MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
EVER since Mr. Churchill made his famous allocution at Harvard the newspapers have been full of correspondence and articles on the subject of -Basic English. I do not feel that the
general attitude adopted shows any very deep or serious acquaintance with the purposes and principles of Basic, or any fair recognition of the intelligence and good sense which has inspired the inventors of this most ingenious system. Many writer have, in fact, rendered it clear that they have no conception at all of the objects for which Basic has been invented and elaborated by a long process of trial and error. Professor C. K. Ogden, who would seem to be as indifferent to injustice as he is to publicity, has maintained a dignified silence in the face of deep and constant provocation ; his reserve is an honour to Cambridge and a reproach to other and less reticent benefactors of mankind. For Professor Ogden has been criticised for degrading the English language and for reducing the high style of Burke or Macaulay to the proportions of a washing- book. Basic, however, is not intended to be a literary language : it is intended, as its name implies, to be a convenient medium of expression in the practical areas of intercourse. It sets out to provide the world with a lingua franca which will enable nation to speak unto nation, not in terms of rhetoric or poetry, but in terms of everyday life. The true criticisms of Basic are, in fact, different from those which have generally been adduced. It might be ques- tioned, for instance, whether our rough English tongue does in fact provide the best matrix from which to create an international lan- guage. Although the grammar and syntax of English does offer special chances of simplification, our spelling and pronunciation are as unteachable and as unlearnable as those of Chinese. This would have been a most valid criticism if made fifty years ago. In the present age of wireless and gramophone it should be possible to secure that from Shanghai to Cartagena the 85o words of Basic are properly pronounced.
A more valid criticism is made by those who contend that, although it may well be that the Javanese and the Bantu will easily acquire the neat tools of Basic, the English-speaking peoples will not them- selves take the trouble to remember when they are-speaking Basic and when they are not. Thus, although the Australian may well understand the carefully uttered Basic of the Solomon Islanders, the islanders will not for one moment understand what the Australian replies. Some such confusion may, of course, result. Yet this dis- advantage is as nothing compared -to the immense benefit which would accrue were the world to possess a language which is easily mastered and rapidly learnt, and which will, by wireless and special basic newspapers, become in the course of three or four generations a common basis of communication between the peoples of the earth. A further criticism, which possesses some validity, is that English, being an imprecise language, is not really suited to serve, even in a simplified form, as a lingua franca. The general currency which Latin enjoyed in the Middle Ages, and French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was due, it is averred, to the fact that these two languages were in their very nature languages of extreme pre- cision. There is something in this criticism, and there is no doubt that the French language, which, as Andre Gide remarks, is a " piano without pedals," was a valuable medium of diplomatic intercourse owing to its careful avoidance of emotional undertones. French words have an outline as sharp as that of a minted coin ; English words float like jelly-fish upon a sea of association.
What irritates me about the criticisms which I have been reading recently is the assumption that the English language is something static and venerable, which must not be vulgarised by foreign im- portations or diminished by over-simplification. Such critics ignore
entirely the bastard origins of our mother tongue, and forget that the English language is the most vigorous and lively mongrel that there has ever been. I am prepared to believe that many centuries before the dawn of history the Aryans who settled in the Dnieper bend, spreading throughout the world from Kharkov or Zaporozhe, did possess some parent tongue from which all the Indo-European languages are derived. This fact, or this assumption, does not however give me any sense of heredity. I am prepared to believe that, but for a series of extraordinary adventures, the English language might have remained no more than a Frisian dialect and that we should all today be speaking Platt Deutsch.. I recognise that there must have been some innate vitality about the dialect of the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles which resisted the intrusion of Celtic and Roman words. It is in truth a riddle, which no philologist whom I have met can explain, how it came that only a mere handful of Celtic or Roman words crept int&the language. I do not understand at all why it was that Old English stood out against the Latin language and then collapsed so completely under the Norman invasion. Even among the few Roman words which we have, many drifted into England from the Continent even before Caesar's landing, and many more came afterwards with the Christian missionaries. Nor is it anything but strange that so few Scandinavian words (" take " is one of them) should have been imposed, upon us by the Danish occupation.
It might be possible, I suppose, to deduce from the plucky manner in which Old English rejected foreign importations the theory that it possessed an Aryan purity which even Hitler must admire. Such an argument, however, possesses only an archaeological relevance, since when we did surrender to the Norman invasion we surrendered almost completely. It is this glorious mixture of the King's or Court English withIke English of the peasant which gives to our lovely language a dualtiritonation which few other languages possess. We have been able to acclimatise the Norman words to a degree which the Germans have never mastered. The many French words which have been incorporated in the German language retain their foreign ring. German nationalists, and the Emperor. William among them, have struggled hard to eject these foreign bodies from their native tongue, and have resorted to such foolish devices as to call mayonnaise sauce " Eittmke " or " egg-dip." Even in this country there have been some eccentrics who have asked us to call an omnibus a " folkwain." But the great river of the English language has rolled on in its majestic course, deriving not vigour only, but actual beauty, from the fusion of the Saxon and the Norman streams. And often in the grandest passages of English poetry and rhetoric (" Never in the long history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few "—" Of one who loved not wisely but too well ") we find that it is in the mingling of the two strains which produces so English an effect. Since through the Norman eloquence pierces the sharp Saxon smell of the soil.
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If we remember the mixed origins of our language, if we realise the strength and beauty which comes from the dual tone, we shall not regard our native tongue as some static and venerable monument which must be preserved unchanged by the touch of the profane. Let us welcome words such as " blitz " and " strafe " ; let us not boggle pedantically over the inaccuracy of " morale " ; and let us, for the health of our minds, read daily a passage from Fowler's great book on English Usage. And if we come to regard our language as a living and not as a dead tongue, then we shall not apply pedantic or archaeological criticisms to 'an ingenious, sincere and most intelligent invention such as Ogden's Basic English.
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