Welsh Journals

NATIONALISM IN LANGUAGE By THOMAS QUAYLE, M.A., D.Lrrr. AMONG the innumerable questions which the Great War has brought into prominence, the many and varied attempts to nationalise language are not the least interesting. Under the impulse of a patriotic fervour, nearly all the bellig- erent nations, at one time or another, have carefully scrutinised their spoken and written languages to discover alien and foreign words that, somehow or other, have intruded into the fold. Great Britain and France have had their spasms of this curiosity, which in Russia (to give only the best known example) has resulted in the substitution of Petro- grad" for "St. Petersburg." But perhaps it will not be thought a purely biassed or ex parte statement to mention that this tendency has been specially reduced to absurdity by the Germans. Since the beginning of the war a systematic purging of the German language has taken place in order to eject all the foreign words and phrases which, under present conditions give offence to the Prussian, the Bavarian, or the Saxon. Many of our readers will be familiar with these attempts, and with their clumsy substitutes for the English and French words which, not being able to intern, the Germans think it better to banish for ever. Not that these pro- ceedings are due entirely to the war. Years before the outbreak of hostilities, numerous Sprachvereine had been formed, the members of which strove, with characteristic lack of humour or even of good sense, to provide long lists of native, instead of foreign words, in various professions, trades, occu- pations, etc. Especially against English nautical terms was this campaign directed. It was humiliat- ing, we may suppose, to the amour propre of the German people, that their great navy and mercantile marine was not only obliged to sail the seas by courtesy of the British coaling stations, but when doing so, found themselves forced to make use of words and phrases imported into the German language from English. This question of nationalism in language thus has its amusing aspect, but it has also its serious side, well worthy of consideration. The matter was well and adequately discussed nearly thirty years ago by A. Noreen, who in 1888 published a pamphlet entitled Om Sprakriklighet, of which a German translation appeared soon after in the Indogerman- ische Forschtmgen. Practically the whole of this suggestive treatment of the subject was given as an Appendix to Breal's Semantique (Paris, 1897), as translated and edited by Professor Postgate three years later. It may, therefore, be of interest to recapitulate, enforce, and illustrate the main points of Noreen's thesis, in view of the protests to be heard from time to time against the incorporation of English words into the Welsh language, as well as the proposed attempts to keep the latter tongue as pure as possible. To begin with, an impartial statement of the case by those who raise the question from a purely national standpoint is scarcely possible. Despite all en- deavours to be scientific and impartial, national traditions and prejudices prove too strong, and the inevitable verdict is that one's own language is best and supreme in every respect. But this question, like every other, has two extreme points, between which the truth must somewhere lie. First of all, there is the ideal of a pure language, depending entirely on its own resources, and rejecting or expelling all words that are not native born. The purists triumphantly denounce a borrowing language as reflecting a lack of imagination, and feebleness of mental activity, in the people who speak it. Otherwise they would be able to coin or find home-made words for new conceptions and inventions. Such people have no speech feeling," or at least they make a parade of foreign culture in the form of borrowed terms. The purists especially advocate the use of native compounds for abstract ideas, since it would render these lofty terms and phrases familiar to even the unlearned, and would admit them more and more to the heritage of modern thought. They insist, moreover, on the higher expressive powers of native words, racy as they are of the soil which has given them birth. Moreover, such words have inherent value as historical and patriotic documents. They carry with them something of the race history of the people who speak them: they are, as it were, torch-bearers that hand on the light of past and dying civilisation to the present, and thus help to prepare the way for the future. There is not the slightest doubt that many minds are sensitive to a language in which all the words are products of the same soil and have an air of familiarity and kinship. In the expression of generous sentiments and weighty thoughts, this pleasure may often become a very keen one. The greater the literary past of a nation, the more does the need of remaining in contact with those who have gone before impress itself as a duty, as a condition of dignity and strength,. It is from such feelings that there has arisen the idea and