An Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities | Page 2

But it is when she writes as a literary critic,
defending the English language, with its monosyllables and consonants,
as a literary medium, that she is most interesting.
There was nothing new in what Swift had said of the character of the
English language; he was merely echoing criticisms which had been
expressed frequently since the early sixteenth century. The number of
English monosyllables was sometimes complained of, because to ears
trained on the classical languages they sounded harsh, barking, unfitted
for eloquence; sometimes because they were believed to impede the
metrical flow in poetry; sometimes because, being particularly
characteristic of colloquial speech, they were considered low; and often
because they were associated with the languages of the Teutonic tribes
which had escaped the full refining influence of Roman civilization.
Swift followed writers like Nash and Dekker in emphasizing the first
and last of these objections.
There were, of course, stock answers to these stock objections. Such
criticism of one's mother tongue was said to be unpatriotic or positively
disloyal. If it was difficult to maintain that English was as smooth and
euphonious as Italian, it could be maintained that its monosyllables and
consonants gave it a characteristic and masculine brevity and force.
Monosyllables were also very convenient for the formation of
compound words, and, it was argued, should, when properly managed,
be an asset rather than a handicap to the English rhymester. By the time
Swift and Miss Elstob were writing, an increasing number of
antiquarian Germanophils (and also pro-Hanoverians) were prepared to
claim Teutonic descent with pride.
Most of these arguments had been bandied backwards and forwards
rather inconclusively since the sixteenth century, and Addison in The
Spectator No. 135 expresses a typically moderate opinion on the matter:
the English language, he says, abounds in monosyllables, which gives
us an opportunity of delivering our thoughts in few sounds. This indeed
takes off from the elegance of our tongue, but at the same time
expresses our ideas in the readiest manner, and consequently answers
the first design of speech better than the multitude of syllables, which
make the words of other languages more tunable and sonorous.
It is likely that neither Swift nor Miss Elstob would have found much
to disagree with in that sentence. Swift certainly never proposed any

reduction in the number of English monosyllables, and the simplicity of
style which he described as "one of the greatest perfections in any
language," which seemed to him best exemplified in the English Bible,
and which he himself practised so brilliantly, has in English a very
marked monosyllabic character.
But in his enthusiasm to stamp out the practice of abbreviating,
beheading and curtailing polysyllables--a practice which seemed to him
a threat to both the elegance and permanence of the language-- he
described it as part of a tendency of the English to relapse into their
Northern barbarity by multiplying monosyllables and eliding vowels
between the rough and frequent consonants of their language. His
ignorance of the historical origins of the language and his rather
hackneyed remarks on its character do not invalidate the general
scheme of his Proposal or his particular criticisms of current linguistic
habits, but they did lay him open to the very penetrating and decisive
attack of Elizabeth Elstob.
In her reply to Swift she repeats all the stock defenses of the English
monosyllables and consonants, but, by presenting them in combination,
and in a manner at once scholarly and forceful, she makes the most
convincing case against Swift. Unlike most of her predecessors, Miss
Elstob is not on the defensive. She is always ready to give a sharp
personal turn to her scholarly refutations--as, for instance, when she
demonstrates the usefulness of monosyllables in poetry by illustrations
from a series of poets beginning with Homer and ending with Swift.
There can be little doubt that Swift is decisively worsted in this
argument.
It is not known whether Swift ever read Miss Elstob's Rudiments,
though it is interesting to notice a marked change of emphasis in his
references to the Anglo-Saxon language. In the Proposal he had
declared with a pretense of knowledge, that Anglo-Saxon was
"excepting some few variations in the orthography... the same in most
original words with our present English, as well as with German and
other northern dialects." But in An Abstract of the History of England
(probably revised in 1719) he says that the English which came in with
the Saxons was "extremely different from what it is now." The two
statements are not incompatible, but the emphasis is remarkably
changed. It is possible that some friend had pointed out to Swift that his

earlier statement was too gross a simplification, or alternatively that
someone had drawn his attention to Elizabeth Elstob's Rudiments.
All writers owe much to the labors of scholarship and