SUPPORTERS of OLD ENGLISH
Geþafan Ældu Englisc
This site records individuals who expressed a known, close interest in Old English and Anglo-Saxon language in terms of study, preservation and recovery. They expressed their views strongly enough to be classed as supporters or heralds of the old language.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
In 1825, the former president of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, wrote to a colleague of his pleasure on hearing of a burgeoning taste for a revival and recovery of the Anglo Saxon dialect in England. To find a modern man interested in philology is a rarity but to find a Founding Father and President of the USA with such a passion is rare indeed.
Although Law was his profession, Jefferson had a lifelong interest in linguistics, excelled at Greek and Latin, could read and write in a number of languages and spoke several; he believed that the study of ancient languages was essential to understanding the roots of modern language.
Whilst a law student in Virginia, familiarising himself with the principles of English common law, he discovered that a multitude of legal terms were sourced in Anglo Saxon language. Jefferson read the preface to a 1719 edition of John Fortescue's 15th c treatise on monarchies which suggested the usefulness of "Saxon" to anyone studying the history and terminology of English common law as well as being a valuable aid to etymology. Besides being useful, it was recognised as a delightful language.
Jefferson went on to study Old English grammar and vocabulary and came to comprehend its underlying philosophy in detail, feeling that its grammar should be simplified, the orthography fixed to settled forms and its pronunciatios facilitated by its correspondence with the characters and powers of the English alphabet.
Ironically, as a beneficiary of the Classical education 'frenzy' which overtook all aspects of Western scholarship in his youth, he clearly saw that the very same 'frenzy' which blindly awarded all rational thought to the hegemony of a Classical past, had blighted any rational study of Old English. 'Delightful' Old English had been treated like Cinderella's slipper, her elegant lines twisted and distorted this way and that by mis-directed grammarians who insisted on cramming Old English into the mould of Latin and Greek rather than recognising that it possessed its own remarkable parentage.
Although Jefferson acknowledged the perfection of Greek language in terms of Law he truly appreciated the innate flexibility of Old English for the "latitude it allowed of combining primitive words so as to produce any modification of idea desired.....although since the Norman Conquest it has received vast additions and embellishments in the Latin, Greek, French and Italian languages, yet these are but engraftments on its idiomatic stem: its original structure and syntax remain the same and can be but imperfectly understood by the mere Latin Scholar. Hence the necessity of making the Anglo-Saxon a regular branch of academic education..."
His Essay on the Angl0-Saxon Language was a critique of the importance of learning Anglo-Saxon dialects. In the "Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia," Jefferson included Anglo-Saxon as part of the proposed curriculum, placing it with the modern languages "because it is in fact that which we speak, in the earliest form in which we have knowledge of it." Jefferson was hopeful that Anglo-Saxon would "form the first link in the chain of an historical review of our language through all its successive changes to the present day."
Jefferson can be placed shoulder to shoulder with the great learned men of the 16th and 17th centuries whom he so admired: "Lambard, Parker, Spelman, Wheeloe, Wilkins, Gibson, Hickes, Thwaites, Somner, Benson, Mareschal, Elstob deserve to be ever remembered with gratitude for the Anglo-Saxon works which they have given us through the press, the only certain means of preserving and promulgating them. For a century past this study has been too much neglected..."
Another area of life too much neglected was the influence of religion whose use and mis-use of language was cause for criticism rather than cause for merit. Observing the role of the Church in propagating diktat, Jefferson became firmly anticlerical, writing in "every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty … they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon". Aelfric, as a dedicated de-mystifier and clarifier of language, may have concurred.
Jefferson was a popular and successful President, probably the perfect choice to take on the principal authorship of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
