Scientific English: Ruminations on Dr. Johnson and Noah Webster

The English language is an extraordinarily flexible and expressive tool. French is handicapped as an international language by a much smaller vocabulary, a more rigid grammatical structure, and, above all by a controlling academy which robs it of the necessary flexibility. English has never had such a controlling body. Its development was, however, very strongly influenced by two great lexicographers, near contemporaries, both of whom finally came to recognise that it was undesirable even to attempt to pin the language down into a rigid form. Until the eighteenth century, English orthography was virtually uncontrolled – there are, just for example, six generally accepted signatures by William Shakespeare, yet he managed to spell his own name three different ways (Lewis, 1941). Vocabularies and pronunciations, and therefore spellings, varied widely in different parts of the country. Caxton, introducing his first attempt to print a book in English, tells of a merchant who landed in Kent and asked to buy eggs “and the good wyfe answred that she spoke no Frensshe.” He only succeeded when someone told him to say ‘eyren’. “Loo, what sholde a man in thyse days wryte, ‘egges’ or ‘eyren’?” (Caxton 1474). To bring some sort of order to this chaotic situation, Samuel Johnson published the first real dictionary of the English language in 1755, in London. In a conscious effort to provide an intellectual foundation for American nationalism, in 1783, in Connecticut, Noah Webster published what became The American Spelling Book, which led on, in 1806, to his Compendious Dictionary.

Of the two, Johnson is the more interesting as a character. He is probably known now mainly as the inspiration for the finest biography in the language, but I suspect that, even if Webster had found himself a Boswell, the results would be less interesting. For readers of this journal, Johnson forms a textbook example of a man of great natural abilities struggling throughout his life to overcome the recurring effects of major depression, and, most probably, Tourette's syndrome. His name should rank high in any list of famous people who have suffered from mental disorders. His own writings, notably the essays from The Rambler, were famous at the time, and are full of a sturdy, highly moralistic common sense. They are little read nowadays however, because of his ponderous, rotund, over-Latinised style. Herein lies the rub, and herein also lies the relevance to the readers of this journal. These lexicographic musings were triggered off by my having to find a reviewer, in my capacity as a section editor for Reference Reviews, for the new edition of Gladding's Counseling Dictionary. Reference Reviews, as its name might suggest, is a journal written by librarians for librarians, commenting on dictionaries, directories, encyclopaedias, handbooks, and, increasingly, web-sites used for reference purposes. Its pages are littered with studies of books on counselling and on counseling, of dictionaries of behavioral studies and of behavioural studies, of encyclopaedias and of encyclopedias, and, of course, web-sites produced both by research centres and by research centers.

Johnson was a classicist, an Oxford scholar who saw English as a language with a distinguished past, with many of its words derived from Latin, and to a lesser extent Greek. No-one knows exactly how classical Latin was pronounced (come to that, we cannot be sure exactly how Dr. Johnson's contemporaries pronounced words. Phonetic alphabets and sound recordings are both comparatively recent inventions. Listening to recordings made a century or so ago, or even to re-runs of post-war television programmes/programs and newsreels shows how rapidly the spoken language can change.) A surprising number of documents have survived from classical times, but the majority of the ancient Roman texts we possess are transcriptions and re-transcriptions by mediaeval writers who are unlikely to have considered following the original spelling exactly (Feldherr, 2010). We cannot be sure that the precise spelling as written by Caesar or Cicero has been preserved. Most of the writing we can be sure of is lapidary, and when you are writing with a chisel on a surface of marble you naturally tend to abbreviate. The dedication found at Colchester which seems to me to read: MFAVONMF.POL.FAC>LEGXX.VERECVN.VSE.NOVICUSSILB.POSVERVNT.II : H : S : E

(copied from Scollard, 1979) can only be interpreted as the tombstone of ‘Marcus Favonius Facilis, son of Marcus, of the tribe of Pollia, centurion of the twentieth legion’ by a highly skilled archaeologist, or by a teenager who has grown up with texting. Dr. Johnson was quite sure, however, and used extra letters to indicate classical origins. The superfluous ‘u's, ‘ph's, ‘ae's and ‘oe's that he cluttered the language up with have bedevilled us ever since. Many of them were not regularly used in scientific or medical writing before his time. Early chemists were just as likely to write ‘sulfur’ as they were to write ‘sulphur’. Dr. Johnson merely put the ph in to indicate a Greek origin. Those readers in the Institute of Psychiatry library who are confused by the fact that the back issues of Behaviour Research & Therapy are filed after those of Behavior Therapy now know who to blame.

Webster, by contrast, saw English as a language with an American future rather than a Latin past. His own writings I must admit to finding platitudinous and dull by comparison with Johnson. Certainly, his evasive attitude to slavery contrasts sharply with Johnson's forthright support for Lord Mansfield's judgment in Somersett's case. “Slavery is a great sin and a general calamity… but we cannot legally interfere with the South on this object… the preachers of abolitionism deserve the penitentiary” (Webster, quoted in Warfel, 1953). He wrote, however, in what is recognisably modern English. Modern vernacular English really dates from the romantic writers of the late 18th and early 19th century, under the strong influence of Rousseau. Johnson was just too old and Webster just young enough to come under Rousseau's influence. Boswell's Life of Johnson is a Rousseauesque psychological study of a very non-Rousseauish person. The spellings from Webster's dictionary are therefore not merely those of what has become, as Webster accurately foresaw, the larger and dominant nation, but are also those from just this side of a watershed in the development of the English language.

Variations in English spelling are undoubtedly a nuisance. When reviewing, just for example, the excellent New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors (Daintith and Martin 2009) it was very noticeable that, in addition to the task of cramming an enormous quantity of clearly defined information into a very small book, the editors had had to find room for a two-page appendix on variant British and American spellings, and to include entries under both forms throughout the text as well. If we had one single form of scientific English they would have been able to produce an even more compact book, or, alternatively, would have been able to pack even more useful scientific information into the same space. To ease the problems of users of the Institute of Psychiatry library, to reduce the workload of the review editor sorting out draft contributions to the Journal of Mental Health (Johnson preferred ‘draught’ but draft is one Websterism that has found a place in British English), to allow scientific dictionary compilers to give us more information for the same cost, and to reduce the workload of the compilers of computer spell checking programmes, the general acceptance of the Webster approach would, undoubtedly, increase efficiency.

And yet. And yet. Language is, more than anything else, what makes us human. Looking at different languages gives us a glimpse of other peoples' mindsets. Even in classical Latin, it is disconcerting to find that there is no way of asking a direct question (You can make a statement: “You have a choice which way to go.” You can ask a question expecting the answer yes or expecting the answer no: “You are not going to go that way are you?” but there is no direct way of saying “Which way are you going to go?”) Something like this makes one realise that other people think differently. English-speaking people are notoriously monolingual. – “If you speak three languages you are trilingual. If you only speak one you are English.” Various psychological studies have been made of the relationship between race and IQ, but I am not aware of any recent psychological attempts to match race with linguistic ability. Can this be because race scientists are worried at what they might find? A less contentious explanation is cultural. There is more and more archaeological, and very recently, DNA evidence to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Britain in the dark ages did not involve the death or displacement of the existing population (Myres, 1989). The existing inhabitants already knew two languages, ‘Celtic’ and Latin. There is ample evidence that people who already know two languages find learning a third much easier (Montrul, 2010; Psaltou & Kantaridou, 2009), while the Saxon settlers had not had any previous contact with other languages and so linguistically absorbed the existing inhabitants into a determinedly monoglottal culture.

There is some evidence that there are lifelong cognitive benefits in knowing two languages, and transitional benefits to be gained during the learning process. There are tentative suggestions that bilingual people show less cognitive decline with aging than monolinguals (Snowdon et al., 2000). Efficiency is not everything. The human brain is remarkably plastic, but this does mean that if you treat people like ants they will come to think like ants (Guha, 2009). In a society in which even, say, a supermarket manager has no flexibility to disregard instructions from ‘them’ at head office (Grugulis, 2011), the deskilling of work is making life more ant-like. “Management thinkers… spent decades telling us that the workplace of the future is a shiny high-tech grotto where people are free to exercise initiative and innovate. Yet, the reality is that innovation is imposed on staff…” (Chakrabortty, 2010). Deskilling workers may increase the efficiency of the ant nest, but there is ample evidence that it is bad for human mental health. Ants have very efficient communication systems (Holldobler & Wilson, 2008). The Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel suggested that if humanity had only one language, humans could become god-like. It is equally arguable however that they would become more ant-like. If knowing more than one language is good for human mental health, it is plausible that maintaining the quirky differences these lexicographers introduced into English may be worth retaining, if only as a tiny contribution towards keeping us human.