Founding Grammars (27 page)

Rather than weakening the case for a historical connection between English and Latin, this difference strengthens the likelihood that they're related. The best explanation is that
pater
/
father
and the other pairs each evolved out of a single Indo-European word with the initial sound
p.
(Indo-European words are reconstructed by comparing related words in the descendant languages to determine the most likely original form.) Over time, as English and Latin grew into two distinct languages, the
p
of Indo-European evolved into an English
f.
14

The comparative method can also help reveal the history of a single language. A nineteenth-century philologist looking for the origins of
from,
for instance, would use the comparative method to carefully trace versions of the word back through English documents of earlier times, and then through records of other Indo-European languages. He would discover related words in the Germanic languages—Anglo-Saxon
fram,
Old German
fram,
Old Norse
fr
á
.
He would also find the apparently related Latin word
pr
ō
,
yet another example of the
p
/
f
pattern.

This new way of constructing word histories was a clear departure from the Horne Tooke style of free-form theorizing. The study of word histories and language relationships—once a pursuit for individual enthusiasts—grew into an organized discipline with established guidelines and well-researched conclusions. From now on, no one could get away with declaring, as Horne Tooke had once done, that
from
came from a noun that meant “beginning” without providing historical evidence to back up the claim.

Comparative linguistics was slow to arrive in the United States. Part of the reason was simply the sluggish pace of all communications at that time. Sir William's 1786 talk did not appear in print until 1790. Then the print version had to make its way out of India by sail, arriving in Europe some months later before eventually traveling to America. Another roadblock was the devotion of many American language scholars to the writings of Horne Tooke, or in Webster's case, to his own theories. Webster was aware of Jones's work, but skeptical of it. He writes in the introduction to his 1828 dictionary, “It is obvious that Sir W. Jones had given very little attention to the subject [of etymology], and that some of its most common and obvious principles had escaped his observation.”
15
As always, Webster preferred his own methods.

By 1870 American scholars were beginning to embrace this new field, although only a few universities, such as Yale, offered classes in the subject. Lounsbury and Whitney were among the earliest American philologists. As they and their colleagues applied the comparative method to the various stages of English, they realized that many of the “rules” proposed by Lowth and later grammarians either weren't based on any historical norm—as in the ban on double negatives—or tried to preserve usages that were becoming obsolete—as in the case of
shall.

White's verbal analysis, in Lounsbury and Whitney's view, showed the same weaknesses. What he insisted were logical principles seemed to them to be disguised personal preferences. When White talked about word histories—typically while defending his ideas of linguistic purity—he still leaned on the old-fashioned eighteenth-century intuitive method. The two philologists considered his “feel” for English a poor substitute for an informed understanding of its history and development.

White and other popular commentators condemned many reasonable usages based on their own notions of linguistic elegance. Nineteenth-century philologists, like their spiritual forebears the rational grammarians, believed that usage standards should be based on the real structure of English. Lounsbury and Whitney were fighting the same battles that Webster and Fowle had fought decades earlier, but their detailed research into the history of the language provided them with more potent ammunition.

*   *   *

White's position came under attack from more than one direction. In 1872, only a year after the
College Courant
articles appeared, he endured a more prolonged and vicious assault from Fitzedward Hall, an American philologist living in England. Hall's slender book, titled
Recent Exemplifications of False Philology,
is devoted almost entirely to attacking White. Like the
Courant
articles,
False Philology
reflects a new way of thinking about language use.

Fitzedward Hall arrived at philology by an adventurous route. Hall was born in Troy, New York, in 1825, the oldest of six children. As the son of a prosperous lawyer, he received a conventional education. Although the origins of English words always intrigued him, he concentrated on studying mathematics and science, earning a civil engineering degree at the age of seventeen. Four years later he enrolled at Harvard for further education, but before he could begin classes, his younger brother threw the family into an uproar by running away to sea. As the oldest child, twenty-one-year-old Fitzedward was delegated to go after him. He sailed from Boston in the spring of 1846, bound for Kolkata.

Hall's ship wrecked as it sailed into the mouth of the Ganges River, an accident that changed the course of his life. As he was now stranded in Kolkata for the near future, he decided to fill in time by learning Hindustani and Persian (a common second language in nineteenth-century India). He later added lessons in Bengali and Sanskrit. Hall never found his brother, but he did discover a passion for language studies.

Hall stayed in India for over ten years. While there, he married an Englishwoman living in Delhi, taught Sanskrit and English at Government College in Benares, became an inspector of public instruction for the colonial British government, and fought alongside the British during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. All the time, he continued to perfect his knowledge of Sanskrit. He was the first American to edit a Sanskrit text. He also learned as much as he could about philology and the history of English.

When Hall finally left India, he did not return home to the United States, but settled with his family in London. For a while, his life assumed a more conventional shape. He held a professorship of Sanskrit, Hindustani, and Indian jurisprudence at King's College, as well as the post of librarian at the India Office, which oversaw British Indian affairs. Then in 1869 events took another strange turn.

Hall was dismissed from his post of India Office librarian and ejected from the London Philological Society after a controversy concerning the loan of valuable manuscripts in his charge. The details of the scandal are murky. Long after the events, Hall described his firing to an acquaintance by saying that the India Office had wrongly accused him of being a hopeless drunkard and a foreign spy. The public record from the time consists mainly of a series of elliptical letters in the
Atheneaum
from Hall and others, hinting at devious maneuvers and subtle counterploys. After it was all over, Hall escaped to the Suffolk village of Marlesford. A few years later, his marriage broke up. He stayed on in Marlesford alone, resentful and increasingly reclusive.

In this bitter frame of mind, Hall turned to writing about his own language.
Recent Exemplifications of False Philology
is an extended attack on what he terms “the rabble of verbal critics” currently pontificating about English with little knowledge of their subject. Although his book covers many of the same points as Lounsbury and Whitney, their criticisms seem politely reserved compared with Hall.

Hall's writing style manages to be both arcane and outrageous at the same time. He describes the work of White and his like this way: “The criticaster [inferior critic], having looked for a given expression … in his dictionary, but without finding it there, or even without this preliminary toil, conceives it to be novel, unauthorized, contrary to analogy, vulgar, superfluous, or what not. Flushed with his precious discovery, he explodes it before the public.” Hall intends to expose the fallacies of this “style and temper of philologizing.”
16

Hall starts by examining the ill-considered grammatical comments of several well-known authors, including Coleridge. He takes the same approach as Lounsbury and Whitney, refuting these authors' statements with copious literary examples to the contrary. He presents these mostly in the form of long footnotes. For instance, he refutes Coleridge's criticism of writers who use
whose
for nonhumans (instead of
of which
) by stating that
whose
“has had the support of high authorities for several hundred years.” He reinforces this claim with a footnote nearly a page long—a relentless list of quotations that starts with a fifteenth-century manuscript and ends with Samuel Johnson.
17
Hall believes with his fellow philologists that common usage is the only reasonable way to determine whether a word or phrase is acceptable.

After these preliminaries Hall turns to his main business—taking down White. He announces that he intends to review the weaknesses of
Words and Their Uses
in detail in order to show what happens to “one who puts his faith over-confidingly in dictionaries and intuition.” Hall has no more patience with intuition than the
College Courant
authors. His way of critiquing White is to quote one of White's usage strictures and then show that it's based on a lack of knowledge about English.

For example, White has pronounced against using
experience
as a verb, claiming that a diligent search turned up only one example of the word in an authoritative source. Hall snaps, “Since ‘diligent search' may mean, with Mr. White, industry in turning over the pages of dictionaries, one can scarcely wonder” at his faulty conclusions. Hall's own results have been somewhat different. He says, “How long we have possessed the verb
experience
I cannot say, but as long ago as 1531 it was used by Sir Thomas Elyot.” He follows up with an onslaught of quotations from giants of English literature.
18

The remainder of the book—nearly one hundred pages—proceeds along similar lines. Like Lounsbury and Whitney, Hall has been struck by White's judgment that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by … no usage, however general.” Like them, he considers it nonsensical. He brushes aside White's style judgments with the comment, “His animadversions where original are, I believe, in almost every case, founded either on caprice, on defective information, or on both.” Unfortunately, Hall fears that White's writing style is calculated to appeal to the masses. His dogmatism and positiveness, says Hall, are “of that peremptory stamp which insures the prompt submission of the unthinking multitude.”
19

He calls White's belief that speech is the product of reason and logic an “incoherent fiction,” pointing out the same problem that the
Courant
authors notice—identical facts may lead people to different conclusions. He phrases it in more colorful terms though. “It is not given to everyone,” he sneers, “to enjoy those intimate relations with reason which have been vouchsafed to Mr. White as one of the elect.”
20

Hall sums up his problem with White this way: “Reduced to its simplest expression, the principle on which Mr. White criticizes our language is whim. The very fundamentals of true philology he has still to acquire.” In fact, Hall's complaint is the same as Lounsbury and Whitney's—White is not qualified to write about English. Not only do his rules and guidelines contradict normal usage, they show an ignorance of etymology. In order to write a serious book about language use, “it is by no means enough to trust to memory and to pore over dictionaries,” says Hall. It's also necessary to read widely and “with the eye of a philologist.” Hall surmises that “success in one department of letters has emboldened him to venture his cunning in another department, and one in which he is totally incapable of distinguishing himself.”
21

Hall ends with the unconvincing declaration that he does not feel any personal hostility toward White. His reason for attacking
Words and Their Uses
is the same as Lounsbury and Whitney's—the book has spread grammatical confusion among the uninformed. Otherwise, he insists, White's mistakes “would never have moved me to write in a polemic spirit.” He has only done so because they provided a way of offering a few hints on the necessity of “patient inquiry, cautious reflection, and dispassionate judgment” when attempting to practice philology.
22

Reviews for
False Philology
were mixed. One magazine review begins, “This is a curiously scornful and acrid discussion of questions about the derivation, meaning, and use of words, accompanied with the impalement … of Mr. Richard Grant White.” The reviewer nonetheless finds the book “stimulating, learned, useful, and almost always correct.” Another review is more flattering, suggesting that Hall wrote with “genuine modesty and zeal, for the sake of our old mother tongue.” The reviewer praises him for his lack of linguistic extremism, which gives some idea of the intemperate tone of most usage commentary.
23

The Nation
featured a review by William Dwight Whitney, which he used mainly to fight another round of his own with White. Whitney remarks approvingly on the term “false philology,” which he thinks accurately describes the “dreary and barren” field of verbal criticism. Of course he also approves of Hall's “pungent and able” criticisms. He spends most of the review, however, skewering the second edition of
Words and Their Uses,
released after Hall wrote
False Philology.
Whitney scoffs at White's new preface, in which White defends himself against Whitney's and other people's previous attacks by saying that he has never made any claim to be a philologist. Whitney doesn't accept this excuse. “In these days of philological light and knowledge,” he declares, “no man has the right to come forward and lecture the community on the proprieties of speech, and then try to creep away from adverse criticism under cover of the plea that he is ‘no philologist.'”