Levende Talen. Jaargang 1932

Monosyllabism in English.
By Otto Jespersen, Proceedings of the British Academy. Volume XIV. London. Humphrey Milford. 2s. net.¹⁾

This lecture was delivered by the author as the Biennial Lecture on English Philology for the British Academy in 1928. I am not aware of any similar publication for any preceding or following year, but is satisfactory to find that the British Academy is prepared to support the interests of English philology if the men to represent it worthily are forthcoming. The appointment of Professor Jespersen also shows that the selection will not be restricted by considerations that are not in accordance with the international character of the study of English linguistics, if we may be allowed to use a term that is essentially absurd. For it needs no demonstration that there is no real English linguistics: there is linguistics only.

The truth of this is well illustrated by the essay that the author of the Modern English Grammar offers us here as a parergon. It is not a serried argument in defence of a new idea; it is rather a collection of observations to which his comparison of English and Chinese has led him. The study of Chinese is unfortunately not a common one among students of English and the lecturer does not claim a deeper knowledge of Chinese than has been supplied by the booklet, perhaps rather brochure, of Bernhard Karlgren in the Cambridge series of the World's Manuals (1923). The little book by Karlgren is undoubtedly interesting and instructive as well as authoritative; it is stimulating, too, as has recently been shown in our own country as well, if with less satisfactory results. Some of my readers may have noticed the extraordinary series of newspaper articles by Dr. van Ginneken,

1) Deze bespreking was oorspronkelik voor een ander blad bestemd: vandaar het gebruik van een vreemde taal, hetgeen de lezers naar ik hoop, zullen verontschuldigen.

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in defence of an international common language on the model of the Chinese ideographic system, combined in a way that may be clear to the author himself, but hardly to anybody else, with a defence of the antiquarian system of spelling that is current in Holland, or rather an attack on the reforms that have been proposed and practically found workable for many years. The effect of the little book on the mind of the Danish student of English seems to me more satisfactory. Jespersen compares English and Chinese with respect to the use both make of words of one syllabe. He shows that a goodly number of English monosyllables are the result of phonetic changes, phonetic decay as it used to be called; progress, as Jespersen is fond of considering it. The great difference between the two languages that is emphasized by Karlgren is the character of Chinese final sounds: these are always vowels or nasals. The result is that the number of monosyllables is far more restricted in Chinese than in English, which, it is unnecessary to do more than mention here, does not employ monosyllabic words to the exclusion of longer ones. The phonetic character of Chinese syllables (i.e. words) leads inevitably to homonyms, of which Karlgren gives some extraordinary illustrations. Both Karlgren and Jespersen discuss the difficulty in Chinese of these numberless homonyms as a means of expressing one's thoughts unmistakably. Jespersen is inclined to argue that English is superior to Chinese because it has an incalculably greater number of syllables owing to the existence in English of final stopped and open consonants and final consonant-groups. He even attempts to make a calculation of the number of syllables that are possible in English, and thinks that the ‘danger of ambiguity’ on this account is ‘not very considerable.’ I should prefer to put it more strongly: there is no real risk of ambiguity in English at all: any normal person knows perfectly well when he hears the sound-groups [ə bɛər ɑm] that it must mean a bare arm, and that it cannot refer to a bear, for this word if used attributively would take the suffix -s, without counting the undoubted fact that anybody would know whether the subject of the communication concerned a bear or not. This danger of ambiguity is supposed to be greater in Chinese: I don't believe that it is. And the reason is not my knowledge of Chinese, but partly the facts adduced by Karlgren, who explains that modern spoken Chinese has expedients to ex-

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press a meaning clearly in spite of the numerous homonyms. It is not necessary here to go into this question, because the reader who is interested in it can be referred to Karlgren; but I wish to observe that the fear of ambiguity is misplaced: Language is too much of a social institution for any ambiguity to be bearable. We may say that there can be no ambiguity on any considerable scale in any language because it could not serve its primary function if there were. The observation made long ago by Tobler (Vermischte Beiträge II² p. 147) seems to sum up the question completely: Man könnte auf die mehrdeutigkeit hinweisen wollen, die sich ergeben würde, wenn es gestattet sein sollte in die verbalform auch den zweiten sinn zu legen. Aber einmal brauchen verständige menschen, die sich an verständige menschen wenden, überhaupt nicht gar so ängstlich for der möglichkeit einer misdeutung sich zu hüten,...’ In this connection I venture to express my opinion that the arguments in the late Henry Bradley's much overpraised essay on the Relations of the Written and the Spoken Language are essentially based on the theory that we are all living in an asylum, and this the world, even in its present state, surely is not. It will be seen that Jespersen's essay supplies students with food for thought, even if one refuses to accept his view that English is superior to Chinese or any other language, and is rather inclined to the theory that language is always adequate to the mental achievements of its speakers, in other words, that every group of speakers of a definite language have as perfect a language as they have any use for.

e. kruisinga.