THE NATURALIZATION OF FOREIGN WHI WORDS HEN Taine was praising that earliest of analytical novels, the 'Princess of Cleves,' he noted the simplicity of Madame de Lafayette's style. "Half of the words we use are unknown to Madame de Lafayette," he declared. "She is like the painters of old, who could make every shade with only five or six colors." And he asserts that "there is no easier reading" than this story of Madame de Lafayette's; "a child could understand without effort all her expressions and all her phrases. . . . Nowadays every writer is a pedant, and every style is obscure. All of us have read three or four centuries, and three or four literatures. Philosophy, science, art, criticism have weighted us with their discoveries and their jargons." This is true enough, no doubt; and one of the strange phenomenons of the nineteenth century was the sudden and enormous swelling of our vocabularies. Perhaps the distention of the dictionary is even more obvious in English than in French, for there are now three times as many human beings using the language of Shakspere as there are now using the language of Molière; and while the speakers of French are compacted in one country and take their tone from its capital, the speakers of English are scattered in the four quarters of the earth, and they use each man his own speech in his own fashion. From the wider variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be, since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at home. Perhaps the French are at times even too inhospitable to the foreign phrase. A friend of mine who came to the reading of M. Paul Bourget's Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,' fresh from the perusal of the German philosophers, told me that he was pained by M. Bourget's vain effort to express the thoughts the French author had absorbed from the Germans. It seemed as tho M. Bourget were struggling for speech, and could not say what was in his mind for lack of words in his native tongue capable of conveying his meaning. Of course it must be remembered that German philosophy is vague and fluctuating, and that the central thought is often obscured by a penumbra, while French is the most precise of languages. Those who are proud of it have declared that what is not clear is not French. When Hegel was asked by a traveler from Paris for a succinct statement of his system of philosophy, he smiled and answered that it could not be explained summarily "especially in French!" The English language extends a warmer welcome to the foreign term, and also exercises more freely its right to make a word for itself whenever one is needed. The manufactured article is not always satisfactory, but if it gets into general use, no further evidence is required that it was made to supply a genuine want. Scientist, for example, is an ugly word (altho an invention of Whewell's), and yet it was needed. How necessary it was can be seen by any reader of the late F. W. H. Myers's essay on 'Science and a Future Life,' who notes that Myers refused resolutely to use it, altho it conveys exactly the meaning the author wanted, and that the British writer preferred to employ instead the French savant, which does not - etymologically at least-contain his full intention. Myers's fastidiousness did not, however, prevent his using creationist as an adjective, and also bonism as a substitute for optimism, "with no greater barbarism in the form of the word and more accuracy in the meaning." Just as Myers used savant so Ruskin was willing to arrest the rhythm of a fine passage by the obtrusion of two French words: "A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages; may not be able to speak any but his own; may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distantest relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they hold among the national noblesse of words, at any time and in any country." There seems to be little or no excuse for the employment here of noblesse nobility; and as for canaille, perhaps Ruskin held that to be a French word on the way to become an English word - a naturalization not likely to take place without a marked modification of the original pronunciation, which is difficult for the English mouth. = Every one who loves good English cannot but have a healthy hatred for the style of a writer who insists on bespattering his pages with alien words and foreign phrases; and yet we are more tolerant, I think, toward a term taken from one of the dead languages than toward one derived from any of the living tongues. Probably the bishop who liked now and then to cite a Hebrew sen |