The world next week will be awash with the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, arguably — with Isaac Newton — the most influential scientist it has known. Most of us today accept his theory of evolution through survival of the fittest as incontrovertible fact.

I don’t doubt it. Yet I do question, as I look at the birds outside my window, why it pays the English robin to have a bright red breast and equally bold behaviour, yet the sparrow to be inconspicuous, when the two live in exactly the same environment. And it strikes me that the evolution of our language both obeys Darwin’s theory and raises similar questions.

For centuries, European culture was dominated by Latin. Whatever their local everyday language, intellectuals wrote in Latin. They thus reached other learned men across almost all of their known world. Notably, the Bible was written in Latin, though it had begun life in Hebrew and Greek. For the religious, Latin was their normal speech.

This monopoly began to collapse with the first translations of the Bible into vernacular languages. Parts were translated into English from the eighth century on, but the real impetus came in 1520-1540: complete Bibles in German, Dutch, French and English were produced and, above all, printed, which meant wide circulation.

Yet, Latin was not dead. Newton’s theory of gravity was first set out in Latin, in his Principia Mathematica, as late as 1687. By then, English versions of the Bible had long since triumphed. Yet Latin remained the language of science: in that same 1687, a German savant caused a scandal by proposing a university lecture at Leipzig in German. In the 19th century, however, even in the early 20th, German was the leading scientific language.

Today, English holds that place worldwide, just as it dominates worldwide communication. French too, once the tongue of Europe’s diplomats and known by much of its upper class, is now giving way to English even in the European Union.

For its own sake

Why? “Survival of the fittest” is half an answer. First Britain dominated the globe, then the United States of America. To get on in their world, especially in business, English was almost essential (though, bar Mussolini, the big 20th-century dictators did without).

Yet, English is a pig of a language. It has lost most of the oddities of gender, but its plurals and verb forms are wildly irregular, its pronunciation haphazard, its spelling a quagmire. Here is a language that has plainly not evolved to meet users’ needs. Given a choice, who would propose it as fit for the world?

Equally, why are the various forms of English what they are? Here it is nearer to Darwin. Like his finches in the Galapagos Islands, each has developed differently, in its own environment. The pressure is for understanding, and acceptance, by one’s peers. Hence got for Britons and Indians, gotten for Americans. And, more significantly, jargon for groups, be they physicists or fashion-writers. That the public can’t follow it, why bother? Indeed, as with mediæval church Latin, that makes the in-group look cleverer.

Yet the analogy holds only so far. Why does slang change, for instance? Or the clichés of journalism? Maybe because the human race values novelty for its own sake; the mutation is valuable as such, merely by being a mutation. We aren’t quite like finches after all.

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I owe readers an apology. Rewriting my article two weeks ago, I reread the result carelessly, and at one point ended up implying, contrary to the rest of the piece, that such phrases as to Jack and me (as against to Jack and I) were wrong. Of course, they are not. I was.