36. Good English and Bad (Part-2)

"His system of citing examples of the best authorities, of indicating etymology,

and pronunciation, are still followed by lexicographers." (Philip Howard, The

State of the Language) His system are?

"When his fellowship expired he was offered a rectorship at Boxworth … on

condition that he married the deceased rector's daughter." (Robert McCrum, et

al., The Story of English) A misuse of the subjunctive: It should be "on condition

that he marry."

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason

that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—a language with which it has

precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split

an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be

possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any

more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't

available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like

asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity.

But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves

having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to

accommodate the inconsistencies.

The early authorities not only used Latin grammar as their model, but actually

went to the almost farcical length of writing English grammars in that language,

as with Sir Thomas Smith's De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione

Dialogus (1568), Alexander Gil's Logonomia Anglica (1619), and John Wallis's

Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653 (though even he accepted that the

grammar of Latin was ill-suited to English). For the longest time it was taken

entirely for granted that the classical languages must serve as models. Dryden

spoke for an age when he boasted that he often translated his sentences into

Latin to help him decide how best to express them in English.

In 1660, Dryden complained that English had "not so much as a tolerable

dictionary or a grammar; so our language is in a manner barbarous." He believed

there should be an academy to regulate English usage, and for the next two

centuries many others would echo his view. In 1664, the Royal Society for the

Advancement of Experimental Philosophy formed a committee "to improve the

English tongue," though nothing lasting seems to have come of it.

Thirty-three years later in his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe was calling for

an academy to oversee the language. In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus

with a Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.

Some indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by

the fact that in 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams

wrote to the president of Congress appealing to him to set up an academy for the

purpose of "refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English

language" (a title that closely echoes, not to say plagiarizes, Swift's pamphlet of

sixty-eight years before).

In 1806, the American Congress considered a bill to institute a national academy

and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Letters, presided

over by John Quincy Adams, was formed, though again without any resounding

perpetual benefits to users of the language. And there were many other such

proposals and assemblies.

The model for all these was the Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal

Richelieu in 1635. In its youth, the academy was an ambitious motivator of

change. In 1762, after many years of work, it published a dictionary thatregularized the spellings of some 5,000 words—almost a quarter of the words

then in common use. It took the s out of words like estre and fenestre, making

them etre and fenetre, and it turned roy and boy into roi and loi. In recent

decades, however, the academy has been associated with an almost ayatollah-

like conservatism. When in December 1988 over 90 percent of French

schoolteachers voted in favor of a proposal to introduce the sort of spelling

reforms the academy itself had introduced 200 years earlier, the forty venerable

members of the academy were, to quote the London Sunday Times, "up in

apoplectic arms" at the thought of tampering with something as sacred as French

spelling. Such is the way of the world. Among the changes the teachers wanted

and the academicians did not were the removal of the circumflex on etre, fenetre,

and other such words, and taking the -x off plurals such as bureaux, chevaux,

and chateaux and replacing it with an -s.

Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national

academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they

almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change. So it is probably

fortunate that the English-speaking world never saddled itself with such a body,

largely because as many influential users of English were opposed to academies

as favored them. Samuel Johnson doubted the prospects of arresting change and

Thomas Jefferson thought it in any case undesirable. In declining an offer to be

the first honorary president of the Academy of Language and Belles Letters, he

noted that had such a body been formed in the days of the Anglo-Saxons English

would now be unable to describe the modern world. Joseph Priest-ley, the

English scientist, grammarian, and theologian, spoke perhaps most eloquently

against the formation of an academy when he said in 1761 that it was "unsuitable

to the genius of a free nation… . We need make no doubt but that the best forms

of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence:

and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow

and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious."

English is often commended by outsiders for its lack of a stultifying authority.

Otto Jespersen as long ago as 1905 was praising English for its lack of rigidity,

its happy air of casualness. Likening French to the severe and formal gardens of

Louis XIV, he contrasted it with English, which he said was "laid out seemingly

without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations."