LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

orthographic proposals than Webster’s. The primary line of demarcation was whether the existing twenty-six-letter alphabet was deemed sufficient in itself to support a rational system of spelling, or whether new characters need be introduced to refine the instrument. In 1793, a few years after Webster published his Dissertations, William Thornton proposed and devised a new thirty-character alphabet in Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language.²⁹ Even the earlier (1768) plan of Benjamin Franklin had proposed to introduce some additional characters.³⁰ Franklin’s proposal was in fact what awakened the young Webster to the necessity of spelling reform (he had earlier ridiculed any such plans), yet Webster nevertheless continued to insist that the medium of spelling remain the same Roman alphabet in which modern English was already encoded.³¹ It is telling that this is the site of the only criticism Webster leveled, with some delicacy, against Franklin—to whom he reverently dedicated Dissertations. The problem with Franklin’s “reformed alphabet,” though it solved the problem of imprecise orthography, was that it did so in an inefficient manner: “If any objection can be made to his scheme,” wrote Webster, “it is the substitution of new characters, for th, sh, ng, &c. whereas a small stroke connecting the letters, would answer all the purposes of new characters.”³² In other words, why invent new letters when one might achieve the same result through a clever reapplication of the existing ones? The idea was to retain the standard English alphabet but to make it serve American purposes.

      And this was what a reformed “mode of spelling”³³ would accomplish: not a new lexicon, not a new alphabet, but a new manner in which phonemes are made to correspond to graphemes. Webster lays out the proposed reforms (as he then envisioned them) in a separate essay which serves as the appendix to Dissertations on the English Language, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling.”³⁴ There were three pillars to his plan. First, the elimination of all silent or unvoiced letters, which serve only to widen the gulf between spelling and pronunciation. Second, the use of definite-rather than indefinite-sounding letters in spelling all words, thus correcting some of the notorious inconsistencies and absurdities in English orthoepy. The third and least often discussed proposal was to implement diacritical marks (such as existing accents, the addition of points or dots atop standard letters, or the use of ligatures to connect two letters) whenever necessary to indicate that the standard letters, whether alone or in combination, are making a new sound. In this way, “a trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel … might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the diphthong ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.”³⁵ This rather arcane bit of business is actually quite illuminating, once we read past its technical details to the principle underlying it. For, in the idea of innovation through diacritical modification—with the placing of a dot over a letter as its most elemental iteration—we find a perfect synecdoche of Webster’s entire linguistic project. The elements will remain the same; difference will be lodged in the manner of their arrangement. The modal principle underlying this position about the alphabet is the same premise that animates the whole of Webster’s proposed reforms.

      The remaining sections of this chapter systematically take up the logical dimensions and historical layers of this crucial language debate, in an effort to demonstrate its implications for the literary history that issues from it. First, I take a close look at the relationship between Johnson’s and Webster’s language projects and the reasons for their divergent approaches to orthography—reasons that turn out to do less with Revolutionary politics than with the relationship between English and other European vernaculars. I then provide much-needed historical depth to that eighteenth-century discussion about English spelling by tracing its Renaissance roots. Next, with that history in mind, it becomes possible to see how the transatlantic debates about “American language” layered colonial geopolitics and Revolutionary rhetoric atop an older argument about spelling. The chapter’s final section returns to the problem of polyglossia, considering the critical problem of “foreign”—that is, non-English—languages in Webster’s cultural imaginary.

       Dr. Johnson and Mr. Webster

      The problem of carving an authentic linguistic practice out of an obviously borrowed language had a very concrete parallel in Webster’s own intellectual labors: how, from the starting point provided by his great British precursor, would he arrive at his own American theory of English? Webster had begun his linguistic career as very much a Johnsonian, advocating only the standardization of English and hostile to any scheme of actual reform.³⁶ His break with Johnson occurs only in the late 1780s, and coincides with the increasingly nationalistic tone of Webster’s writing on language.³⁷ In this sense, the relationship he posits between the two national languages in Dissertations on the English Language is mirrored in the relationship between himself and Dr. Johnson. American English would be a version of British English, but at the same time, a variation on it; just so, Webster’s plan was explicitly derived from Johnson’s, while also deviating from it. As Webster worked out the larger problem of linguistic foreign debt, then, he was simultaneously navigating a more local problem of indebtedness.

      Samuel Johnson, “the great leviathan of lexicography,” as Mathew Carey called him,³⁸ died in 1784, the year after Webster had published his first major work, the so-called Blue-Backed Speller. And while all American reformers of English necessarily hearkened back to Johnson, no one was more deliberate in doing so than Webster. Like Johnson, Webster wanted to standardize the English language; but unlike Johnson, he didn’t believe one should look to British usage as a basis for doing so: “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.”³⁹ To put a still finer point on it, Webster warned against emulating the English of Samuel Johnson in particular, “whose pedantry has corrupted the purity of our language.”⁴⁰ In Dissertations on the English Language, “Dr. Johnson” is everywhere Webster’s foil, the object of his harshest criticisms, and the target of his most acerbic rhetoric.⁴¹ But we would do well, I think, to understand this as a measure of Webster’s anxiety of influence, rather than as a symptom of his total opposition to the Johnsonian project. Precisely by arguing so carefully for a set of “departures” from the Johnsonian model, Webster’s own linguistic project almost reduces itself to a kind of running commentary on Johnson’s dictionary. For all of his rhetoric of renovating the language, Webster defines the “new” entirely in correspondence to the “old”: American English is quite literally constituted as a re-forming of a British standard.

      Webster’s departures from Johnson’s system of spelling, then, were not animated by political hostility to the English lexicon. Far from simply aiming to “make a difference” of any kind and at any cost, each of his innovations was in fact backed by a specific rationale, and all of his proposals were united by a coherent linguistic philosophy. The most fundamental issue was whether the spelling of a word ought to proceed in agreement with its etymological origins, as Johnson believed, or according to its pronunciation, as did Webster. Their divergent theoretical convictions on this point, in turn, directly reflected the different sociolinguistic problems each lexicographer had before him. Johnson was attempting to standardize a language that had long been in use by an already existing speech community; his emphasis was on shoring up the boundaries of this community and protecting its language from corruptions in usage. Webster, on the other hand, was attempting to call a unique speech community into being through language; he thus had to devise a linguistic system perfect enough in its structure to be able, all by itself, to turn a population into a people. These entirely different social objectives inevitably shaped their linguistic policies. With regard to orthography, for example, Johnson’s emphasis dictated that he find a way to stabilize spelling in the face of what he saw as imminent chaos—a tangle of variant spellings without any agreed-upon standard. The policy at which he arrived, for complex reasons I will detail in a moment, was to ground proper spelling on the authority of precedent:

Скачать книгу