158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SOME INTEEESTING CHAEACTEEISTICS OP THE MODEEN 



ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



Bt ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN, Ph.D. 



PROFESSOE OF ANTHEOPOLOGT, CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS. 



MODEEN English possesses not a few characteristics of great 

 interest from a psychological as well as from a merely philo- 

 logical point of view. This is especially true, if one considers the pos- 

 sible culmination of our mother-tongue as the world-language. For 

 some of these traits are the very ones which seem fitted to enable Eng- 

 lish to survive in that role. They are matters connected with flexibility ; 

 correspondence with thought instead of subordination of it to gram- 

 matical categories and merely formal canons; power over words un- 

 known to other tongues, where freedom in accepting foreign terms and 

 liberty to " reduce " unnecessarily cumbersome expressions are often 

 unhappily much restricted ; absence of fear of hybrids and certain other 

 misgivings of the "purists" and pedants. Altogether, English is a 

 living language, master over both grammar and dictionary, and exceed- 

 ingly skilful in its use of this sovereignty. But a few of these important 

 qualities of modern English can be considered here. 



1. Foreign Words. — The free adoption of foreign terms of all kinds 

 is one of the most striking evidences of the real vitality and essential 

 cosmopolitanism of modern English. Its vocabulary always has " the 

 open door." It admits on the same conditions a word from Ojibwa or 

 from Greek; one from Latin or from Polynesian. If the right word 

 turns up at the right time, there is no Academy to pass judgment upon 

 it, grammatically or lexicographically. The sole authority to welcome 

 or to reject is the genius of the language itself. Tammany and teU- 

 phone, taboo and aeroplane, all come into our common speech with equal 

 rights to citizenship. English is thus dependent upon no one language, 

 or even set of languages, for the accretion of its vocabulary. It can 

 pick and choose wherever it will ; no linguistic market is ever closed to 

 its traffic. No one language, however polished, however important in 

 the past history of the world, however highly esteemed by educators or 

 approved by men of science, can assume the role of dictator here. The 

 balancing of its draughts upon the classic languages with those upon 

 insignificant or unknown barbarian tongues and dialects is a marked 

 feature of the mother-tongue. English lets the psychological moment 

 dominate; the needs of the time outweigh the prohibitions and the 

 circumscriptions of the pedant. Thus Greek gave us ostracise, but not 



