is the clearest of all civilised tongues.

Deficiencies of French

But an impartial consideration will soon show that French can avoid ambiguity only by taking infinite care of itself. Intrinsically the language is deficient in the instruments of expression.

The trouble is not so much the well known homonyms like louer (meaning ‘to let, to hire or to praise’) as a lack of distinction between ‘his' and ‘her’, ‘to’ and ‘at’, ‘of’ and ‘from’, ‘in’ and ‘into’, ‘who’ and ‘which’, ‘if’ and ‘whether’, ‘all’ and ‘any’ and ‘every’.

There is also no satisfactory passive infinitive, no efficient method of forming compound words, and no facility with prepositional phrases like ‘to boil over’, ‘to steer round’, ‘to black out’.

Such phrases appear to be more and more necessary in modern life, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that French, so admirably adapted to the stabilised intercourse of the 18th Century, is no longer suited to the multifarious and expanding needs of our own times.

The other important romance languages, Spanish and Italian, being similar in structure to French, share many of its disadvantages. Both have an inadequate array of pronouns, an infertile vocabulary and the same difficulty over prepositional phrases as has been noted already. On strict merits, neither stands in the forefront of consideration for selection as a world language.

German heaviness

German, which comes next to mind, has the great merit for today of being able to create new words nearly as easily as English. Unfortunately, these words are often formed from roots which do not ‘ring a bell’ in the other main departments of the scientific world (eg for ‘oxygen’ ‘Sauerstoff’, contrasted with ‘oxygène’, ‘oxigeno’, ‘ossigeno’ etc).

But the worst features of German are its heavy syntax, its three genders, a confusion of pronouns (‘Sie’ can have four different meanings) and the preservation of a complicated system of inflections, which, unlike those of Latin, are so promiscuous as to negative their purpose of distinguishing the functions of words.

Russian, likewise, has three genders. Added to these, its six cases, its ‘aspects’ of the verb, its peculiar alphabet of 32 letters, and its complication of adjectival declensions, make it even less suitable than German for worldwide intercourse.

Arabic and Chinese can be dismissed as too retarded to serve the 20th Century as a common tongue.

Greek and Latin

It should not be forgotten that the two languages miscalled ‘dead’ – Latin and Greek – both stand high in the order of merit for beauty, accuracy, literary heritage, and importance to our present civilisation.

Greek, which uses almost every linguistic device, is a sheer miracle of grammatical invention; nor is Latin, though less brilliant, far behind Greek in its resources of verbal engineering.

But it must be recognised that the modern world does not desire an ingenious language: the preference for simplicity is overwhelming. For this reason alone, it would be hard to revive Latin or Greek as a lingua franca in the Western hemisphere.

It seems, then, that a perfect natural language for modern global intercourse is not easy to find. Could an artificial language supply the deficiency?

One thinks immediately of Esperanto, and then of its predecessors, Volapük and Ido. The inference is that the world cannot make up its mind which to adopt, and this is understandable because, as with television sets, the possibility of a better model is always just round the corner. Indeed, Saussure’s Esperantido, Peano’s Interlingua and Jespersen’s Novial have all been claimed to surpass Esperanto, which some linguists already consider obsolete.

Universally acceptable

Finally, of course, there arises the question, ‘Why not English?’

Whatever its merits or defects as a linguistic creation, English is politically and commercially the most essential and widespread of all modern languages. It can therefore be said to have crashed through the gate of acceptability. Its literary, scientific, religious, philosophical, historical and economic territories are immense and still growing.

The question that remains is whether it can be simplified for the foreigner’s benefit without losing its richness and power, its clarity and adaptability.

The clarity of English is of a peculiar kind. Some foreign languages have too much grammar: English sometimes risks ambiguity by having too little (eg ‘We can’t choose a man like you’), but this ambiguity can invariably be avoided provided it is recognised in time, English having so many turns of expression at its disposal. We should beware of still further reducing the grammatical content of English, which is already one of the least inflected languages in the world: for it is even arguable that English is nowadays showing a tendency to become less intelligible in proportion as the idea spreads that it has no grammar to worry about.

The chief danger in English is the lack of distinctive form which would tell us whether a word is noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

Marvellous instrument

The headline ‘Argentine meeting demand renewal’ is a good illustration. The first thing to observe is that this confusion is more likely to be detected and avoided by a man of classical education than by one to whom parts of speech, like cricket stumps, cannot be named except in reference to their position. It is no coincidence that the proliferation of sentences like the ‘Argentine’ headline has accompanied the decline of Latin as sine qua non of the Englishman’s education.

The best English is written by those who, like Winston Churchill, have done enough Latin to know that the tools they are using, even though they appear to have the same handles, have not necessarily the same edge: just as the best seamanship on modern ocean liners is displayed by those who have been trained ‘in sail’.

The English language is a marvellous instrument provided that it is used properly, and for this proper usage a writer needs some knowledge of a language that, whilst not being too difficult, like Russian, possesses all the linguistic ‘gadgets’ in visible operation like Latin.

The second lesson to be drawn from the ‘Argentine’ headline is that English, to maintain its clarity, needs to preserve its little words like ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘of’, ‘to’ etc, which are often our only way of distinguishing noun from verb or verb from adjective. These words are so despised nowadays that they are in danger of disappearance.

Deplorable compressions

For this reason, the compression which English often suffers in the fashionable craze for speed or economy is to be deplored. English requires space in which to manoeuvre: it cannot say such things as ‘We have been growing tired again’ in one word as Latin can. Consequently any shortage of time or newsprint is likely to deform rather than to improve the English language.

We cannot create time, but we should acquire more newsprint so as to remove one of the main excuses offered today for the mutilation of what is, at its best, the finest instrument of expression that man has yet devised.

© R A Piddington

You may have seen these tongue-in-cheek Rules of English elsewhere. They are strictly NOT for learners of English and should not be taken seriously . . .

Rules of English

1. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.

2. Between you and I, case is important.

3. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

4. Watch out for irregular verbs which have crope into our language.

5. Don’t use no double negatives.

6. A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.

7. When dangling, don’t use participles.

8. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.

9. Don’t write a run-on sentence you have to punctuate it.

10. About sentence fragments.

11. In a letter themes reports articles and stuff like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.

12. Don’t use commas, which aren’t necessary.

13. Its very important that you use apostrophe’s correctly.

14. Don’t abbrev.

15. Check to see if you have any words out.

16. As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong.

17. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with.

18. It is important to never ever under any circumstances split an infinitive.

19. The active voice is preferred.

20. Use of the passive voice is to be avoided.

21. Eschew obfuscation.

22. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

23. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

What a European superstate could mean for you . . .

Ze Uro-Drem

The European Commission has announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phase-in plan to be known as ‘EuroEnglish’.

In the first year, ‘s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly this will make the sival servants jump with joy. The hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favour of ‘k’. This should also help klear up konfusion.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replased by ‘f’. This will make words like ‘fotograf’ 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent ‘e’s in the language is disgrasful, and they should go away.

By the forth yer, pepl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords contaning ‘ou’, and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl ritn styl. To mak it ezir to red, al nowns vil bekum Kapitalizd. Zer vil be no mor Trubls or Difikultis and Evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech Ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!

Hints on pronunciation for foreigners

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)

A moth is not a moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

My wrod!

Aoccdrnig to a rsaehrceer at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

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