Formatting the English Language

While my previous post detailed my amazement at Franklin’s ability to outline a method of English instruction that survives almost unchanged today, I saw him as far less visionary, for once, in his letter to Webster. Indeed, it is critical to have a standardization of the English language. However, perhaps because of his allegiance to two English speaking countries, Franklin reprobates changes that have since become commonplace. Principally, he laments that French words have infiltrated the English language rather than Latin serving as the sole means of deriving new English words. Since Franklin’s time, these French words, such as laissez-faire, ennui, avant-garde, have become heavily integrated into the English vocabulary. Perhaps Franklin worried that English would become inferior to another European language. He compares it with in a somewhat competitive manner: “our English bids fair to obtain second place.” Certainly, Latin would not pose a threat, as it had reached verbal extinction for the most part.

Franklin thought English would gain popularity because of the number of literary works printed in the language. The mass of translations available after Franklin’s time seems to disprove that theory. Rather, English has become the world’s first language because of commerce, colonization, political power, etc. Interestingly, French now ranks as the #1 second world language. Franklin also urged Webster to correct mispronunciations, particularly in Boston. However, clearly regional pronunciations survive today, such as the Boston ‘r’ and southern drawl. When I first moved to Vanderbilt, from Michigan, my ‘out’s and ‘about’s sounded almost Canadian, and I called it ‘pop’ instead of ‘coke (soda)’. It seems quite unrealistic to want to make the English language uniform wherever it is spoken, especially since a word may be needed to describe a meaning/situation that simply does not exist in another place. However, having a uniform reference of the language is essential to eliminate unnecessary differentiations of words. Franklin returns to his perceptive self when he notes that such elimination will make the language easier to learn: “If therefore we would have the Benefit of seeing our language more generally known among mankind, we should endeavor to remove all the difficulties, however small, that discourage the learning it.” Ironically however, even after Webster’s dictionary, the structure of the language (in certain irregular verbs), not the spelling or pronunciation, makes English one of the most difficult languages to learn.