The Mother Tongue Read Free

or another that our language is superior to all others. In The English Language, Robert Burchfield writes: “As a source of intellectual power and entertainment the whole range of prose writing in English is probably unequalled anywhere else in the world.” I would like to think he’s right, but I can’t help wondering if Mr. Burchfield would have made the same generous assertion had he been born Russian or German or Chinese. There is no reliable way of measuring the quality of efficiency of any language. Yet there are one or two small ways in which English has a demonstrable edge over other languages. For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mercifully, uninflected. In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch. This can cause immense social anxiety. The composer Richard Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were partners for twenty-five years and apparently adored each other and yet never quite found the nerve to address each other as anything but the stiff “Sie.” In English we avoid these problems by relying on just one form: you.
    In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed. A speaker of Japanese must equally wend his way through a series of linguistic levels appropriate to the social position of the participants. When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings running from the perfunctory arigato (“thanks”) to the decidedly more humble makotoni go shinsetsu de gozaimasu, which means “what you have done or proposed to do is a truly and genuinely kind and generous deed.” Above all, English is mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her adolescence miserably trying to remember whether it is “la plume” or “le plume” will appreciate just what a pointless burden masculine and feminine nouns are to any language. In this regard English is a godsend to students everywhere. Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefinite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, “It’s time to go to bed,” where in most other European languages they must say, “It’s the time to go to the bed.” We possess countless examples of pithy phrases—“life is short,” “between heaven and earth,” “to go to work”—which in other languages require articles.
    English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages. German is full of jaw-crunching words like Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company), Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), and Kriegsgefangenenentschädigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations), while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such as Douwe Egberts Koninlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory-Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out business cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp truncations: IBM, laser, NATO. Against this, however, there is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.” That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
    But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better and