Clarence W. Wachner

In my large collection of old textbooks, a few stand out because their likes are no longer used in today’s schools. They represent topics, practices, or approaches that would be valuable it they were reinstated. Clarence Wachner’s General Language is such a book.

Subtitled English and Its Foreign Relations, it is divided into two sections, “Our Language,” and “Languages of the World.” It was designed to inform students about the nature of their own language and its relation to other languages in global communication. Interns working under my direction in 1968-69 used it as the basis for a unit of study for eighth graders in a university laboratory school.

It included chapters on the nature of language, communication through signs and symbols, the development of writing, the use of dictionaries, place-names in the US, families of languages (especially Indo-European languages), the history of English, and the perceived need for a world language such as Esperanto. I always enjoyed working with students on special projects in which they compiled their own research on surnames and given names, street names and subdivision names, trade names, botanical terms, the naming of planets, constellations, months and days of the week, and the like. One of the purposes behind such projects was to develop a thorough understanding of the differences between denotation and connotation and the human element in language change.

Though English or language arts is almost always a required subject all the way from kindergarten to college, it is surprising how little students learn about the nature of language, the way language develops and changes, and the interesting stories behind words, names, and idiomatic expressions.

I think this part of the book would be written better and would include more relevant topics if it were still produced today; for example, it would now include chapters on ebonics, on social and regional dialects, on English as an official or legally mandated language, on gender and language, on the languages of advertising and politics, on slang and socially unacceptable language, on name-calling and linguistic discrimination, and many other such topics.

The second part of General Language introduces the study of foreign languages, with chapters on German, Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, Polish, Arabic, and languages of the Far East. All students should learn to speak at least one foreign language. If they did, they would understand their own language better and, even more important, that would learn how difficult it is—impossible, in fact—to produce an exact translation of ideas from one language to another, especially with regard to idiomatic expressions and the emotional associations of words and phrases.

These chapters on foreign languages were helpful in helping students decide which foreign language they might want to study in high school or college. In fact, for French, Spanish, and German, there were about two weeks’ worth of beginning lessons in each language. For all the languages, students learned something about their special features (for example, musical terms in Italian, root words and suffixes from Latin and Greek, Arabic and Roman numerals, and the like). They learned where the languages are spoken and some basic communication needs if one traveled in these countries, as well as the contributions that each made to the vocabulary of English.

Conspicuously missing, of course, are sections on African languages and on the languages of indigenous peoples, such as native Americans, the Maori in New Zealand, and the like. Today, undoubtedly such a flaw would be corrected.

Unfortunately, this book was never widely used and, to my knowledge, has completely disappeared from the market. Nothing is more basic to the educated person than an understanding of language (and languages). What a shame that “general language” is not a required and exciting study in all our schools.… (meer)