Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/485

Rh He has also read considerable good philological literature on the general development of English and has done some independent investigation. On the basis of these studies he comes to the conclusion that the differences in speech between the English in England and America are so great that it is permissible to speak of an American language. The reviewer, on the other hand, has been a technical student of the growth and development of English, German, and other Germanic languages for more than thirty-five years and hence is accustomed to look at linguistic phenomena from quite a different point of view from that of a literary man. To him language is made up of definite fixed types of expression that vary very much in different tongues. To him the materials submitted in this book do not in general possess distinctive types and hence do not indicate that there is such a thing as an American language. Very many of these words were coined in this country, but the die came from England. It is truly marvelous that in a country so large as the United States different languages did not arise. The explanation lies in the peculiar circumstances that mark the colonial period. At the time the English colonists came to this country English had in general become fixed in its character. The early American period was a paper age. From the very beginning books were at hand and books and periodicals became ever more common. Altho the colonists were scattered over a wide territory the printed form of English kept ever before the American people the old English types of expression. The low stage of culture of the aborigines made impossible any serious shattering of these old English types. To the reviewer these things are so self-evident that he does not feel called to undertake here a formal refutation of the principal claim of the book. But there are a number of other claims that are worthy of attention.

On several occasions the author inveighs eloquently against the poor teaching of English grammar in our schools. According to the author's view the present bad state of grammar instruction results from the fact that the teacher teaches English while the pupil understands only American. "The effects of this are two-fold. On the one hand he (the pupil) conceives an antipathy to a subject so lacking in intelligibility and utility. As one teacher puts it, 'pupils tire of it; often they see nothing in it, because there is nothing in it.' And on the other hand, the school-boy goes entirely without sympathetic guidance in the living language that he actually speaks, in and out of the classroom, and that he will probably speak all the rest of his life." The last sentence is so sad that it ought to touch the heart of every teacher in the land and move every school-board to take immediate action to remedy this great evil. There can be no doubt that this sad state of things exists. The cause,