G.B.S. on a Joy Ride

THE MIRACULOUS BIRTH OF LANGUAGE (256 pp.)--Richard A. Wilson--Philosophical Library ($3.75).

The principal excuse for publishing this work in the U.S. is the introduction that goes with it. Since the old party who wrote the introduction is George Bernard Shaw, no further excuse is necessary.

In addition to being a playwright, music critic, economist and socialist soapboxer, Shaw has long fancied himself an amateur biologist. When Darwinian doctrine swept England like a Caribbean storm, Shaw thought it a creed "compared to which the" story of Noah was cheerful and encouraging," and-stoutly fought against Darwin's claim that there was no purposive mind behind the universe. Even those who thought he lost the battle of science should readily admit that he wins the battle of wits, hands down.

Evolution and English. "Imagine my delight," said Shaw when he received an inscribed first edition of Professor Wilson's rather heady treatise. Wilson, before getting down to the origins and philosophy of languages, had rehearsed the old controversy of natural selection v. creative evolution, the better to drub the Darwinians. Full of youthful enthusiasm, 91-year-old Shaw sat down to write a 36-page introduction for a new edition of Professor Wilson's study in which he proves, if nothing else, that he can still write the liveliest prose of any man alive. He takes the reader on a joy ride, part serious and part clowning, rambling about the evils of Darwinism, the horrors of English grammar and the need-for a new alphabet.

With mock horror, Shaw recalls the dreadful results of Darwinism. Having once rejected the fundamentalist notion that "the universe is the work of a grotesque tribal idol described in the book of Numbers as God, who resolves to destroy the human race, but is placated by the smell of roast meat," the Darwinians decided that "the 39 articles were reduced to absurdity . . . Hell was abolished. Jehovah was exposed as an impostor whose real name was Jarvey . . . Talk of emptying the baby out with the bath! . . . Herod's massacre of the innocents was a joke in comparison."

And once the babies had been emptied, "vivisectors claimed that science acknowledged no morals; plutocrats held that business is business and nothing else; Anacreontic writers put vine leaves in their hair and drank or drugged themselves to death . . . bright young things daubed their cheeks with paint and their nails and lips with vermilion, made love to soldiers, kept up their spirits with veronal tablets, and changed into battered old demireps in their twenties . . ."

Caesar's Fault. Shaw seems just to be getting up full steam on Darwinism when he jumps the track and chugs off on a discussion of the English language. "An intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it det, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelt the Latin word for it with a b."

Shaw's solution is the reform of the language and the creation of a new alphabet "with 24 new consonants and 18 new vowels" and based on the rule of "One Sound One Letter." The layman, he warns, will resist change to the death; after having gone to the trouble of learning to spell cough and tough, he will not agree to relearn them even as cof and tuf.

"Englishmen may yet kill one another and bomb their cities into ruin to decide whether v-a-s-e spells vawz or vaiz . . . We shall agree that h-e-i-g-h-t is an orthographic monstrosity; but when it is abolished and we have to decide whether the official pronunciation shall be hite or hyth, there will probably be a sanguinary class war . . ."

After 36 pages of this, poor old Professor Wilson and his earnest, 201-page discussion just don't have a chance.

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