The day when English becomes extinct
Early modern philosophers, such as John Locke and George Berkeley, wrote scintillating English. Anyone who has tried to read their original texts will agree that they are worth perusing not only from a philosophical but from a literary (or stylistic) point of view. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been paid---or so it seems to me---to the way those philosophy titans composed their pulchritudinous sentences. Why?
The other day I casually put the two words “syntax” and “John Locke” into the Google search bar. Among the entries that popped up was a modestly-designed homepage( http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/index.html), managed by a philosopher who taught at various universities in the UK. Interestingly, what he ardently emphasizes there is the importance of modernizing the original texts of great thinkers, like Locke and Hume, so that undergraduates could understand their content.
Particularly intriguing is his essay titled “On Translating Locke, Berkely and Hume into English.”(http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/translating.html) He begins it with these words:
According to him, the reason why we need such translation is because undergraduates cannot and will not read the original texts. It is surprising that university students in Britain, most of whom must have spoken English for almost twenty years, should not be able to read beautifully written, if a little archaic, English texts. Locke is certainly one of the most recalcitrant writers, but philosophers like Berkeley and Hume are not difficult at all. The manager of the homepage laments that many of his students had formed a bad habit of gaining only a general impression of what they read, and often failed to pay due attention to its detailed aspects.
Of course, we should be careful of criticizing them too harshly. Can undergraduates in Japan read, for example, Yukichi Fukuzawa or Rohan Koda without difficulty? No, they cannot. That Japanese youngsters also have a lot of trouble understanding classic masterpieces should serve as a humbling reminder that, after all, we might be in the same boat. Still, things appear to be worse in UK than here, for my impression suggests that the linguistic gap between early modern English and the present-day English is smaller than the gap between Fukuzawa’s Japanese and the present-day Japanese. An astute observer may feel this is strange, for Locke was more than two centuries older than Fukuzawa. But it is important to bear in mind that Japanese has changed over the past centuries far more rapidly and radically than English.
The philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill were very impressive prose writers, and therefore it is deeply regrettable if people who stand directly on the shoulders of those giants cannot read their magna opera. Besides, if this phenomenon is not unique to the UK but prevails across many English-speaking countries, including, of course, the United States, then English might, in the near future, lose something that has allowed it to be an expedient tool of analytical philosophy. Minae Mizumura, a Japanese writer, opines in her latest essay that what she claims to be a sophisticated version of Japanese(国語) may become extinct under the influence of English as the lingua franca. I am deeply horrified lest a sophisticated version of English, too, die out. Would that youngsters in the UK ameliorated their English skills.
The other day I casually put the two words “syntax” and “John Locke” into the Google search bar. Among the entries that popped up was a modestly-designed homepage( http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/index.html), managed by a philosopher who taught at various universities in the UK. Interestingly, what he ardently emphasizes there is the importance of modernizing the original texts of great thinkers, like Locke and Hume, so that undergraduates could understand their content.
Particularly intriguing is his essay titled “On Translating Locke, Berkely and Hume into English.”(http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/translating.html) He begins it with these words:
The title is absurd, of course: all three wrote beautiful English, which I love. Still, they need to be translated. Let me explain.
According to him, the reason why we need such translation is because undergraduates cannot and will not read the original texts. It is surprising that university students in Britain, most of whom must have spoken English for almost twenty years, should not be able to read beautifully written, if a little archaic, English texts. Locke is certainly one of the most recalcitrant writers, but philosophers like Berkeley and Hume are not difficult at all. The manager of the homepage laments that many of his students had formed a bad habit of gaining only a general impression of what they read, and often failed to pay due attention to its detailed aspects.
Of course, we should be careful of criticizing them too harshly. Can undergraduates in Japan read, for example, Yukichi Fukuzawa or Rohan Koda without difficulty? No, they cannot. That Japanese youngsters also have a lot of trouble understanding classic masterpieces should serve as a humbling reminder that, after all, we might be in the same boat. Still, things appear to be worse in UK than here, for my impression suggests that the linguistic gap between early modern English and the present-day English is smaller than the gap between Fukuzawa’s Japanese and the present-day Japanese. An astute observer may feel this is strange, for Locke was more than two centuries older than Fukuzawa. But it is important to bear in mind that Japanese has changed over the past centuries far more rapidly and radically than English.
The philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill were very impressive prose writers, and therefore it is deeply regrettable if people who stand directly on the shoulders of those giants cannot read their magna opera. Besides, if this phenomenon is not unique to the UK but prevails across many English-speaking countries, including, of course, the United States, then English might, in the near future, lose something that has allowed it to be an expedient tool of analytical philosophy. Minae Mizumura, a Japanese writer, opines in her latest essay that what she claims to be a sophisticated version of Japanese(国語) may become extinct under the influence of English as the lingua franca. I am deeply horrified lest a sophisticated version of English, too, die out. Would that youngsters in the UK ameliorated their English skills.
