THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505140029
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
Given today's quasi-holiday designation, I've decided to write about the Mother Tongue.
(Sorry, Mom - you know I love you, but this space is dedicated to discussing how newspapers work, the information age, First Amendment issues and other topics journalistic - not personal. This is about all I can squeeze in: Happy Mother's Day.)
Writing about language is an occupational hazard for journalists. Virginia-born newspapermen James J. Kilpatrick and Russell Baker have written acclaimed columns and books on the subject, as have broadcasters-turned-authors Edwin Newman and Robert MacNeil.
Whether on paper or on the air, the medium we all work in is words.
We know we have succeeded if we get the words right.
Luckily, we have the right words to work with.
English - which did not exist when Julius Caesar landed his legions in Britain nearly 2,000 years ago - has enjoyed remarkable success since the days of Shakespeare, as noted by Robert MacNeil and co-authors Robert McCrum and William Cran in their 1986 book, ``The Story of English'':
``Between 1600 and the present, in armies, navies, companies and expeditions, the speakers of English - including Scots, Irish, Welsh, Americans and many more - travelled into every corner of the globe, carrying their language and culture with them.
``Today, English is used by at least 750 million people, and barely half of those speak it as a mother tongue. Some estimates have put that figure closer to one billion. Whatever the total, English at the end of the twentieth century is more widely scattered, more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language.''
Not only did English overlay other lands and cultures, it became enriched by them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ``The English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.''
English is like a wall painted with layers of colors, blotted and sponged and rubbed away in places to reveal other colors. Its core layers include: Celtic languages that predate Welsh and Gaelic, the modern Celtic tongues; Anglo-Saxon or Old English languages that can be heard today in Dutch and the Frisian dialect of the Low Country; a dash of Old Norse brought by Viking invaders; three infusions of Latin - first from conquering Roman legions, then from Christian missionaries and finally, repackaged in the Romance language now called French, from the Norman invasion in 1066.
Wherever English conquerors - or corporate investors or consultants - have gone, they have brought back into their language new words like ``pajama'' and ``honcho'' and ``blitz,'' borrowing from friend and enemy alike.
Our language lives, riding along a global military and economic presence, incorporating contributions from other languages, stretching its rules along with its vocabulary, escaping the regulatory rigidity that eventually helped kill Latin and, one could argue, is starving French, once the lingua franca of international trade and diplomacy.
``After the Norman invasion, English was neglected and ill-considered by the Latin-writing and French-speaking authorities; so it was unregulated and unimposed upon; from the earliest times it was naturally the language of protest and dissent, the language of the many rather than the few,'' MacNeil, McCrum and Cran write.
``Its genius was, and still is, essentially democratic. It has given expression to the voice of freedom from Wat Tyler, to Tom Paine, to Thomas Jefferson, to Edmund Burke, to the Chartists, to Abraham Lincoln, to the Suffragettes, to Winston Churchill, to Martin Luther King. It is well equipped to be a world language, to give voice to the aspirations of the Third World as much as the inter-communication of the First World.''
H.L. Mencken, a Baltimore journalist, wrote in ``The American Language,'' published in 1919:
``A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.''
Here's to a long life, Mother English. by CNB