THE FUTURE LANGUAGE OF THE WORLD

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 15, 17 January 1873, Page 4

THE FUTURE LANGUAGE OF THE WORLD

(From the London Telegraph) The time is coming when one language shall be spoken from China to Pern, from the world's Dan to its Beersbeba. And who can doubt which tongue: it is that shall triumph in the end above all others ? French is the ideal dialect of literature and science. What such men as Comte or - St. Beuve could have done without French —how far they could have expressed themselves in any other tongue it is difficult to think. But, after all, art and criticism, literature and science, are but a small part of the great life of the world. Nor can we doubt that when the International of capitalists holds its meetings five thousand years hence to protest against the cruel tyranny of tbe working classes, its delegates will address tbe great Assembly in English, and allwill understand them. Our noble old- Teutonic tongue is the fullest and the richest in the world. No language-r-rnqt even .German—^has a grander literature. None is fuller|6fe)pi!s from all quarters of the, ea^h.'^^t^r English Dictionary lie mixed together Latin, Greek, Hebrew, .Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German —nay, even Malay and Chinese words. And who can doubt, as he slowly rolls round the little mapped sphere which does duty for the world's globe, that English is, : v abos||al!?!,oth^ the i eartn ? "ThY, tongues I which hay 6 no* literature must die. And if we dismiss from our calculations the barbarous dialects

of Africa and the East, of the dwellers round the North Pole, of the savage hordes of China and Tartary, arid of the Indians of the West, bow large a proportion of tho civilised world speaks the tongue of Chaucer aud Spenser, of Shakespeare and Milton? Set the world against England and her Colonies and the colossal continent of Nohh America, and it is easy to see what will be .the end of the confusion of tongues — which language will longest hold its own in the obstinate struggle for. the survival of the fittest. , Great; works, the heirlooms of past days, will be studied by scholars. Dante, Cervantes. Boccaccio. Rabelais, Calderon — these, and our own Chaucer, almost as unintelligible now' to most of us as 'Piers Ploughman' or Skelton, will still be read for love of themselves, as men even now toil through the Vedas, wander with Phoedrus on tbe banks of the Ilissus, and , with Lucretius contemplate the fretful folly of man and the grand universe of things. But for the busy toilers in the world's hive, for the men who are to knit the whole world into one, and to make it of one sentiment and of one speech, the English tongue will be the weapon of conquest. The mere foree — the dead weight of that obstinacy which, while others learn English, makes the English unwilling to acquire any speech save their own, tells in our favor. Numbers are with us. - Everything, it. may be said, is on our side. Already English will carry a man apparently farther than any other vehicle of expression. It will one day be the language of the world.