Language is a very personal attribute. How we use language is taken as an index of our intelligence and clearly marks our social position. George Bernard Shaw makes that point in his classic drama about language, Pygmalion. Early in the play, Professor Higgins points to Eliza Doolittle, standing in Covent Garden in her flower-girl rags, and says:
You see this creature with her Kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party. I could even get her a place as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, which requires better English. (5)In his preface to the play Shaw comments, "Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower-girl is neither impossible nor uncommon." (6) Shaw cannot resist this added bolstering of his argument, nor would many knowledgeable persons disagree with his fundamental claim, if not his hyperbole, about the critical determination of social status by language.
In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris would not permit the presentation of papers that raised questions about the origin of language. To raise the issue at all was blasphemous. Language was the exclusive property of humans, the basis for our uniqueness. To question its origins was to imply that it might not have been handed down from above. Even now there are theorists who react emotionally to any questions about language existing in forms other than human. To them the very attribution of such a complex function to "lower" forms of life seems to demean our own. To readers who hold similarly exalted views of language, some of what follows could be upsetting.
Are we occasionally chauvinistic about our language? The present acceptance of English as essential to the study of most sciences reinforces such attitudes. The worldwide acceptance of English, however, is of recent origin. Until World War II German was accepted as the language of science and French the language of diplomacy. We should remind ourselves that in Shakespeare's time English was regarded as a "barbarous, vulgar, and rude tongue without logic."(7) It was considered unfit for scientific, let alone for polite, discourse. Four hundred years ago Sir Thomas More commented on the subject of the English language.
That our language is called barbarous is but a fantasy, for so is, as every learned man knoweth, every strange language to any other. And though they would call it barren of words, there is no doubt that it is plenteous enough to express our minds in anything whereof one man hath used to speak with another. (8)
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