The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  By the end of the proposal M. J. Shields has become M. J. Yilz.

  Even when the revamped orthography promises to be a little more pliable than this, there are economic reasons for resisting spelling reform. For instance, every publisher would have to adopt the revised spelling, at great cost, and a huge amount of written material would in one stroke become obsolete. There would also be difficulties in enforcing the changes. Historical information about where words come from would be lost – perhaps not a cause for universal lamentation, but a dismaying depletion of our heritage. Yet fundamentally the objection is this: spelling reform will work only if it is universal. Reforms that seem appropriate in, say, Oxford will seem strange and unacceptable in Winnipeg or Wellington, because they will be based on the phonetics of the English mostly spoken in Oxford rather than that spoken hundreds or thousands of miles away.

  Imagine an international referendum to achieve English spelling reform. Who would be consulted? And who would win? Not the British, that’s for sure. English’s spellings, as they stand, accommodate a variety of pronunciations. You only have to think about some of the disparities in pronunciation within your own social circle to see the wider difficulties. How would you feel if the pronunciations underlying the new system of spelling were not your own? Some readers will recall the hostility felt in many quarters towards metrication. Compared to the introduction of a new system of spelling, that ill feeling would seem minuscule. Unlike adopting the metric system, this change would not be a one-off. It would be huge, but would nevertheless have to be repeated; pronunciations would continue slowly to shift, and spellings would have to be updated from time to time in order to fit the new pronunciations. Ask the proverbial man in the street whether simplified spelling might be a good thing, and he will probably say it would. Explain what would be involved, and he will very likely change his mind. In any case, the appetite for reform is not widespread. The proponents of reform are capable of making a lot of noise, but most people care a good deal less about the issue than the agitators like to make out.

  In any case, you cannot suddenly decouple a language from its historical freight. In the sixteenth century, when English was spoken only by a few million people, the case against reform was not watertight. Now, the educational arguments notwithstanding, it is impregnable. In its present form, English spelling makes it possible for texts to be shared by people who speak in very different ways. It would be tragic to lose that.

  7

  The many advantages of a good language

  Reforming grammar, and the eighteenth-century doctrine of correctness

  Reforming grammar can seem less difficult than reforming spelling – because, although the territory is larger, the reforms can be accomplished piece by piece. But what is grammar? The word is used frequently, and it is used with an air of authority, yet ask its advocates and apologists to say what it is and you will hear some strangulated responses.

  The word grammar has a number of meanings. People speak of ‘bad grammar’ or ‘correcting’ someone’s grammar as though there is agreement about what grammar itself is, but the word is elastic. One of the definitions provided in the single-volume Oxford Dictionary of English is ‘a set of actual or presumed prescriptive notions about correct use of language’, and it is this aspect of grammar that excites most discussion and anxiety. ‘Actual or presumed’ gets to the heart of the matter: there are notions, and then there are the mere notions of notions. However theoretically pleasing they may be, the categories into which language is organized by grammarians are porous. Edward Sapir, a hugely influential twentieth-century thinker whose work straddled anthropology and linguistics, put the matter succinctly when he said that ‘All grammars leak’.1

  There is an important distinction to be drawn between ‘grammar’ and ‘a grammar’. Fundamentally, ‘grammar’ is a system of rules expressing the regular forms of a language; ‘a grammar’ is a book providing a particular model of that system. Today a grammar is likely to map what we know about how a language is used. In its ideal form, it is a complete description of the language, but, as we know, grammar books have not always been descriptive.

  The distinction I have drawn matters because grammar exists whether or not it is recorded in books. One can know grammar without being conscious of it. In fact, most of the time we are unaware of its workings. Learning a language involves mastering its grammatical rules, but once we have mastered them we may struggle to give an account of them.

  When we refer to ‘good English’ we mean English that is grammatically secure. But ‘good writing’ or ‘a good speech’ are different matters: we are thinking here of the effects achieved more than of grammatical integrity, and, while these performances are likely to be grammatically sound, they need not be so.

  I can speak or write grammatically without communicating in a pleasing or especially effective way. The flipside of this is my being able to convey my thoughts to you without abiding by grammatical rules: you will know what I mean if I say, ‘I would of loved one of them chicken pies what you done cook.’ Less obviously, perhaps, I can write grammatically without making sense. Noam Chomsky illustrated this principle with the sentence ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. Grammatically, this is fine; it is well-formed, unlike the same group of words in reverse – ‘Furiously sleep ideas green colourless’. But it means nothing. We intuitively judge the first version to be better than the second, which suggests that our determination of whether a sentence is well-formed is to some degree independent of our grasp of its meaning.

  Yet this is not what is taught in schools. Teachers focus on the procedures that allow us to form sentences well, rather than on the underlying philosophy. You may have read the last two sentences with raised eyebrows, for, if English grammar is taught at all in English schools today, it is taught vaguely. Exposure to the idea that there is this frumpy thing called grammar may happen only when other languages are taught. This is where students come across concepts such as ‘genitive’, ‘pluperfect’ and ‘preposition’. And the information that there is in French such a thing as the pluperfect subjunctive (‘O toi que j’eusse embrassée!’) may not carry over into students’ perception of English.

  Grumblers say teachers’ neglect of grammar is a recent development. Yet in 1921, a government-sponsored report into the teaching of English in England declared that ‘Grammar is certainly badly taught as a rule’ and went on to wonder, ‘Is it … impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is?’ The report is written in a relaxed style unlikely to be used in its modern equivalent. ‘We are happily free,’ say its authors, ‘from most of the cumbersome inflections which hampered the utterances of our ancestors and which still hamper that [sic] of our old-fashioned cousins, the Germans.’ We can see influential patterns in its arguments. Teaching of ‘correct speech in schools’ should be based ‘first of all, on correction of mistakes when they arise; secondly, on the great power of imitation; and thirdly, at a later stage, … on the teaching of the general rules to which our standard speech conforms.’ These priorities are familiar. More of a surprise is the authors’ decision to cite with approval an earlier report on teaching in secondary schools, which claimed that ‘There is no such thing as English Grammar in the sense which used to be attached to the term.’2

  Those ‘cumbersome inflections’ are worth a moment of our time. One of the things that strike students of highly inflected languages such as Russian or Arabic is that they pack a lot of information into words. English does not. However, Old English was a largely synthetic language, which is to that say that it had many inflections: for instance, nouns had four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) and there were three genders, all clearly marked. This system decayed, and Middle English was largely analytic; it had fewer inflections, especially in its nouns and adjectives, and typically it signalled the grammatical role of a word, X, by using an extra word, Y, rather t
han binding the information into X. The reasons for this change are not our concern here. But the uninflected nature of English means that sentences have to be structured by other means. Word order is crucial. Something that appeals to novice learners of Latin is the way it is possible to scramble the word order and still make perfect sense; the way the words are tagged ensures that Caesarem occidit Brutus and Brutus Caesarem occidit both convey the information that Brutus killed Caesar. This seems neat. English, as we are perhaps uncomfortably aware, does not work like that. While it is nonsense to say that English has no inflections – I have just made inflection plural by adding an s, and adding is an inflected form of add – it is true that English does not have great inflectional complexity. Its lack of inflections when compared with Latin or Russian explains the common perception that it has little grammar. But it is precisely the absence of inflections that makes the grammatical arrangement of words – i.e. syntax – important in English.

  While grammar used to be taught more vigorously than it is today, the philosophy behind such teaching has always been hazy. The principles of English grammar, as presented to schoolchildren, are a patchwork. Students typically understand the subject as a network of traps for the unwary. The machinery of communication is ignored. Instead, teaching has traditionally focused on eliminating common mistakes, and the approach has been punitive, not positive. It would be unusual (and illegal) for a schoolchild today to be beaten for making a grammatical mistake in class, but older readers of this book may remember being given the cane or the strap for doing so. Perhaps the most lasting memory of grammar instruction, though, is the impression it creates that within something that is presented to us as a science there can be great inconsistencies. This is unnerving: how can I do the right thing if the principles of doing right are so full of exceptions? The experience is one we are likely to have again – for instance, in our encounters with the law.

  The eighteenth century is often portrayed as an age of grammarians. There had been accounts of grammar before, as we have seen, and there would be many afterwards, but commonly it is to this period that a lot of our grammatical notions are traced. It is usually characterized as an age of regulation, discipline, logic and prescription – summed up in the title of a 1929 study by Sterling Leonard called The Doctrine of Correctness.

  At this time, complaining about English became a force for unity. During the two previous centuries, writers had looked forward optimistically to a time when the state of English would be much improved. But in the eighteenth century, commentators switched to lamenting the passing of a golden age of English. Dr Johnson described the writers ‘which rose in the time of Elizabeth’ as ‘the wells of English undefiled’ (words originally used by Spenser of Chaucer, with wistful inaccuracy). The Elizabethans, he believed, were ‘the pure sources of genuine diction’. The genuine diction remained until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In this view Johnson was close to Swift, who felt that the period of excellence had occurred between the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1558 and the start of the First English Civil War in 1642. Nostalgia for that period was common, though not universal.

  The sense of slippage was widespread. It helps explain why the eighteenth century was the period when ideas of correctness became an obsession. In an attempt to prevent any further deterioration, writers began to make specific pronouncements about what was good usage and what was its scandalous opposite. They did so against a background of linguistic affectation, bombast and snobbery, in which commercialese was ever more rampant.

  Writing in 1724, the author of The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation (generally believed to be Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man) examined the state of English and complained of the lack of a decent dictionary, the raw ignorance of students arriving at university, the ‘silliness’ of women’s choice of words, and the shortcomings of the alphabet. ‘We have no Grammar of it that is taught in any School that we ever heard of,’ he wrote.3 Wilson died in 1755, the year Johnson brought out his famous Dictionary; he did not live to see what would turn out to be a glut of grammars in the decades following the publication of Johnson’s magnum opus.

  The title of Wilson’s book is significant. It avoids specificity – a knowing sort of indirectness – yet really the book ought to have been called The Many Advantanges of Good English to Britain. Getting English in order was increasingly seen as a way of solidifying national identity. For some, this was an egalitarian mission; for others, a means of papering over the cracks in relations between the different parts of Britain. Grammatical security was regarded as a way of cementing the Constitution by other means. But let us be clear: there is no single document that sets out a British constitution. Rather, we have a collection of laws. There are key statutes of a constitutional nature – ranging from Magna Carta, issued in 1215, to, for instance, the Freedom of Information Act in 2000 – but there are also elements of the de facto constitution that are unwritten. Its sources are scattered, and it has evolved for practical purposes. It is amorphous and in many places indistinct, and as a result it is much contested.

  The most arresting thing about the systems of grammar promulgated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is their profusion. The standard modern overview of the subject, by Ian Michael, examines more than 270 grammars produced between 1586 and 1800, and identifies in these no fewer than fifty-six different systems, while even among those that stuck closely to Latin patterns there were twenty different systems.4 The authors of these books frequently lifted material from those of their predecessors, and few of them could make much claim to originality. But it is striking that so many people thought they could profitably contribute to this field – that there was money to be made, and that they had something valuable to say.

  Reviewing the efforts of English grammarians for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875–89), Archibald Sayce wrote that ‘The endeavour to find the distinctions of Latin grammar in that of English has only resulted in grotesque errors and a total misapprehension of the usage of the English language’. That view was far from orthodox at the time. In 1914 H. G. Wells could still wonder, ‘Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbare article of the schoolmaster’s creed was put away for good? Everyone who has given any attention to this question must be aware that the intellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languages such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English, that learning Greek to improve one’s English style is like learning to swim in order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems only too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression in English at all.’5 He had previously had this to say:

  At present our method in English is a foolish caricature of the Latin method; we spend a certain amount of time teaching children classificatory bosh about the eight sorts of Nominative Case, a certain amount of time teaching them the ‘derivation’ of words they do not understand, glance shyly at Anglo-Saxon and at Grimm’s Law, indulge in a specific reminiscence of the Latin method called parsing, supplement with a more modern development called the analysis of sentences, give a course of exercises in paraphrasing (for the most part the conversion of good English into bad), and wind up with lessons in ‘Composition’ that must be seen to be believed.6

  Wells’s image of ‘classificatory bosh’ would have affronted most teachers in the eighteenth century. Until recently English had been taught only in so-called dissenting academies, but now the increased emphasis on English in schools created a market for doctrine about language and for schemes that helped impart it. As Sterling Leonard points out, ‘the claims for the study of language made at this period were entangled with the idea of formal discipline’, and there was ‘obvious educational value’ in ‘pursuing rather subtle analogies’ and in ‘mastering abstract differentiae in the resolution of false syntax’. The result was ‘the multiplication of formal niceties’.7 ‘Educational value’ is conceived here from the
point of view of the educators rather than those they educate: the job of teaching is made more straightforward when lessons are broken down into exercises and tests.

  The established methods of teaching Latin offered a model for this. English did not develop from Latin, so it seems crankish to expect it to conform to the patterns of Latin. It would be more reasonable to expect it to behave like German, since the two languages have shared ancestry, although in moving away from that ancestry they have of course both altered. But, whereas many seventeenth-century grammarians such as John Wilkins had wanted to erect a completely new system, in the eighteenth century it was common to accept uncritically that Latin provided a set of grammatical concepts that could be mapped on to English. One of the founding works in this tradition was George Snell’s 1649 The Right Teaching of Useful Knowledg (sic), which argued that ‘the present, exquisite, and elaborate times … seem to bee the most advantagious for settling … our English tongue’ and glorified Latin as ‘a Grammatical language, elegant, certain, and perfect’ and ‘a book language, which no force of arms can alter’.8 Later contributions of note included Elisha Coles’s Nolens Volens (1675), a primer promising ‘You shall make Latin whether you will or no’ and promoting Latin as a model for good English, and Richard Johnson’s Grammatical Commentaries (1706), which laboriously identified the shortcomings of Lily’s nearly two-hundred-year-old Grammar yet deified Latin as a universal language, suitable moreover for everyday speech.