The Problem of a Common Language

MR. ROBERT BIKLEY, in his third Reith broadcast, culminating in a call for an International language and selecting French as the most probable choice (Spanish used to be the favorite), has gone very faithfully and competently over all the ground that has been surveyed again and again for a hundred years past without making any effective impression on either the public or the education authorities. It was all said by Alexander J. Ellis in his century-old book. I am old enough to have heard him lecture, in his velvet skull cap, for which he always apologised. After pleading his phonetic brief he read Shakespear with Shakespear‘s pronunciation just as Mr. Coghill now reads Chaucer. Since Ellis, we have had Pitman and Sweet, Yolapuk and Esperanto, and no end of phonetic alphabets and shorthand systems; but we are still entangled in Johnson’s absurd etymological bad spelling, wasting years of our lives in writing the single sounds of our language with two, three, four, five letters or more, and turning our children out of our elementary schools after nine years’ daily instruction unable to speak or write English well enough to qualify them for clerical or professional appointments. All our phonetic propaganda is sterilised by the dread that the cost of the change would be colossal.

As a matter of fact, it is the cost of Johnsonese that is colossal: so colossal that it is beyond the comprehension of our authorities. Mr. Birley may argue until Doomsday for an international language, and plump for French as the best; but no authority will pay any serious attention until he puts the case into figures, and concentrates on labor saving as the only consideration that will cut any ice. The choice between French and English may turn on the fact that in French the very common word shall is spelt with eight letters and in English with five, of which one is superfluous. To appreciate this difference we must begin with the cost in time and labor of writing one alphabetic letter.

Take the word debt. Spell it det; and write it over and over again for a minute. Then do the same spelling it debt. The difference between the number of times you have written det and debt gives you the difference in lime and labor between writing one letter of the alphabet and two.

If, like some of our spelling reformers and phoneticians, you are mathematically silly enough to play the old trick of disguising this difference as a percentage, you will get a figure too small to impress anybody. A percentage may mean a halfpenny or a million pounds sterling, a fraction of a second or a thousand eons, a parish council or a world federation. Keep to the facts. The first fact is that the difference you have counted is a difference per minute. It will prove to be 12 seconds. Therefore, as there are 365 days in the year, the difference is 73 days per individual scribe per year.

How many scribes are there? As the English language goes round the earth, the sun never setting on it, it is impossible to ascertain exactly how many people are writing it, not for one minute as an experiment, but all the time incessantly and perpetually. No matter: a big cross section will be just as conclusive. In the British Commonwealth and the United States of North America there are more than 270,000,000 born writers and speakers of English. Of these the proportion of authors, journalists, clerks, accountants, scholars, private correspondents and others writing continually and simultaneously all round the clock may safely be taken as one in every hundred, making 2,700,000. Multiply this figure by the 73 days. The answer is that every year in the cross section alone we are wasting 540,000 years of time and labor which we could save by spelling English phonetically enough for all practical purposes, adding to the Johnsonese alphabet fourteen letters, all of which can be borrowed provisionally from the stocks now held by our printers for selling up foreign and classical grammars, algebras, and the like.

I have left India, Pakistan, and Ceylon out of the calculation with their 400,000,000, whose dozen dialects are giving way to English. They would make the figures too enormous to be credible. One could only laugh. Enough to note that there is no industrial company on earth that would not scrap and replace all its plant, at whatever cost, to save in cost of production a fraction of such magnitudes. In the face of them it is folly to prattle vainly for the thousandth time about universal languages, teaching children to read, standard pronunciation, and the rest of the argy-bargy our phoneticians keep regurgitating.

It is Johnsonese that we cannot afford, not a forty-letter alphabet. For more than seventy years I have written books, plays, articles, and private letters, in legible phonetics, and thereby added at least two months every year to my productive lifetime as compared to Shakespear and Dickens, who had to write their works in longhand, though Dickens was an adept in reporting shorthand, which is unreadable by printers and typists.

I do not pretend to know what language will become international, though I agree with Mr. Birlcy that it will not be an artificial one. The fittest will survive. My guess is Pidgin English, the lingua franca of the Chinese coolie, the Australian black boy, and the traders and seafarers who employ them. It gets rid of the incubus of much useless grammar. In commercial Johnsonese we write “I regret to have to inform you that it is not possible for me to entertain the proposal in your esteemed letter.” In Pidgin this is “Sorry no can.” Pidgin, spoken or phonetically spelt, is a labor saving device which leaves the harvester, the internal combustion engine, and the telephone nowhere.

The case of children learning to read is an overworked bugbear. Children learn to read and write by sight, not by sound. Those who have deficient visual memory spell phonetically and sign with a mark. Blind children read by touch, deaf ones lip read. I cannot remember any time when a page of print was unintelligible to me; so I can hardly have suffered much when learning.

Children should be taught to spell phonetically, and corrected only when their spelling betrays a mispronunciation, which for the present may be taken to mean a departure from the usage of Mr. Hibberd, chief announcer to the British Broadcasting Corporation. His vowels are much more representative and agreeable than those common to the University of Oxford and the Isle of Dogs.

A cockney who pronounces French in the accent of Stratford-atte-Bowe is actually more intelligible in France than the phonetic virtuoso who pronounces all but perfectly, barely a hundredth of every vowel being off the mark. The foreigner whose school taught English is excellent the day he arrives here speaks broken English after a year‘s residence, finding it quite sufficient for his purposes and an innocent, amusement for his neighbors. All teachers should bear in mind that better is the enemy of good enough, and perfection not possible on any terms. Language need not and should not be taught beyond the point at which the speaker is understood. Not five minutes should be wasted in teaching a chauffeur who says “Them hills is very deceiving to say I hose mountain gorges are very deceptive.” An English child who says “I thinked” or “I buyed” is just as intelligible as an adult who say’s “I thought” or “I bought.”

We say that I ime is Money. It is civilization, art, literature, leisure, pleasure: in short, life more abundant.