There was a certain excuse for the utterance, in the past, of these doleful forebodings. The nature of language and of the influences that operate upon it was then but little understood. Not, indeed, until a late period has the radical error which lies at the foundation of these beliefs been recognized clearly; by vast numbers it is still not recognized at all, or, if so, very dimly. For the anxiety entertained about the speech in previous centuries there is therefore explanation, even if it does not amount to justification. Men knew nothing of the historical development of the words and grammatical forms they were in the habit of using. They had not the slightest conception out of what impurity had sprung much of the vaunted purity in which they rejoiced. To them the language seemed a sort of intellectual machine which had come into their possession with all its parts finished and elaborated. They were consequently solicitous that nothing should be brought in to impair its imagined perfection; they lived in perpetual dread of the agencies that might threaten its integrity.
The Goal of "Fixing" the Language
There was one aim in particular held before the eyes of the men of the past. This was to render the language what they called fixed. If that were once accomplished, the speech would undergo no further change, save on an extremely limited scale and in certain well-defined directions. The tide of corruptions, real or assumed, would thus be permanently stayed. A belief of this sort has been widely cherished in every age and in every country possessed of a literature. It has naturally exercised the minds of many of those speaking our own tongue. That men of letters should indulge in it is not particularly surprising. However much they may deal with language as an instrument of expression, they have in general little knowledge of its history or of the diverse influences that are always operating upon it and modifying its character. But it shows how thoroughly this idea had permeated the minds of all that we find it proclaimed by a scholar of the intellectual stature of Bentley. "It would be no difficult contrivance," he wrote: "if the public had any regard to it, to make the English tongue immutable, unless hereafter some foreign nation overrun and invade us."
But it is perhaps hopeless to expect that any man, however eminent, shall be in most things much in advance of his age. Bentley, great scholar as he was, shared to its full extent in the special ignorance, then prevalent, of the English tongue and of its history. Nor in his general linguistic views was he superior to his contemporaries. In the very passage containing the quotation just given, he spoke gravely of the Hebrew as the primitive language of mankind. He further asserted that it underwent no change from the creation to the time of the Babylonian captivity--that is, according to the then received reckoning, about three thousand years. It is not reasonable to expect that a man should be more accurate in his conclusions than he is in his facts. It will create no surprise, therefore, to find that Bentley could see no reason why English, too, having been glutted with Latin words to its full capacity and needing no further additions, should not continue unchanged for the rest of its existence.
Samuel Johnson on Fixing Speech
Even later, Dr. Johnson, in the Plan of his Dictionary, issued in 1747, declared that one end of his undertaking was "to fix the English language." But a man could not compile a vocabulary of the tongue without learning something of the nature of speech. By the time he finished his work, he had been cured of this particular error. It seemed impossible for most men of the past--the impossibility continues for some men of the present--to comprehend the elementary principle that in order to have a language become fixed, it is first necessary that those who speak it should become dead--dead at least intellectually, if not physically. Then, indeed,it can undergo no change, for there is no one to change it. But so long as it lives in the mouths of men, and not merely in the pages of books, it must constantly introduce new words and phrases to express the new facts which have been brought to the knowledge of those who speak it, the new inventions and discoveries which they have made, the new ideas and feelings which they have come to entertain.
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