"His system of citing examples of the best authorities, of indicating etymology,
and pronunciation, are still followed by lexicographers." (Philip Howard, The
State of the Language) His system are?
"When his fellowship expired he was offered a rectorship at Boxworth … on
condition that he married the deceased rector's daughter." (Robert McCrum, et
al., The Story of English) A misuse of the subjunctive: It should be "on condition
that he marry."
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason
that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—a language with which it has
precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split
an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be
possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any
more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't
available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like
asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity.
But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves
having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to
accommodate the inconsistencies.
The early authorities not only used Latin grammar as their model, but actually
went to the almost farcical length of writing English grammars in that language,
as with Sir Thomas Smith's De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione
Dialogus (1568), Alexander Gil's Logonomia Anglica (1619), and John Wallis's
Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653 (though even he accepted that the
grammar of Latin was ill-suited to English). For the longest time it was taken
entirely for granted that the classical languages must serve as models. Dryden
spoke for an age when he boasted that he often translated his sentences into
Latin to help him decide how best to express them in English.
In 1660, Dryden complained that English had "not so much as a tolerable
dictionary or a grammar; so our language is in a manner barbarous." He believed
there should be an academy to regulate English usage, and for the next two
centuries many others would echo his view. In 1664, the Royal Society for the
Advancement of Experimental Philosophy formed a committee "to improve the
English tongue," though nothing lasting seems to have come of it.
Thirty-three years later in his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe was calling for
an academy to oversee the language. In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus
with a Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
Some indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by
the fact that in 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams
wrote to the president of Congress appealing to him to set up an academy for the
purpose of "refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English
language" (a title that closely echoes, not to say plagiarizes, Swift's pamphlet of
sixty-eight years before).
In 1806, the American Congress considered a bill to institute a national academy
and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles Letters, presided
over by John Quincy Adams, was formed, though again without any resounding
perpetual benefits to users of the language. And there were many other such
proposals and assemblies.
The model for all these was the Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal
Richelieu in 1635. In its youth, the academy was an ambitious motivator of
change. In 1762, after many years of work, it published a dictionary thatregularized the spellings of some 5,000 words—almost a quarter of the words
then in common use. It took the s out of words like estre and fenestre, making
them etre and fenetre, and it turned roy and boy into roi and loi. In recent
decades, however, the academy has been associated with an almost ayatollah-
like conservatism. When in December 1988 over 90 percent of French
schoolteachers voted in favor of a proposal to introduce the sort of spelling
reforms the academy itself had introduced 200 years earlier, the forty venerable
members of the academy were, to quote the London Sunday Times, "up in
apoplectic arms" at the thought of tampering with something as sacred as French
spelling. Such is the way of the world. Among the changes the teachers wanted
and the academicians did not were the removal of the circumflex on etre, fenetre,
and other such words, and taking the -x off plurals such as bureaux, chevaux,
and chateaux and replacing it with an -s.
Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national
academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they
almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change. So it is probably
fortunate that the English-speaking world never saddled itself with such a body,
largely because as many influential users of English were opposed to academies
as favored them. Samuel Johnson doubted the prospects of arresting change and
Thomas Jefferson thought it in any case undesirable. In declining an offer to be
the first honorary president of the Academy of Language and Belles Letters, he
noted that had such a body been formed in the days of the Anglo-Saxons English
would now be unable to describe the modern world. Joseph Priest-ley, the
English scientist, grammarian, and theologian, spoke perhaps most eloquently
against the formation of an academy when he said in 1761 that it was "unsuitable
to the genius of a free nation… . We need make no doubt but that the best forms
of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence:
and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow
and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious."
English is often commended by outsiders for its lack of a stultifying authority.
Otto Jespersen as long ago as 1905 was praising English for its lack of rigidity,
its happy air of casualness. Likening French to the severe and formal gardens of
Louis XIV, he contrasted it with English, which he said was "laid out seemingly
without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations."