Language, liberty and the English of our dictionaries

"LANGUAGE", WALTER Bagehot grandly declared, "is the tradition of nations." And what, precisely, would one learn about the English from contemplating their language? Most significantly that they cherish liberty; not the French codified or the German goosestepping kind, but individual liberty.

The arch English-speaker is Humpty Dumpty, with his assertion that words mean what he wants them to mean. One cannot imagine a French or a German egg saying that. The British hate rules, no more so than in how they speak, or should speak. We love dictionaries because, unlike academies, they do not legislate, they merely describe. They are not rule books but maps to an exciting, newly explored territory.

This month sees the publication of two such lexical maps, The New Oxford Dictionary of English and the revised Chambers Dictionary. They are rivals and the stakes are high. An authoritative dictionary, like the Bible, Spock or Shakespeare, will become not just a bestseller but a long seller for decades. But a successful dictionary requires daunting investment: the NODE, we are told, was six years in the making and cost pounds 6m. It seems a lot, until you realise that, monumental as the achievement is, it stands on the shoulders of the 12-volume original New English Dictionary, which took 70 years (1856-1926) to assemble at 10 times the cost.

OUP's publicity department knew that they would get front-page publicity by announcing that from yesterday, you are allowed to split infinitives - official. The "split-infinitive" news release was rather naughty on Oxford's part - it's not the role of dictionaries (certainly not a dictionary founded on descriptive principles, like the NODE), to lay down the law. And anyway, for the record, the split infinitive was quietly given the green light two years ago, in Sidney Greenbaum's Oxford English Grammar (1996). In a remote subsection, Greenbaum demonstrated conclusively that there are sentences in which the infinitive "must be split". For example, this from an Any Questions programme: "Certainly all members of the panel here tonight are too young to really remember the World War". Move "really" around the sentence (really too young, really to remember) and you have palpably different meanings. As Greenbaum also pointed out, adherence to the prohibition on split infinitive was, like so much in the English language, a class thing. In Latin, infinitives are single compound words. To divide them is un-Latin. Who cares about Latin? The public school types who rule us. Splitting infinitives is the victory of the Gas Works Secondary Modern over Eton.

There is, as George Orwell never tired of pointing out, something inherently healthy in the anarchic richness of the English language. Totalitarian societies regulate language because they want to regulate thought (Stalin, one should remember, was a world-class linguist as well as a tyrant). Impoverish and systematise language and you lobotomise the population. With no great ideological agenda, but sensible intuition, the English treasure the irrationality of English - the sheer lunacy of such locutions as: "he chopped the tree down, and then he chopped it up" (we can, in these free and easy times, end sentences with a preposition; and I don't even have to feel guilty about not saying "we may"). George Bernard Shaw left a sizeable portion of his wealth to the cause of rationalising English spelling. All in vain: it would make sense to spell "government' "guvment' - and it would certainly make primary school less arduous. But we love the eccentricity of "plough", "rough" and "through" all spelled the same and spoken differently. It makes us feel freer people.

Languages which derive from a single linguistic root (like Italian, Spanish or Greek) are generally poor in duplicates and synonyms. English - enriched by waves of foreign invasion - is extraordinarily rich in words ostensibly meaning the same thing. It's not just redundancy. As Walter Scott pointed out, cow and beef (French boeuf), sheep and mutton (French mouton), pig and pork (French porc) contain within them a little oppression narrative. The Normans saw the meat on the table, the Saxons tended the animals in the field. The split between Latinate and Saxon words (fellatio/ knob- gobble) derives from the dominance of a literate clerisy in the Catholic church over the illiterate masses. As Nancy Mitford pointed out in the 1950s, with U and non-U usages (napkin, or serviette?), English polysemy - or multiple-wordedness - permits an inexhaustible resource of class nuance. The English language is not just the nation's history but its sociology.

So it's in order to whole-heartedly rejoice in another addition to our linguistic freedom - or is it? The NODE sees its lexical territory inexorably expanding - there are 2,000 new expressions in its pages defining the social lineaments of the 1990s, from alcopop, through Blairism and bonkbuster, to sleaze. English is getting richer in words and freer in usage all the time.

The richness, redundancy and complexity of English is wonderful for wordsmiths, but not necessarily good for those who need to avoid ambiguity. The reason that French is traditionally the lingua franca of diplomacy is that it is essentially unambiguous (although De Gaulle perpetrated one of history's most famous pieces of double-talk with "je vous ai entendu", that the pieds-noir thought was "I have understood you" not, "I have listened to you").

In many situations ambiguity can be not just confusing but disastrous. Say "look out!" when the train is hurtling towards a narrow tunnel and your companion may get his bead knocked off (the French "attention!", or German "Achtung!" would be much safer). Law requires a disambiguated terminology. So do computers. English is, with the collapse of the USSR and until China comes on the scene, the only world language. This primacy will be consolidated, for the next decade at least, by the explosive growth of the Internet - 80 per cent of whose transactions are in English. But, like the communications of air traffic controllers (who have also standardised on English) the Internet needs disambiguated English. It's odds on that over the next few years, within the vast seething jungle of English as she is spoke and described in the NED we shall see an inner core of English- Esperanto evolve - what in the 1930s, C.K. Ogden and I.A Richards called "Basic English" and Orwell lampooned as 1984's "Newspeak". And with it, of course, will come all those rules that we hate so much and possibly even an academy to impose them.