University of Virginia Library

Mark Twain, letter of 2 June 1878 (MTHL 1:232-33).

William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An
Outline of Linguistic Science (New York: Appleton, 1875), p. 154.

Frederic William Farrar, An Essay on the Origin of Language
(London: J. Murray, 1860), pp. 86-87.

See "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in Mikhail
M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), especially pp. 61-66.

Juri M. Lotman, "The Future for Structural Poetics," Poetics 8
(1979): 505-6.

Henri Bergson poses a "law in accordance with which we will
define all broadly comic situations in general. Any arrangement of acts
and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of
life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement" (Laughter
[1900], in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1956], p. 105).

See, for example, the letter Twain wrote Bayard Taylor from
Heidelberg on 7 May 1878, when his knowledge of German was at

---

166

Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 343. See also Caryl Emerson,
"The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization
of Language," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 255.

Mark Twain, letter dated 20 March 1862, published in Keokuk
Gate City, 25 June 1862, p. 1 (reprinted in The Pattern for Mark Twain's
"Roughing It," ed. Franklin R. Rogers [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1961], p. 39).

Pidgin English was used by Indians not only to speak to
whites but also to conduct affairs with other racial groups. See J. L.
Dillard, All-American English (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 99-111.

San Francisco Morning Call, 9 July 1864 (CofC, 70).

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed.
Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade-Baskin, rev. ed.
(London: Peters Owen, 1974), pp. 11-13.

An extreme case of linguistic domination is the stock dialogue
between the boot camp drill sergeant and the new recruit. When the
former repeats a question, shouting, "I can't HEAR you!" the latter
may not respond, "But I spoke perfectly clearly"; he has no choice
but to repeat his answer even more loudly, as many times as the sergeant
elicits it.

Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
and Other Sketches (New York: Webb, 1867), pp. 58-59.

See Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns, As
Seen in the Novels and Narratives, 1855-1885 (Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1960), pp. 21-24.

For James M. Cox, The Innocents Abroad is the record of Mark
Twain's "mock-initiation" into the reality of Europe, through a process
of "illusion followed by disillusion . . . so recurrent as to be the
very mechanism of the narrator's behavior" (Mark Twain: The Fate of
Humor [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966], pp. 45-56).

The paradox is similar to the famous one in Life on the Mississippi.
To navigate the river safely, the pilot must learn to read it as a system of signs that indicate relative danger and safety. Once the

---

167

The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971-),
pp. 19-20. On Transcendentalist belief in a universal language, see
Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature
in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1981), pp. 9, 75-105, 125-26.

"Mark Twain in Paris," New York Sun, 27 January 1895, sec. 3,
p. 4 (quoted in Louis Budd, "Mark Twain Talks Mostly about Humor
and Humorists," Studies in American Humor 1 [1974]: 9).

George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 71.

Th[érèse] Bentzon, "Les Humoristes américains: Mark
Twain," Revue des deux mondes 100 (1872): 314.

In her final paragraph, speaking of Twain's works in general,
Bentzon writes: "Ce qui est intraduisible surtout, c'est ce qui fait le
principal mérite de ces bigarrures, le style original et mordant, le
tour idiomatique, le mélange bizarre et souvent pittoresque de néologie,
de patois et d'argot qu'on appelle le slang" ("Les Humoristes
américains," p. 335).

Rogers, Burlesque Patterns, p. 164, n. 7.

Translated direct discourse has the same formal appearance
as ordinary direct discourse but a different ontological status. The resistance
of foreign discourse to assimilation is suggested by the following
paradigm (in which the asterisk and question mark represent
"unacceptable" and "questionable," respectively):

For an argument that there is no nonarbitrary distinction between

---

168

John T. Krumpelmann, Mark Twain and the German Language
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953).

Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. (New
York: Harper, 1912), 2:621.

Paine thought the essay "one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of
humor . . . Mark Twain at his best" (Mark Twain: A Biography, 2:669).

The Mark Twain Papers contains an unfinished burlesque
German grammar, "German As She Is Acquired" (DV 155) (printed
in David R. Sewell, "Varieties of Language in the Writings of Mark
Twain," Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1984,
pp. 174-76).

According to a newspaper report, Twain made similar suggestions
when he spoke on Italian grammar in Florence for a British Relief
Fund benefit; see "Mark Twain to Reform the Language of Italy,"
New York Times, 10 April 1904, sec. 2, p. 1.

Mark Twain, "Italian without a Master," Harper's Weekly, 2
January 1904, 18-19.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, in The Annotated
Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New-York: Bramhall House, 1960), p. 269;
see also Gardner's extensive note on Humpty-Dumpty's semantic
logic, pp. 268-70.

Twain's translation: "REVOLVERATION IN THEATER. Paris,
27th. La Patrie has from Chicago: The cop of the theater of the opera
of Wallace, Indiana, had willed to expel a spectator which continued
to smoke in spite of the prohibition, who, spalleggiato by his
friends, tirò (Fr. tiré, Anglice pulled) manifold revolver-shots. The
cop responded. Result, a general scare; great panic among the spectators.
Nobody hurt" (WMT 24:240). (Spalleggiato means "backed" or
"supported." Otherwise the translation is jovially accurate, except
that scarica means "salvo.")

See Wilga Rivers and Mary S. Temperley, A Practical Guide to
the Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 20-23; and R. Titone, Teaching Foreign
Languages: A Historical Sketch (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 1968), pp. 33-37.

Mark Twain, Notebook 32, MTP TS, p. 12 (✝); see Alan Gribben,
Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1980), 2:269.

François Gouin, The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages,
5th ed., trans. Howard Swan and Victor Bétis (London: George
Philip & Son, 1894), p. 10.

Neither Gouin's name for his method nor his criticism of traditional

---

169