Robert Southey

Remarks on the English Language.

He who ventures to criticise a foreign language should bear in mind that he is in danger of exposing his own ignorance. "What a vile language is yours!" said a Frenchman to an Englishman;—"you have the same word for three different things! There is ship, un vaisseau; ship (sheep) mouton; and ship (cheap) bon marchÉ."—Now these three words, so happily instanced by Monsieur, are pronounced as differently as they are spelt. As I see his folly, it will be less excusable should I commit the same myself.

The English is rather a hissing than a harsh language, and perhaps this was the characteristic to which Charles V. alluded, when he said it was fit to speak to birds in. It has no gutturals like ours, no nasal twang like the Portugueze and French; but the perpetual sibilance is very grating. If the Rabbis have not discovered in what language the Serpent tempted Eve, they need not look beyond the English; it has the true mark of his enunciation. I think this characteristic of the language may be accounted for by the character of the nation. They are an active busy people, who like to get through what they are about with the least possible delay, and if two syllables can be shortened into one it is so much time saved. What we do with Vmd. they have done with half the words in their language. They have squeezed the vowel out of their genitives and plurals, and compressed dissyllables into monosyllables. The French do the same kind of thing in a worse way; they in speaking leave half of every word behind them in a hurry; the English pack up theirs close, and hasten on with the whole.

It is a concise language, though the grievous want of inflections necessitates a perpetual use of auxiliaries. It would be difficult to fill eight lines of English, adhering closely to the sense, with the translation of an octave stanza. Their words are shorter; and though in many cases they must use two and sometimes three, where we need but one, still if the same meaning requires more words, it is contained in fewer syllables, and costs less breath. Weight for weight, a pound of garvanzos[29] will lie in half the compass of a pound of chesnuts.

Frenchmen always pronounce English ill; Germans, better; it is easier for a Spaniard than for either. The th, or theta, is their shibboleth; our z has so nearly the same sound that we find little or no difficulty in acquiring it. In fact, the pronunciation would not be difficult if it were not capricious; but the exceptions to any general rule are so numerous, that years and years of practice are hardly sufficient to acquire them. Neither is the pronunciation of the same word alike at all times, for it sometimes becomes the fashion to change the accent. The theatre gives the law in these cases. What can have been the cause of this preposterous and troublesome irregularity is beyond my knowledge. They acknowledge the defect, and many schemes have been devised by speculative writers for improving the orthography, and assimilating it to the oral tongue: but they have all so disfigured the appearance of the language, and so destroyed all visible traces of etymology, that they have only excited ridicule, and have deserved nothing better.

It is difficult to acquire, yet far less so than the German and its nearer dialects; the syntax is less involved, and the proportion of Latin words far greater. Dr Johnson, their lexicographer, and the most famous of all their late writers, introduced a great number of sesquipedalian Latinisms, like our Latinists of the seventeenth century. The ladies complain of this, and certainly it was done in a false taste,—but it facilitates a foreigner's progress. I find Johnson for this very reason the easiest English author; his long words are always good stepping-stones, on which I get sure footing.

If the size of his dictionary, which is the best and largest, may be regarded as a criterion, the language is not copious. We must not however forget that dictionaries profess to give only the written language, and that hundreds and thousands of words, either preserved by the peasantry in remote districts, or created by the daily wants and improvements of society, by ignorance or ingenuity, by whim or by wit, never find their way into books, though they become sterling currency. But that it is not copious may be proved by a few general remarks. The verb and substantive are often the same; they have few diminutives and no augmentatives; and their derivatives are few. You know how many we have from agua; the English have only one from water, which is the adjective watery; and to express the meaning of ours, they either use the simple verb in different senses, or form some composite in the clumsy Dutch way of sticking two words together; agua, water; aguaza, water; aguar, to water; hazer aguada, to water; aguadero, a water-man; aguaducho, a water-pipe; aguado, a water-drinker, &c. &c. And yet, notwithstanding these deficiencies, they tell me it is truly a rich language. Corinthian brass would not be an unapt emblem for it,—materials base and precious melted down into a compound still precious, though debased.

They have one name for an animal in English, and another for its flesh;—for instance, cow-flesh is called beef; that of the sheep, mutton; that of the pig, pork. The first is of Saxon, the latter of French origin; and this seems to prove that meat cannot have been the food of the poor in former times. The cookery books retain a technical language from the days when carving was a science, and instruct the reader to cut up a turkey, to rear a goose, to wing a partridge, to thigh a woodcock, to unbrace a duck, to unlace a rabbit, to allay a pheasant, to display a crane, to dismember a hern, and to lift a swan.

Their early writers are intelligible to none but the learned, whereas a child can understand the language of the Partidas, though a century anterior to the oldest English work. This late improvement is easily explained by their history: they were a conquered people: the languages of the lord and the subject were different; and it was some ages before that of the people was introduced at court, and into the law proceedings, and that not till it had become so amalgamated with the Norman French, as in fact to be no longer Saxon. We, on the contrary, though we lost the greater part of our country, never lost our liberty—nor our mother tongue. What Arabic we have we took from our slaves, not our masters.

I can discover, but not discriminate, provincial intonations, and sometimes provincial accentuation; but the peculiar words, or phrases, or modes of speech which characterize the different parts of the country, a foreigner cannot perceive. The only written dialect is the Scotch. It differs far more from English than Portugueze from Castilian, nearly as much as the Catalan, though the articles and auxiliars are the same. Very many words are radically different, still more so differently pronounced as to retain no distinguishable similarity; and as this difference is not systematic, it is the more difficult to acquire. No Englishman reads Scotch with fluency, unless he has long resided in the country—I have looked into the poems of Burns, which are very famous, and found them almost wholly unintelligible; a new dictionary and new grammar were wanted, and on enquiring for such I found that none were in existence.

The English had no good prose writers till the commencement of the last century, indeed with a very few exceptions till the present reign; but no book now can meet with any success unless it be written in a good style. Their rhymed poetry is less sonorous, less euphonous, less varied, than ours; their blank verse, on the other hand, infinitely more rhythmical than the verso suelto. But their language is incapable of any thing between the two; they have no asonantes, nor would the English ear be delicate enough to feel them. In printing poetry they always begin the line with a capital letter, whether the sentence requires it or not: this, which is the custom with all nations except our own, though at the expense of all propriety, certainly gives a sort of architectural uniformity to the page. No mark of interrogation or admiration is ever prefixed; this they might advantageously borrow from us. A remarkable peculiarity is, that they always write the personal pronoun I with a capital letter. May we not consider this great I as an unintended proof how much an Englishman thinks of his own consequence?