Wild Wales: The People, Language, & SceneryBorrow, George
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Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery
Borrow, George
Borrow, George, 1803-1881 -- Travel -- Wales; Wales -- Description and travel
many points of likeness; one of these is the intense love of music
displayed by the two, another is the blending of poetic imagination with
practical sagacity. The Magyars have been called a race of lawyers, but
their love of law-points and litigation is not greater than that of the
Welsh, and yet how poetical is each race to the core!
With regard to languages—to survive will in the present century mean to
spread. Languages that do not spread will be crushed out. People who
talk glibly about the vast expansion of the English language all over the
world do not seem to realize that it is not the excellence of a tongue
which makes it survive and causes it to spread over the earth, but the
energy, military or commercial, of the people who speak it. It is not
the excellence of the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton that has carried
it all round the globe, but the busy energy of the commonplace people who
migrated for the most commonplace ends imaginable, and took the language
with them, and then increased and multiplied, building up new
English-speaking communities. It is for this reason that the English
language seems destined to become, if not the “universal language,” at
least the _lingua franca_ of the world. And nothing is more pathetic
than to observe the dread among Continental nations that this will be the
case in the future; and nothing is more humorous than the passionate
attempts to invent artificial languages, Volapük, Esperanto and what not,
to do the work that the English language is already doing all over the
sea, and will, apparently, soon be doing all over the land.
I dwell here upon this interesting subject in order to say that if Welsh
does not survive it will not be because it is not a fine language, but
simply because Destiny has decreed that it shall share the fate of many
another language spoken at present much more widely than Welsh.
III
IS NOT “WILD WALES” WRITTEN BY A CELT AND NOT BY AN ANGLO-SAXON?
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