H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
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II. The Beginnings of American |
1. The First Differentiation |
| William Gifford, the first editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the tale that a plan was set on foot during the Revolution for the abandonment of English as the national language of America, and the substitution of Hebrew in its place. An American chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed, makes the proposed tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” 1 The story, though it has the support of the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature, 2 has an apocryphal smack; one suspects that the savagely anti-American Gifford invented it. But, true or false, it well indicates the temper of those times. The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority, whatever its character, and that hostility, in the direction of present concern to us, culminated in the revolutionary attitude of Noah Webster’s “Dissertations on the English Language,” printed in 1789. Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect. “Let us,” he said, “seize the present moment, and establish a national language as well as a national government. … |