Читать книгу Literature, American Style - Ezra Tawil - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

To Form a More Perfect Language

Noah Webster’s American-Style English

Purity of style consists in the use of such words, and such constructions, as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak; in opposition to words and phrases that are taken from other languages, or that are ungrammatical, obsolete, new-coined, or used without proper authority…. The introduction of foreign and learned words, unless where necessity requires them, should never be admitted into our composition. Barren languages may need such assistance, but ours is not one of these. A multitude of Latin words, in particular, have, of late, been poured in upon our language. On some occasions, they give an appearance of elevation and dignity to style; but they often render it stiff and apparently forced. In general, a plain, native style, is more intelligible to all readers; and, by a proper management of words, it can be made as strong and expressive as this Latinised English, or any foreign idioms.

—Lindley Murray, English Grammar

Making a Difference

In the late 1780s, Noah Webster began to represent national linguistic distinction both as an aspirational goal and as an historical inevitability in North America: “Whatever predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues, and particularly the British descendants for the English, yet several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English, necessary and unavoidable.”¹ On the one hand, “unavoidable”: linguistic differentiation was a future certainty. On the other hand, “necessary”: it was imperative that Americans somehow catalyze that ineluctable process and ensure that it unfolds in a properly regulated fashion. In his seminal treatment of American English, David Simpson identifies Noah Webster as the foremost of the first wave of “linguistic pioneers” of a recognizably American English that would not really exist until around 1850.² For all of that, Webster did not set out to create a new vernacular or even a distinct dialect of English; his reforms focused on the creation of what Simpson calls a new “linguistic practice, if not quite a language.”³ Webster’s boldest and most counterintuitive idea was that the abstract problem of forming a new national cultural identity might find a strangely concrete and technical solution: this broad social transformation could be accomplished merely by inventing a new system of English spelling. A few simple alterations in orthography would change everything. “This will startle those who have not attended to the subject,” he granted, but the institution of such seemingly humble linguistic reforms was in reality “an object of vast political consequence.”⁴ Its “capital advantage,” simply put, would be to “make a difference between the English orthography and the American.”⁵

But why spelling? Of all the ways to approach language reform and all the realms of linguistic practice one could target, why focus on orthography? It was not just that new spellings were a clearly visible and immediately apprehensible way to “make a difference” between American and British English. There was a more fundamental reason that it had to be orthographic reform. Spelling represented change at the right level of the language: it was not merely superficial, and yet it was not deeply substantial. Spelling reform went to work at this middle register between surface and depth, form and content. To change “the mode of spelling”:⁶ something of this order was literally required by the nature of Webster’s national linguistic project. Once he committed to modifying the existing English language rather than building a new one from the ground up, Webster had to find a way to alter the manner in which the language was used, without discarding the actual materials of that language. What was needed, in short, was a modal change.

This is why a book about “style” as the anchoring concept of American literary exceptionalism might begin with Webster, who was not a literary figure but a language reformer—and not even the most innovative one of his time. For the modal logic at which Webster arrived is the linguistic analogue of the concept of literary style. In each case, something borrowed is said to have been rearticulated as something new. Webster’s technical solution to the problem of American English—though we might do better to call it “American-style English,” by analogy with American-style democracy or Soviet-style socialism—thus put into circulation a set of critical concepts about the nature of transatlantic emulation-cum-innovation that literary producers would need to describe their own sense of the relationship between English literary culture and its American imitations.

* * *

Because Webster called so powerfully for “the Americans” to manufacture linguistic distance from “their parent country,”⁷ he has long been a symbol of the so-called cultural declaration of independence supposed to have begun around the end of the eighteenth century.⁸ One quotation from his 1783 letter to John Canfield, for example, has become ubiquitous in scholarly and popular writing about the period: “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”⁹ As for his linguistic works of the late 1780s—most notably Dissertations on the English Language along with its oft-quoted appendix, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling”—they, too, are easily mined for such stirring cultural-nationalist declarations.¹⁰ Webster has thus become a poster boy for the brand of nationalism associated with what I have called the “Anglophobia thesis” in historiography, with all of its oedipal undertones. After all, was not his cry for the “separation of the American tongue from the English” just such a revolt against paternal law at the level of language itself? Did not his system of spelling add up to a declaration of “orthographic independence” (as Jill Lepore calls it)?¹¹ David Simpson, having some fun with this same revolutionary analogy, quips that “it was to prove more difficult to declare independence from Samuel Johnson than it had been to reject George III.”¹² Yet we must guard against the presumption, however playfully expressed in these cases, that linguistic “independence” was ever Webster’s goal to begin with.

To be sure, Webster’s linguistic project was entirely of its political and cultural time and place. The 1780s was the decade in which “American English” first emerged as a cultural question that demanded some accounting and theorization.¹³ In 1781, the Scottish American educator John Witherspoon first coined the term “Americanism”—by analogy to the existing term “Scotticism”—to refer to the linguistic departures from the British standard that were starting to proliferate in North America.¹⁴ In 1782, Robert Ross produced an American Grammar, followed in 1785 by his New American Spelling Book.¹⁵ The timing of all this is surely no coincidence. The ongoing military conflict with Britain at the turn of the decade had lent the matter of American English cultural and political charge; after the formal declaration of peace in 1783 it came to seem even more urgent; and the question was simply unavoidable after the establishment of the federal government of the United States in 1787. In 1788, Benjamin Rush laid out a “Plan for a Federal University” in which he emphasized the central importance of “philology” as a subject for the new nation: “our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage, and the pulpits of Great-Britain, from whence we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of stile in the United States.”¹⁶ That same year, the Philological Society of New York was formed “for the purpose of ascertaining and improving the American Tongue.”¹⁷ From the federal to the local, then, this question seemed to be everywhere at the end of the 1780s. Webster’s own work was thus perfectly suited to, and clearly shaped by, this milieu. In 1787, Webster tellingly renamed part one of his earlier Grammatical Institute of the English Language from its former title, An Accurate Standard of Pronunciation (as he had called it in 1783), to the American Spelling Book, thus rebranding it along the lines of the nationalist spellers of Ross and others.¹⁸ And while (as I will emphasize in this chapter) his proposed linguistic reforms were guided by a coherent linguistic philosophy, at times his rhetoric suggested that it was merely the production of “difference”—perhaps any difference at all—that was paramount: “As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language, even were the plan proposed perfectly unexceptionable.”¹⁹

What else would we want to call this, then, if not a linguistic declaration of independence? It is an understandable temptation, but as I shall insist in the pages that follow, a more careful consideration of Webster’s plan, its fuller contemporary context, and its historical predecessors tells a rather different story. Certainly his writing is full of highly quotable nationalist slogans, but the arguments in which these declarations are embedded are far less Anglophobic and far more deferential to transatlantic cultural authority than is commonly acknowledged. The trick is not to mistake slogans for theses. Particularly in the 1780s, the young Webster was not at all shy about cranking up the rhetorical winch when he wanted a point to hold maximum tension. Rhetorical bravado aside, however, Webster’s project for linguistic reform was ultimately animated not by static nationalist oppositions but by a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation. Webster’s invectives against “our rage for imitating the errors of foreigners,”²⁰ for example, may appear to be motivated by a revolutionary animus against British models as a bar to national originality—and it may even be fair to say that Webster himself was invoking and manipulating that animus for rhetorical purposes—but as I will demonstrate, he understood transatlantic emulation as such to be a neutral and inevitable fact of American life. Anglo-Americans simply needed to ensure that they imitated the proper models, and imitated those models properly. Once we begin to take account of these complexities, Webster’s linguistic project begins to look less like post-Revolutionary cultural nationalism par excellence and more like a layering of post-Revolutionary rhetoric atop a much older problem of standardizing English spelling. By returning Webster’s argument to the context of transatlantic debates about language and grammar in the second half of the eighteenth century, and by reconnecting that modern debate to a much older British conversation about the English language stretching back to the Renaissance, this chapter views Webster’s linguistic nationalism against a richer and more multidimensional background, and by doing so recovers some of its lost nuances.

To begin with, while Webster may have been the most important of the American language reformers, he was by no means the most radical. This much-vaunted linguistic pioneer was in fact rather conservative in his approach to the question of what American language could look like. What first bears remarking upon is a fact so obvious it may almost be neglected: Webster determined that, in order to form a distinctly “American” language, he would have to begin with English in the first place. Though, to be more precise about it, Webster didn’t really make the case for American English so much as he made the case appear to make itself: English, he tells us early in Dissertations, was “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents.”²¹ Webster thus treated it as a foregone conclusion that “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived.”²² Yet by referencing, with equal matter-of-factness, the “predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues,”²³ he also acknowledged the fact that “the Americans” in 1789 were a polyglot population with multiple national origins. I will have more to say later about this cultural situation and what Webster did to address it. For the moment, my point is simply that it was not inconceivable to him that the national language might end up being built on a basis other than English; it was just highly undesirable.

This is the side of the story that Leonard Tennenhouse will not allow us to forget in his discussion of the post-Revolutionary language debates in The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850.²⁴ Anglo-American language reformers like Webster were not attempting to cut the American language off from English, Tennenhouse emphasizes. In a sense, Webster’s goal was the same as that of late eighteenth-century British language reformers like Samuel Johnson: to “stabilize English usage.”²⁵ This approach to the question of American language thus illustrates Tennenhouse’s “diaspora” argument in miniature: Anglo-American culture before and after the very moment of political independence conceived of itself as a branch of a British diaspora, which is to say, it was intent on reproducing the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England. Webster’s project of perfecting American English would certainly seem to be a clear case in point. Yet, as I will argue here, his dream of a distinctly American English also indulged a cultural fantasy of autochthony, despite a cultural reality that looks more like diaspora. As Webster saw it, the English “root or stock,”²⁶ once transplanted to American soil, would reach downward and tap somehow into the primitive Saxon past of the English people, their culture, and its language. According to this strange, seemingly illogical, and yet culturally powerful argument (which I will explore in detail later in this chapter), American English would thus replicate a more original and primordial form of the language than currently existed in Britain itself. Naturally, none of this could occur if Americans rejected English outright; instead they ought to seek to perfect it.

This was by no means a universal presumption. While Webster was focusing his efforts on reconfiguring the system of English spelling, others among his contemporaries proposed building the American language on a basis other than English. One curious notion in circulation at the time, and often mentioned ever since, was the possibility of establishing Greek or Hebrew as the national language.²⁷ It is doubtful that the idea was actually ever seriously considered for adoption, but we can understand why it made for such a good story: such a move would have ensured maximum separation from English, yet without sacrificing the undeniable prestige of an established language. On the other hand, the often-referenced proposal to adopt an indigenous North American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian was almost certainly apocryphal,²⁸ but here again, that only makes its logic more telling: in one stroke, it would have achieved linguistic distance from the metropole, which in itself was merely a negative distinction, while also grounding a positive claim of American autochthony or indigeneity. Webster, as we shall see, would cut his own peculiar path to that claim, even though his starting point was the “inherited” English language.

Even among those who took the same basic tack of Americanizing English, there were more innovative 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: Johnson will choose what he considers the best spelling for each word, based on the prior usage of a writer of “classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”⁴² In turn, an ordinary user of the language would find out which spelling he ought to adopt by consulting—you guessed it—Johnson’s dictionary. But this kind of approach would have been entirely inappropriate to Webster’s purpose. Webster needed to fashion a systematic and rule-governed approach that would render the language system transparent, internally consistent, and therefore easy to acquire, since it must succeed insuturing former speakers of different national languages into a new national speech community.⁴³ Someone new to the language would thus be able to derive proper forms for himself by deduction from universal laws of construction, rather than consulting a dictionary each time to arrive at each bit of proper usage. A word’s spelling, then, would not only be regular and easy to derive, but it would act as a guide to pronunciation and would in turn be guided by it. The spoken and written dimensions of the language would thus mutually support each other, and both would buttress the community of language users. In this way, “a regular national orthography”⁴⁴ would not only maintain or preserve social stability; it would actively generate it.

This thumbnail sketch should give some initial sense of why a topic as dry as spelling would have become such a highly charged point of contention. But in order to see just how much of Johnson’s thinking Webster in fact adopted while adapting it to a different set of social conditions, we will first have to take a close look at Johnson’s dictionary.

* * *

From Samuel Johnson’s first articulation of his project in the 1747 Plan of A Dictionary of the English Language to his description of it as ultimately realized in the first edition of his dictionary, he represented the “great end of this undertaking” quite simply: to “fix the English language.”⁴⁵ This did not mean that English was damaged and in need of repair; to “fix” a language meant to stabilize it, to settle it (a related Johnsonian term was to “ascertain,” to render certain, from the Latin certus, settled). A language that remained unfixed and unsettled, by contrast, was in constant danger of being unmoored by the various forces of linguistic drift, which for Johnson was synonymous with corruption and degeneration. That was why one wrote a dictionary: not solely, as we might casually assume, to help the users of a language navigate its corridors, but to police those corridors—to serve and protect the language itself. “This, my Lord,” Johnson writes in his Plan, “is my idea of an English dictionary; a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.”⁴⁶ Eight years later, in the preface to the dictionary itself, Johnson repeats his ambition to “fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition,” but here he adds a telling metaphor: the lexicographer attempts to “embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.”⁴⁷

The lexicographer’s ground zero is a deceptively simple problem: which words to put in his dictionary and which ones to leave out. “In the first attempt to methodise my ideas,” writes Johnson in the Plan, “I found a difficulty, which extended itself to the whole work. It was not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen.” Decisions about lexical inclusion and exclusion were not merely a practical matter of limiting the extent and size of a finite volume. What is really at issue is nothing less than patrolling the borders of a national language. The “chief intent” of his dictionary, Johnson asserts, is “to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom; and this seems to require nothing more than that our language be considered, so far as it is our own.”⁴⁸ The phrasing is deliberate and bears important conceptual weight. An idiom, here used in the sense of a regional dialect rather than a local figure of speech, is language which belongs to a unique speech community and to that community alone, as Johnson’s gloss—“our language … considered, so far as it is our own”—makes clear. It is telling, then, that Johnson must immediately qualify that objective: “This is, perhaps, the exact and pure idea of a grammatical dictionary, but in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use.”⁴⁹ The context in which this qualification appears, we can assume, is highly significant: at this moment in the Plan, Johnson is confronting the problem of how to deal with words from other languages. “If [all] foreign words … were rejected, it could be little regarded, except by criticks”; but “it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it instructs the learner.”⁵⁰ Johnson must thus develop a system of inclusion that would determine when foreign words will be turned away from the national linguistic border, and when they must be, however reluctantly, admitted. Since this problem and the lexical policies that it generates in Johnson’s dictionary will be targets for Webster’s polemic—and since the issue of foreign languages will, for entirely different reasons, pose a serious challenge for Webster’s own national linguistic project—I will need to walk through the issue in some detail.

Johnson’s real problem, it turns out, is not so much what to do with foreign words but what to do about the fact that they are intrinsic to English itself. This is true not only in the quotidian sense that “the terms of particular professions” in circulation in modern English, along with “the arts to which they relate,” are “generally derived from other nations,” but also in a much more fundamental sense having to do with the origins of the language.⁵¹ “Our language is well known not to be primitive or self-originated,” says Johnson, “but to have adopted words of every generation, and, either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase of its copiousness, to have received additions from very distant regions; so that in search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway.”⁵² Put simply, much of what now constitutes that language which is distinctively “our own” has come into English from the outside.⁵³ Even as he promises to “preserve” its “purity,”⁵⁴ then, Johnson is forced to reveal that English, as it was given to him, was an impure language to begin with.

Johnson’s somewhat sidelong acknowledgement of this issue touches on a widely held common sense about the nature of modern English. English has borrowed from (“received additions from”) other languages, he has mentioned in passing, “either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase of its copiousness.” The understanding of the language implicit here was at least a few centuries old by the time Johnson wrote. Its origins lie in the fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language on the order of already established and more prestigious languages such as French and Latin.⁵⁵ Middle English, largely derived from the Saxon branch of the Teutonic language, already understood itself as in some ways deficient in relation to the “Romance” (that is, Roman-derived) languages, not only by virtue of their cultural prestige, but also because of its own intrinsic properties. English “had yet to be standardized” as a written language and was “struggling for cultural recognition”⁵⁶ alongside Latin and the European vernaculars. Most significantly, Middle English writing was marked by a “sense of insufficiency about the language’s Germanic core,” which made it less copious and, it was feared, less expressive than its more established neighbors in the Romance family.⁵⁷ (Johnson is still referring, in 1747, to “more polished languages” such as French.)⁵⁸ And so, starting in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the English lexicon expanded itself via incorporations from French and Latin.⁵⁹ The prevailing understanding, in short, was that English had to take out loans from other languages in order to supply its own deficiency.

In one of the more peculiar and fascinating passages of the Plan, Johnson discusses this phenomenon of linguistic incorporation via an elaborate citizenship metaphor: words from another language are “foreigners” or “aliens”; to admit them formally into the idiom is to “naturalize them,” and even, in one fanciful phrase, to permit them “to settle themselves among the natives.”⁶⁰ Obviously Johnson is playing out this scenario of linguistic immigration with tongue planted in cheek, but we begin to suspect that the wit has a serious core when, rather than dropping the joke, he extends it further: “Of such words, however, all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language; for some of them are naturalized and incorporated; but others still continue aliens, and are rather auxiliaries than subjects.”⁶¹ On the basis of this finer distinction between different types of linguistic “foreigners,” he develops, so to speak, an immigration policy: “Of those which still continue in the state of aliens, and have made no approaches towards assimilation, some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchasers of the Dictionary will expect to find them. Such are many words in the common law, as capias, habeas corpus, præmunire, nisi prius: such are some terms of controversial divinity, as hypostasis; and of physick, as the names of diseases.”⁶² Most significant here is something hiding in plain sight: the graphical code by which Johnson distinguishes “naturalized” foreigners from unassimilated “aliens.” He is already using that scheme in the passage just quoted, and explains its logic on the following page: “There ought … to be some distinction made between the different classes of words; and, therefore, it will be proper to print those which are incorporated into the language in the usual character, and those which are still to be considered as foreign, in the Italick letter.”⁶³ In this way, the lexicographer makes his concessions to usage and practicality while still guarding the language against chaos and the collapse of the outside upon the inside.

I have already touched on many of the areas in Johnson’s thinking in which Webster found—or made—openings for his own lexicographical departures, but I have yet fully to explain the most significant: the position Johnson took in what he calls “the great orthographical contest … between etymology and pronunciation.”⁶⁴ Johnson’s policy follows in part from the problem of linguistic incorporation I have just been discussing. First, he acknowledges that English is plagued by inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation, in part because of the diversity of its origins. As “alien” words entered into English, part of their “naturalization” entailed their adjustment to English construction (for example, “the change of a foreign to an English termination, and a conformity to the laws of the speech into which they are adopted”);⁶⁵ but inevitably the fit will be imperfect. And by virtue of the promiscuity of its incorporations, this is a systemic rather than an occasional problem for English. Its polyglossia results in a sort of patchwork at the surface of the language. By contrast, it stands to reason that the more self-contained a language is, and the less polyglot in its origins, the more it will naturally tend towards regularity and consistency in its structure. For example, the “accuracy of the French, in stating the sounds of their letters, is well known.”⁶⁶

The lexicographer of modern English thus faces a peculiarly difficult task. English is crisscrossed by “numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”⁶⁷ In every corner of the language—and not just at the highly visible level of spelling, but also in its deeper rules of construction—Johnson keeps finding the same thing, namely, a “regular form”⁶⁸ with almost as many departures from the rule as standard applications of it. Though they are “familiar to those who have always used them,” these “very frequent” exceptions do, of course, “interrupt and embarrass the learners of our language.”⁶⁹ Johnson runs through an illustrative handful, including some of the same inconsistencies that English speakers today are apt to mock in their own language—“fox makes in the plural foxes, but ox makes oxen” while “sheep is the same in both numbers,” and so on in the formation of plurals, the construction of comparative and superlative adjectives, and the conjugations of verbs.⁷⁰ Obviously, when every rule comes surrounded by such a large nimbus of exceptions, “rule” itself no longer enjoys its customary privilege. And since proper English “cannot be reduced to rules,” learners of the language will find that its usage “must be learned from the dictionary rather than the grammar.”⁷¹ This is more than just a deft act of self-advertisement. It is a way of staking a position in a debate about linguistic standards, and already an implicit declaration about where, if not in “rules,” those standards might reside.

“When I took the first survey of my undertaking,” Johnson wrote in one of the most famous passages in his preface to the dictionary, “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”⁷² This description of the problem already contains, in its closing phrases, the terms of its own resolution: inconsistencies will be managed, and fixity restored, by referring the vagaries of usage to “writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.” This embrace of authoritative usage may sound like mere lexicographical fiat, but it also follows from Johnson’s acknowledgment that English, by virtue of its polyglot origins, “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules.”⁷³ People learning the language cannot hope spontaneously to generate proper usage from universal laws of derivation (“from the grammar”) as they would be able to do if learning a more regular language; here, the “grammarians can give little assistance.”⁷⁴ Thus, English “is not to be taught by general rules, but by special precedents; it is not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech; but we must remark how the writers of former ages have used the same word.”⁷⁵ Nor will any “former” writers do; Johnson’s exemplary “precedents” must be drawn from what he calls “the best writers,”⁷⁶ and his readers must be absolutely convinced that he knows the difference: “In citing authorities, on which the credit of every part of this work must depend, it will be proper to observe some obvious rules; such as of preferring writers of the first reputation to those of an inferiour rank; of noting the quotations with accuracy; and of selecting, when it can be conveniently done, such sentences, as, besides their immediate use, may give pleasure or instruction, by conveying some elegance of language, or some precept of prudence or piety.”⁷⁷ Certainly, ordinary users of the language, much less those in the process of learning it, cannot be expected to scour the history of authoritative usage for themselves in this way; they will need a trusted meta-authority to sift through it for them. Only a lexicographer can perform this labor. Whether in the realm of spelling, pronunciation, construction, or style, what constitutes “proper” English must be “learned from the dictionary.”⁷⁸

In the realm of orthography, what the reader of Johnson’s dictionary will learn is that the spelling of a word bears the traces of its etymological origins, whether those origins be Saxon, French, Latin, or what have you. (“In the investigation both of the orthography and signification of words,” Johnson announces in the preface, “their Etymology was necessarily to be considered.”)⁷⁹ This approach is meant to address an empirical problem: as Johnson looks around him at modern English usage, he sees countless words that “continue to be variously written, as authours differ in their care or skill.”⁸⁰ To fix the spelling of those words once and for all, “it was proper to enquire the true orthography, which I have always considered as depending on their derivation, and have therefore referred them to their original languages.”⁸¹ In making the case for this approach in the preface, Johnson gives some choice examples of how etymological origin will help him settle some thorny spelling problems: “thus I write enchant, enchantment, enchanter, after the French, and incantation after the Latin; thus entire is chosen rather than intire, because it passed to us not from the Latin integer, but from the French entier.”⁸² For this reason, Johnson is often said to have “Latinized” or “Romanized” the English language—a charge to which I shall return below. But as this handful of examples also indicates, to determine “true” spelling by following etymology also means, crucially, not to derive it from the way that word is pronounced; to choose “entire” over “intire” is to side with derivation over pronunciation. Johnson’s orthographic philosophy is thus also generally understood to be linked to his privileging of writing over speech: “It has been demanded, on one hand, that men should write as they speak; but … it may be asked, with equal propriety, why men do not rather speak as they write.”⁸³ This position would earn Johnson the contemptuous charge of pedantry—a barb Webster would aim more than once at his great predecessor.

Everything New Is Old Again

Based on the above account, we might be inclined to speculate that Webster zeroed in on the problem of spelling for tactical reasons: given its intricate lines of connection to so many aspects of Johnson’s project, orthography would be an effective thread to pull in order to unravel his lexical authority. This would be to presume, of course, that the assault on Johnson was Webster’s primary end. Webster’s polemic was broad and unmistakable, and I will explore its specifics below. But did the critique of Johnson determine Webster’s linguistic choices, or was it merely one of their effects? As I have already noted, part of the difficulty in sifting through the layers of Webster’s polemic against Johnson is our tendency to read it rather reflexively through a national political lens. Webster’s own manipulation of Revolutionary rhetoric seems to beckon us in that direction. That political context, of course, is relevant; but it only reveals part of the story. And to look at the language debate exclusively from that angle is to risk seriously misreading some of its most basic facets and missing vast aspects of its historical and cultural contexts.

One thing is indisputable: Webster famously chose the opposing side in Johnson’s “great orthographical contest.”⁸⁴ He casts his lot with pronunciation rather than etymological derivation as the source of proper spelling, which is to say, he advocates for “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation.”⁸⁵ From a Johnsonian perspective, this would be rather like mooring a ship to a boat; it made just as little sense to try to fix spelling by tethering it an even more unstable realm of language. Webster was aware of this position, which he poses as the last of five “Objections” in a dialogical section of his appendix devoted to confronting potential counterarguments: “ ‘It is idle to conform the orthography of words to the pronunciation, because the latter is continually changing.’ ”⁸⁶ Webster explicitly identifies this as “one of Dr. Johnson’s objections,” and pronounces it “very unworthy of his judgement.”⁸⁷ He then proceeds to turn the argument exactly around: “So far is this circumstance from being a real objection,” he asserts, “that it is alone a sufficient reason for the change of spelling.”⁸⁸ In fact, it is Johnson’s own position that is absurd: “On his principle of fixing the orthography, while the pronunciation is changing, any spoken language must, in time, lose all relation to the written language; that is, the sounds of words would have no affinity with the letters that compose them.”⁸⁹ He gives a few examples from current usage (“no mortal would suspect from the spelling, that neighbour, wrought, are pronounced nabur, rawt”)⁹⁰ and then delivers the coup de grace: “Admit Johnson’s principles, take his pedantic orthography for the standard, let it be closely adhered to in future, and the slow changes in the pronunciation of our national tongue, will in time make as great a difference between our written and spoken language, as there is between the pronunciation of the present English and German. The spelling will be no more a guide to the pronunciation, than the orthography of the German or Greek. This event is actually taking place, in consequence of the stupid opinion, advanced by Johnson and other writers, and generally embraced by the nation.”⁹¹

But in order to understand this dispute properly, it is crucial to recognize where the two lexicographers agree. To begin with, they were in total agreement on the nature of the problem: “It has been observed by all writers on the English language,” wrote Webster, “that the orthography or spelling of words is very irregular”; Johnson, of course, was the most famous of those “writers on the English language.”⁹² And they agreed on the source of this problem: apart from the more general fact of the “changes to which the pronunciation is liable” in any language, the principal cause in the case of English particularly, writes Webster, is its “mixture of different languages.”⁹³ Johnson, as we have already seen, had acknowledged the same problem, but Webster put a much finer point on the various linguistic strains competing for dominance within English.

In a section of Dissertation I on “The History of the English Language,” Webster accounts for the hybridity of modern English by narrating its development.⁹⁴ His linguistic history is an essentially agonistic one, moving from conquest to conquest in order to identify some of the key moments of linguistic incursion, incorporation, and transformation, including the Roman invasion of Britain around the beginning of the “Christian era,”⁹⁵ which superimposed Latin on top of the “native Celtic language”⁹⁶ that he calls the “primitive” language of Britain; the fifth-century invasion of Britain by Saxons from the North, whose dialect of the Teutonic language replaced the “jargon of Celtic and Roman”⁹⁷ and formed the true basis of modern English; the Norman Conquest in 1066, which introduced Norman French into British culture, especially in polite society and at Court;⁹⁸ and King Edward III’s 1362 Statute of Pleading, which ordered the English vernacular to be used to plead all cases in court, but establishing Latin (rather than French) as the official language for recording legal proceedings. For better or worse, “our present English” emerged from this history as essentially a mixture of “the Saxon, the Norman French and the Latin.”⁹⁹ In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster focuses on the orthographic chaos this polyglot composition has created: “when words have been introduced from a foreign language into the English, they have generally retained the orthography of the original, however ill adapted to express the English pronunciation.”¹⁰⁰ Here of course, Webster’s account of the problem, which is substantially the same as Johnson’s, has already begun to make the case for his own solution, which famously departs from Johnsonian spellings by substituting more definite-sounding characters for less definite-sounding ones wherever possible, and eliminating unsounded letters entirely, in order to bring orthography in line with pronunciation. Unless the language were to be allowed to remain in its current state of chaos, Webster wrote the following year (in a preface testing out his new spelling scheme), “there iz no alternativ.”¹⁰¹

But where Webster most profoundly departs from Johnson was not in the particulars of his orthographic solutions, but rather in his determination to “solve” the problem at all. Webster was completely committed to what he saw as the lexicographer’s responsibility to “remove causes of error,”¹⁰² not just to identify them. By contrast, what is most striking about Johnson is how little he actually attempted to do about the fundamental linguistic problems that both of them understood so similarly. “Our inflections,” writes Johnson at one point in the Plan, “are by no means constant, but admit of numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”¹⁰³ Not corrected, mind you, but just “diligently noted.”¹⁰⁴ And so when it comes to spelling, it can be surprising how much Johnson is willing to accommodate his dictionary to an orthographic status quo that he describes so pejoratively: “The present usage of spelling, where the present usage can be distinguished, will, therefore, in this work, be generally followed; yet there will be often occasion to observe, that it is in itself inaccurate, and tolerated rather than chosen.”¹⁰⁵ From the perspective of a true language reformer like Webster, Johnson’s willingness to tolerate the intolerable must have seemed a scandalous abdication of lexicographical duty. Not content to say, as Johnson did, that English spelling “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules,” nor that it is simply “not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech,” Webster absolutely refuses the underlying assumption that comprehensive reform was impracticable or impossible. However variable they may seem, Webster insists, “it does not follow that pronunciation and orthography cannot be rendered in a great measure permanent.”¹⁰⁶ It just “requires some labor to adjust the parts and reduce them to order.”¹⁰⁷ Where Johnson saw it as his job to make a note of irregularities, Webster determines to regulate. Where Johnson proposed to “embalm”¹⁰⁸ the language in order to arrest its decay, Webster believes he can actually revive the patient.

Johnson’s reluctance to take corrective linguistic action was a principled lexicographical philosophy he had first announced in his Plan: “The chief rule which I propose to follow is, to make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find.”¹⁰⁹ This conservative aversion to anything that smacks of reform is fueled by Johnson’s conviction that “all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage; and as inconstancy is in every case a mark of weakness, it will add nothing to the reputation of our tongue.”¹¹⁰ The irregularity of English, it is true, is a form of “inconstancy” intrinsic to the nature of the language; but to move too hastily to innovate would only be to compound it with the inconstancy of all human art. Johnson’s highest priority, as he repeatedly asserts throughout the Plan, is to stabilize the language, not to perfect it. This dictates that—for all of his rhetoric of imposing order on chaos—some degree of linguistic confusion be allowed to remain. As a result of this conviction, Johnson finds any attempts to perfect the language dangerous in principle. In the preface to the dictionary, Johnson confesses to having once been tempted by the dream of a bolder and more comprehensive lexicographic achievement, which he compares to a fantasy of epic heroism: “When first I engaged in this work, I … pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind.”¹¹¹ But ultimately he chooses to deny himself these fantastical pleasures, which he calls “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.”¹¹² What he awakens to is the explicitly anti-utopian realization that “thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”¹¹³ In the 1747 Plan, Johnson had already warned against those bearing such schemes of linguistic perfection: “There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniencies [sic] of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake; and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.”¹¹⁴

Now Johnson, to state the obvious, was not referring to Noah Webster (who was born the year after the Plan was published), but Webster would seem to be the kind of thinker Johnson cautioned against—those who “take pleasure in departing from custom” and “think alteration desirable for its own sake.” Was not departure from (British linguistic) custom his goal? Was not an “alteration” of British English regarded as an end in itself, and did he not settle specifically on “reformation of our orthography” as the means to that end? Beyond that, is there not more than a hint of the utopian in Webster’s wish that “the inhabitants of America can be brought to a perfect uniformity in the pronunciation of words” and in his explicit pursuit of “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation”?¹¹⁵ The first thing we can infer from the seeming applicability of Johnson’s critique to his posthumous American successor is simply that Webster’s reforms must not have been so unprecedented. Those to whom Johnson referred in the lines above were, in a manner of speaking, the Noah Websters of the prior two centuries—men who, indeed, did so “despise the inconveniencies of confusion” that they proposed to correct irregularities through a comprehensive reform. Since one of my goals is to add nuance to a rather flattened historical narrative of a linguistic declaration of independence, a revolution against British orthographic authority, it is essential to understand this whole matter in its full cultural and historical context. And that entails reading backward from this transatlantic late eighteenth-century dispute to its much earlier English origins.

* * *

The story of modern spelling reform in English properly begins with the arrival of print in England in the late fifteenth century (William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476).¹¹⁶ At this time, there was still nothing like a “generally recognized standard form of English speech, and only the beginnings of a standard orthography.”¹¹⁷ The new possibility of rapid reproduction and circulation of printed copies put more pressure on this problem than had the circulation of manuscripts.¹¹⁸ By and large, “printers of the early sixteenth century demonstrate little obvious interest in working towards a standardized orthography” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 27), which made them the targets of invective by commentators on the state of English spelling such as John Hart, who in 1551 noted “the divers vices and corruptions which use (or better abuse) mainteneth in our writing.”¹¹⁹ Vivian Salmon summarizes these “abuses” according to Hart, which include some of the same orthographic defects of which Webster would complain later: “Arguing that ‘vicious’ writing ‘bringeth confusion and uncertainte in the reading’ … he lists the major faults as ‘diminution,’ ‘superfluite,’ ‘the usurpation of one letter for another, by their confusible double powers,’ and ‘the mysplacing and disordering of them.’ ”¹²⁰ By the end of the sixteenth century, “the ‘correct’ relationship between the spoken and the written word … occupied printers and grammarians alike.”¹²¹ This led to a period of “intense discussion” about “the lack of a standard orthography and the possibility of providing a more satisfactory one,”¹²² such as those proposed by Sir Thomas Smith in 1568, Hart in 1569, and William Bullokar in 1580. Some advocated the reform of spelling on phonetic lines, while others merely aimed for more consistency of any kind, regardless of the gap between spelling and pronunciation. Some called for a new or revised alphabet more capable of capturing English speech, while others (like Bullokar) opted for “the traditional alphabet with a great variety of diacritics.” In turn, these attempts also brought about strong counterarguments against spelling reform, such as those by John Caius and John Baret in 1574.¹²³

The early modern phase of orthographic reform culminated with Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 treatise, Elementarie, which was “the first consistent attempt to codify and promulgate detailed rules for normalising and regularising traditional English spelling.”¹²⁴ The work bears some comparison to that of Webster, not so much in the particulars of its suggestions for reform (Mulcaster opposed a purely phonetic spelling system) but in its general aspirations and its rhetorical tone. Driven “by his typically Renaissance esteem for the English language, and by his desire to bring it to the utmost perfection,”¹²⁵ Mulcaster refused to yield to an acceptance of its faults or of the impossibility of correcting them; he argued instead that the language is “as readie to yeild to anie rule of Art, as anie other is”¹²⁶—much as Webster would later claim in opposition to Johnson’s tolerance for irregularity. And in Webster’s famous claim that his is the “situation the most favorable for great reformations; and the present time is, in a singular degree, auspicious,”¹²⁷ we see shades of Mulcaster’s assertion that every language has a moment in which it is “fittest to be made a pattern for others to follow” and that “such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”¹²⁸

This Renaissance orthographic debate was enough in circulation by the 1590s that Shakespeare could mine it for satire in Love’s Labour’s Lost: in act 5, scene 1, the pedantic scholar Holofernes complains of the linguistic style of Don Armado, specifically castigating him for not actually pronouncing the b in doubt or debt as they are written:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer

than the staple of his argument. I abhor such

fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and

point-devise companions; such rackers of

orthography, as to speak dout, fine, when he should

say doubt; det, when he should pronounce debt,—d,

e, b, t, not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf;

half, hauf; neighbour vocatur nebor; neigh

abbreviated ne. This is abhominable,—which he

would call abbominable … (lines 1750–59)

The real “racker of orthography” in this scene, of course, is Holofernes; though more accurately, it is orthoepy he places on the rack, by insisting that these graphemes be spoken. By having him do so, Shakespeare dramatizes the absurdity that can result from uttering words as they are written—particularly when, in the case of words like debt and doubt, the “b” is only present by virtue of historically recent attempts to reflect the Latin roots, debitum and dubitare, respectively.¹²⁹ (Webster would respell “indebted” as “indeted.”) In other words, not only is the general linguistic practice being satirized here the exact counterpart of Johnson’s later suggestion that men ought to “speak as they write,” but these particular spellings are directly in line with the Johnsonian principle of making orthography follow etymological origin.

With this deeper history in view, then, it becomes clear why Johnson refers in 1747 to “the great orthographic contest [that] has long subsisted between etymology and pronunciation”¹³⁰—acknowledging that the debate already had some historical legs—and it is also clear whom Johnson might have had in mind when offering somewhat sarcastic “honours”¹³¹ to previous attempts at orthographic reform. Most significantly for my purposes, it becomes clear that Webster’s late eighteenth-century argument in favor of the perfectibility of English was not in fact a call to “innovate” the language, but rather an attempt to restore it to an earlier and more perfect state. For all of his association with linguistic novelty, Webster was in fact placing himself in a lineage of language reformers who preceded Johnson and his contemporaries by two centuries. This was no secret; on the contrary, it was one of the explicit terms of Webster’s cultural authority. “In the essays, ritten in the last yeer,” he wrote in a 1790 preface testing out his revised orthography, “a considerable change of spelling is introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over Gower and Chaucer.”¹³² In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster cites, as precursors to his own attempts, those “formerly made in England to rectify the orthography of the language,” including those of Sir Thomas Smith in 1568 and two early seventeenth-century reformers, Alexander Gil and Charles Butler.¹³³ In this way, Webster framed his own reforms as a resumption of an unfinished Renaissance project. “Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds,” he asserts, “still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”¹³⁴ This was to be a rather different kind of “American Renaissance” than F. O. Matthiessen’s: not a renaissance of America’s own so much as America’s completion of a cultural rebirth that had begun in England centuries earlier but had stalled in its country of origin.