By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi There is an enduring chronocentric arrogance in our assessment of notions of qua...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
There is an enduring chronocentric arrogance in our
assessment of notions of quality all over the world. (Chronocentrism is the
false, narcissistic belief that one’s or another generation is superior to generations
that came before and/or after it). We perpetually bewail the fall in the
standards of everything, especially language, presumably from the good old days
of “our” or another time.
Every year when the West African Examination Council
releases results of “O” level exams, there is often a cornucopia of national mourning
in the media about the fall in the standard of education—and especially of
English. Several people in my generation read social media posts by younger
people and conclude that our world is in peril because we are being succeeded
by cheerfully irresponsible know-nothings.
Here in America, my professor colleagues also think the
quality of English—and of education itself—is in a frighteningly inexorable freefall,
and that the millennial generation can’t be entrusted with the future of the
world. “Nobody teaches grammar anymore” is a common refrain among
self-appointed grammar Nazis here.
But is the standard of English actually falling? Or is the
language merely changing? But, most importantly, has there been a time in the
history of the world when standards were thought to be perfect or even
adequate?
A Glimpse from the
Past
Apparently, chronocentric putdowns of the linguistic
proficiency of younger generations is as old as time itself. In his book titled
Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered, Harvey A.
Daniels tells us that there are records of pedagogical apprehensions about falling
standards of writing and grammar since more than 4,000 years ago in Sumerian,
the world’s first written language. “It seems that among the first of the clay
tablets discovered and deciphered by modern scholars was one which recorded the
agonized complaints of a Sumerian teacher about the sudden drop-off in students’
writing ability,” he wrote.
The Economist’s “Johnson”
language column of February 12, 2015 quoted the Sumerian language teacher to
have said the following about the decline in standards: “A junior scribe is too
concerned with feeding his hunger. He does not pay attention to the scribal
art.”
How about English? When did snooty scholars and teachers
start complaining about the “decline” of the language?
English has been “bad”
since the 1300s
William Langland, an English author, is probably the first
recorded chronocentric pedant to bemoan the fall in the standard of English.
The Economist quoted him as having
written, sometime in the 1300s, that, “There is not a single modern schoolboy
who can compose verses or write a decent letter.”
The paper also exhumed a quote from 1387 attributed to an
English monk and historian by the name of Ranulph Higden who thought the
English tongue was being contaminated by inelegant mixing with Norman French
and Vikings. (French people from
Normandy conquered the English in 1066 and colonized them for years,
including imposing Norman French as the official language of the country).
“By commiyxtion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes and afterward
wiþ Normans, in menye þe contray longage ys apeyred and som useþ strange
wlaffyng chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbyttyng,” he said. Of course, this
is Middle English (as English spoken from 1100 to 1450 is called), which is incomprehensible
to many Modern English speakers. Thankfully, the Economist translated it into modern English thus: “English speakers
had taken to ‘strange, articulate utterance, chattering, snarling and harsh
teeth-gnashing’, bad habits he put down to the mixing together of Anglo-Saxons,
Vikings and Norman French.”
Sociolinguists call this code-mixing, that is, the
deliberate fusion of lexical elements from two or more distinct languages in
one speech act. Interestingly, Hidgen was also guilty of the “offense” of
code-mixing that he railed against. “Commiyxtion” (commixing), for instance,
traces lexical descent from Norman French, ultimately from Latin. So do “strange”
and “contray” (“contrary”).
In 1672, famous English poet John Dryden thought everyone in
his generation spoke and wrote terrible English, which departed from the inimitable
standards left by Shakespeare and his contemporaries: “It is not their plots
which I meant, principally, to tax; I was speaking of their sense and language;
and I dare almost challenge any man to shew me a page together, which is
correct in both. … [M]alice and partiality set apart, let any man who
understands English, read diligently the works of Shakspeare and Fletcher; and
I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of
speech, or some notorious flaw in sense,” he wrote.
In the 1700s, English satirist Jonathan Swift said the
decline in the standards of English was so enormous that it warranted the
establishment of a language academy to police grammar and usage, although,
ironically, he thought French, which had (and still has) a language academy, was in a worse state
than English. “Our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements
are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; and the Pretenders to
polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that
in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar,” he wrote.
In 1762, Robert Lowth, whom the Economist called “probably the most influential English grammarian
of all time,” wrote a grammar book in which he pilloried the grammar of even
English greats like Shakespeare, John Milton, and writers of the King James
Bible. “Our best authors have committed gross mistakes, for want of a due
knowledge of English grammar,” he wrote.
In 1786, James Beattie, a Scottish poet and philosophy
professor, lamented that, “Our language is degenerating very fast.”
In 1852, Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough also tore apart
the quality of grammar and writing of his time. “Our own age is notorious for
slovenly or misdirected habits of composition,” he wrote.
English in America
Anxieties about the decline in the quality of English isn’t
limited to Britain; it also manifested early in America. A Scottish writer by
the name of Captain Thomas Hamilton who visited America in the 1800s wrote: “Unless
the present progress of change [is] arrested...there can be no doubt that, in
another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible
to an Englishman.” Nearly 200 years after, it hasn’t.
In 1879, a Harvard University professor by the name of Adams
Sherman Hill condemned “the work of even good scholars disfigured by bad
spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or
inelegant expressions.”
In a well-cited 1889 essay titled “Methods of Study in
English,” an American by the name of M. W. Smith wrote: “The vocabularies of
the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use
simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the
pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.”
In 1917, yet another
American by the name of Charles Henshaw Ward said, “From every college in the
country goes up the cry, ‘Our freshmen [i.e., first-year university students]
can't spell, can't punctuate.’ Every high school is in disrepair because its
pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.”
In a 1961 book by J. Mersand titled Attitudes toward English Teaching, we read the following: “Recent
graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of
the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence,
either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words.
Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to
almost all recent graduates.”
Finally, in a 1978 book by Arn Tibbets and Charlene Tibbets
titled What’s Happening to American English?, the following sentence appears: “The
common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the
weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and
feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in
grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense.... In the history of
modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech
has been so widespread. Nor in the past has the general idiom, on which we
depend for our very understanding of vital matters, been so seriously
distorted.”
No Golden Age
It is apparent that there has never been an age in the
history of humankind when education and language use were considered perfect,
when people didn’t have anxieties about decline in standards. This is true not
just of English but of all languages. In other words, there was never a golden
age. Nor would there ever be. So let’s stop beating ourselves up.
There have always been, and there will always be, people who
cherish and guard grammar and “proper” usage, people who are ignorant of the socially
acceptable consensus in language use, and people who intentionally transgress
conventional boundaries.
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