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JACQUES
BARZUN
Vhat If-? English aers//.,
Germaru and French
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asked what I think wouid have happened if our national
language were German instead of English. My first impulse is
to retort: 'Why, isn't it German?' I think of the thick layers of
abstract jargon we carry on top of our heads, of the incessant
urge to rename everything in roundabout phrases (Personal
Armor System
:
the new army helmet), of the piling up of
modifiers before the noun (easy-to-store safety folding ironing
board), of the evil passion for agglutinating half-baked ideas into
single terms (surpriTathon :
advertising goods by lottery) and I
can only grudgingly concede: 'True, it isn't German, but some
of it is more German than English.'
Had the Pilger Fathers brought with them the pure Platt-
deutsch of their time, all might have been well. After separation
from its source and under stress of the hard frontier 1ife, the lan-
guage would have melted and clarified like butter, lost its twisted
shapes and hard corners, and become a model of lucidity and
force.
\/hat
only the greatest German writers-Goethe, Schop-
enhauer, Nietzsche, and a few others-managed to do by main
strength in their prose would have been done anonymously by
everybody in Massachusetts and in the wagofls crossing the
plains. Tough characters like Thoreau, Lincoln, Mark Twain,
and Ambrose Bierce would not have tolerated the stacking of
ciause within clause of yard-long words, uncaring whether
meaning comes out at the other end. They were articulzte beings
and they articulated therr thoughts-as we are doing less and less
every day.
For on our former, flexible and
.clear
Anglo-Latin-French,
which we call merican English, the berwltigend academic
fog has descended and we grope about, our minds damp and
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JCQUE,S
BARZUN
moving in circles. Similar forms of the blight have struck the
other languages of Testern civilization, with the inevitable result
of a growing inability to think sharp and straight about any-
thing-whence half our'prahblems'.
Had the good forthright people who built this country in the
last century met this verbal miasma on landing here, they would
have either perished soon from suffocation or made tracks for
the open ai of Canada, which would now number zro million.
Make no mistake: syntax can change the course of history.
English has a great advantage over German, on the one hand,
French and the rest of the Romance languages, on the other, in
that it possesses two vocabularies, neady parailel, which carry
the tespective suggestions of abstract and concrete, formal and
vernacular. A writer can say concede or giue in; assume or take ap;
deliuer or hand ouer; insert ot
?ilt
in; retreat or
fall
back; a shop in
New York can evefl call inself 'Motherhood Maternity'. The two
series of terms are not complete, and the connotations of a word
in either set must be heeded before it can be used as a substitute
for its first cousin, but the existence of the quasi duplicate makes
for a wide range of c_g.!"S{$r"g
i"A -q"tyJe
and nu-an-c-el'iq
.!bS"gh1
Only a mechan-ical mind believes that the so-called Anglo-Saxon
derivatiyes should always be preferred, and only the starched and
stilted wiil persistently fall into the Latinate.
In contrast, the corresponding words in German always show
their concrete origins: Erupfndung means perception, but whereas
the English wotd conceals the Latin take (capete), the German
keeps in plain sight the
fnd
(come upon). Similarly, Gelegenheit
(occasion) has lie in it; abrichten (adjust) has straight; Verltltnis
(proportion) has hold; Entwarf (project) has throw, and so on. All
the everyday words reappear in the compounds. Not merely the
associations of these words but their uses and contexts are in-
fluenced by this 'open plumbing': the abstract idea has not been
fully abstracted away.
French, having lost much of its brisk medieval vocabulary
during the Latinizing vogue of the Renaissance, has been left
with very formal-sounding words for everyday use-for example
comestible and connmmation for cases in which we would say
food
and drink. The reason why American and English tourists think
that French hotel porters are highly educated is that they say
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JACQUES
BARZUN
JCQLTES
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'41
body is inclined to belittle English for its mongrel characteri"d
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'illogicaiities', let him remember the limitations of its rivals:
'W'e
are Lrcky to have, in
James's
words, a language 'with all the
modern improvements'.
,984
such things as: Monsieur est ttatina{ vous allez a'a spectacle; 1l
setait pruienl de prendre un imperm'eable; c'est un indigine; oui, la
repr'esiatation est int(tgrale-and, so on. The truth is, no other
*ords are avallable
1"*..pt
,lrt g), and all these 'learned' terms
are the famiiiar ones,
iust
,.-ili" highfuhtin emergen4T in English
ts the oniy \riay to refer to a very commonplace event'
The reiults-of these contrasting developments in the leading
languages of the
\West
go beyond differences of style; they may
plalsib'iy be held responsible for tendencies of thought' Thus,
itr." pt ilosophy stopped being written in Latin, the English
school that
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*rt the Empiricist-thinkers who believed in
the primacy of tltings: ideas vzere viewed as coming from obiects
in the world concreteiy felt. In French philosophy, notions came
first: abstract words breed generalities at once, and the realm of
thought is then seen as cut off from the world of things, the
minJfrom the body. See M. Descartes. The historians Tocque-
vi11e and Taine thought that some of the greatest errors of the
French Revolution were due to unconscious and misplaced
abstraction.
By the same token, the French language has a reputation-
whoiiy undeserved-for being the most iogical of all. For three
hundied years Ftench wtiters have tepeated this myth in good
faith, because the act of fltting together abstract, generalizing
terms lends a geometrical aspect to the product. But French
gf^fnmar and osage and spelling are full of iilogicalities-1ike
those of other languages.
As for Getman, its iumpy compounds and awkvrard syfltax
present a paradox. There is a sense in which a fotmal German
,.rrr.rr.. delivers its core meaning three times over-once in the
root of the verb, again in the noun, and finally in the adiectives
or adverbs almost l*ryt tacked on to those other terms' One
might therefore have expected that German thought would be
peJuiiarly down-to-earthl yet everybody knows that is has been
peculiarly cloudy. The probable explanation is that the words
ihat have to be used fot abstract ideas (like Vorstellang-'pttt
before') acquire the abstract quality while keeping visible their
original concreteness. This double aspect makes the user con-
fident that he is on solid ground. The upshot is the German aca'
demic prose that made l(ierkegaard, Nietzsche, and William
James
lear their hair (Eigenesbaarsichauslupflickenplage)'
If any-
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