Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/270

 sprinkled with italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often interlarded with Greek. The mere printing of such words in italics is an active force toward degeneration. The Society hopes to discredit this tendency, and it will endeavour to restore to English its old recreative energy; when a choice is possible we should wish to give an English pronunciation and spelling to useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a good many words the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by the original foreign forms.

A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any English newspaper of the slightest intellectual pretension will show how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English must perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the same import are carefully italicized and accented, e. g., matinée, café, crêpe, début, portière, éclat, naïveté, régime, rôle, soirée, précis, protégé, élite, gemütlichkeit, mêlée, tête-à-tête, porte-cochère, divorcée, fiancée, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase, dénouement. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign analogues thought to be more elegant, e. g., repertory by répertoire, sheik by shaikh, czar by tsar, levee by levée, moslem by muslim, khalifate by khilifat, said by seyd, crape by crêpe, supper by souper, Legion of Honor by Legion d'honneur, gormand by gourmand, grip by la grippe, crown by krone. Proper names also yield to this new pedantry, and the London Times frequently delights the aluminados by suddenly making such substitutions as that of Serbia for Servia and that of Rumania for Roumania; in the course of time, if the warnings of the S. P. E. do not prevail, the English may be writing München, København, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and s' Gravenhage; even today they commonly use Hannover, Habana and Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers are careful about the diacritical marks in proper names, e. g., Sèvres, Zürich, Bülow, Fran-