Greetings all:
This has all been a highly entertaining correspondence. I have withheld so far, but may draw now what German Philologists might call a Bilanz?
1. Everyone agrees that English is of remarkably various origin, both in formal grammar, past and present usage, and contemporary flexibility.
2. The English vocabulary is, among modern spoken languages, probably the richest, at least in terms of the sheer number of words or stems registered by professional lexicographers, of any currently in use around the globe.
3. Modern English is, for all its admixtures in loan-words, absorption of grammatical and lexical things from other tongues - Celtic, Latin, Norman-French, Amerindian, Hindi, Chinese and other sources - still grammatically a Germanic tongue.
4. The dialects of English, from Glasgow to New England, Saskatchewan and Australia always develop their own local lexical, orthographic and phonological formulations, and are bound to do so. That is in the nature of the Darwinian evolution of language.
5. Any attempt to "purify" English, by rejecting the Latinate or other classical roots, and to re-adopt the A-S forms, would be absurd: we might accept y-clept, y-bounden &c. in Christmas carols, but we shall not stop talking about "politics", "religion" or "sport" (of Anglo-French origin), "scoundrel" (likewise).
This is what makes English such a magnificent medium for poetry - we will concede to the Italians, Germans and Russians their supremacy in music, and to the Dutch, Renaissance Italian artists and some others, theirs in the related fields.
But precisely because of its long and richly mixed history, we can concede to none in poetry - including that of the Authorised Version of the Bible, whose anniversary we contemplate and celebrate this year.
