Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1889 — THE ENGLISH LANQUAGE. [ARTICLE]

THE ENGLISH LANQUAGE.

Badly Written end Spoken by Educated People. English men of letters are perpetual* ly scolding andl nagging at one another for speaking and writing bad English, or for prodoudeing it erroneously, and the fault-finders make, as a rule, as many mistakes as do the writers and speakers whom they profess to correct And then step in, forsooth, the Americans, clad from top to toe in the shining armor of self-confi-dence, and they airly tell us that we know not how to speak or proaounce ' our own language, and that to mend our ways we should take lessons of Bostonites or the Dutch-Irish-English and altogether cosmopolitan people of New York. We may needs wince a little under these strictures,' for our [ withers are not by any means un wrung, and to the ear of a foreigner who has made only a literary study of English it' is certain that our pronunciation, or rather our many and discordant methods of pronunciation, must appear illogical and very ludicrous. It is not alone clergymen who drawl the church service and mumble their sermons; it is not alone school children who are taught to read in monotonous sing-song; it is not alone young ladies who, through affection, lisp or mince , their words; but it is the great body of the English people—aye, of educated. . English poople—who habitually stammer before they can find the word, who rarely pronounce their final consonant, who slur and shuffle their syllables into one another,. who almost invariably put the wrong emphasis on the chief members of a phrase, and who, if they do not absolutely chew and swallow the ends of their vocables, as the ' lern Greeks do, utter them in such . disjointed and slip-shod f ishion as to make them more than half unintelligible to the foreign ear. This is why it may be quite feasible for a Frenchman to live seventeen years in England without being able to understand English.—London Telegraph.