Contents
-SUBJECT INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.
Page 249
is possible we should wish to give an English pronunciation and spelling to useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a good many words the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by the original foreign forms. 45 |
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A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any English newspaper of the slightest intellectual pretension will show how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English must perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the same import are carefully italicized and accented,
e. g., matinèe, cafè, crêpe, dèbut, portiére, èclat, naïvetè, règime, rôle, soirèe, prècis, protègè, èlite, gemütlichkeit, mêlèe, tête-á-tête, porte-cochére, divorcèe, fiancèe, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase, dènouement. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign analogues thought to be more elegant,
e. g., repertory by
rèpertoire, sheik by
shaikh, czar by
tsar, levee by
levèe, moslem by
muslim, khalifate by
khilifat, said by
seyd, crape by
crêpe, supper by
souper, Legion of Honor by
Lègion d’honneur, gormand by
gourmand, grip by
la grippe, crown by
krone. Proper names also yield to this new pedantry, and the London
Times frequently delights the
aluminados by suddenly making such substitutions as that of
Serbia for
Servia and that of
Rumania for
Roumania; in the course of time, if the warnings of the S. P. E. do not prevail, the English may be writing
München, Kobenhavn, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and
s’Gravenhage; even today they commonly use
Hannover, Habana and
Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers are careful about the diacritical marks in proper names,
e. g., Sévres, Zürich, Bülow, François, Frèdèric, Hèloise, Bogotà, Orlèans, Besançon, Rhône, Côted’Or, Württemberg. The English dictionaries seldom omit the accents from recent foreign words. Cassell’s leaves them off
règime