Chapter I: Front Matter

PARTS OF SPEECH

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH

_Books by Brander Matthews_:

ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS

French Dramatists of the 19th Century

Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less importance

Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays

The Historical Novel, and other Essays

Parts of Speech, Essays on English

The Development of the Drama (_in preparation_)

PARTS OF SPEECH

ESSAYS ON ENGLISH

BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS
PROFESSOR IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901

Copyright, 1901, by
BRANDER MATTHEWS

_Published September, 1901_

THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.

TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE
GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION
IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

PREFATORY NOTE

Altho the various essays which are now brought together in this book have been written from time to time during the past ten years, nearly all of them have had their origin in a desire to make plain and to emphasize one fact: that the English language belongs to the peoples who speak it--that it is their own precious possession, to deal with at their pleasure and at their peril. The fact itself ought to be obvious enough to all of us; and yet there would be no difficulty in showing that it is not everywhere accepted. Perhaps the best way to present it so clearly that it cannot be rejected is to draw attention to some of its implications; and this is what has been attempted in one or another of these separate papers.

The point of view from which the English language has been approached is that of the man of letters rather than that of the professed expert in linguistics. But the writer ventures to hope that the professed expert, even tho he discovers little that is new in these pages, will find also little that demands his disapproval. The final essay is frankly more literary than linguistic, for it is an attempt to define not so much a word as a thing.

So wise a critic of literature and of language as Sainte-Beuve has declared that “orthography is like society: it will never be entirely reformed; but we can at least make it less vicious.” In this sensible saying is the warrant for the simplified spellings adopted in the following pages. As will be seen by readers of the two papers on our orthography, the writer is by no means a radical “spelling-reformer,” so called. But he believes that all of us who wish to keep the English language up to its topmost efficiency are bound always to do all in our power to aid the tendency toward simplification--whether of orthography or of syntax--which has been at work unceasingly ever since the language came into existence.

B. M.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
July 4, 1901.

_CONTENTS_

PAGE

I _The Stock that Speaks the Language_ 3

II _The Future of the Language_ 29

III _The English Language in the United States_ 47

IV _The Language in Great Britain_ 81

V _Americanisms Once More_ 97

VI _New Words and Old_ 127

VII _The Naturalization of Foreign Words_ 165

VIII _The Function of Slang_ 187

IX _Questions of Usage_ 217

X _An Inquiry as to Rime_ 241

XI _On the Poetry of Place-Names_ 271

XII _As to “American Spelling”_ 295

XIII _The Simplification of English Spelling_ 319

XIV _Americanism--An Attempt at a Definition_ 343