Some time ago I came upon this little tidbit of info: that during the debates over the United States Constitution in the 1780s, disgust for the British was so intense that a proposal was advanced to ditch English and adopt some nice pseudodead dialect as the new nation’s official language. Is this true? If so, can you confirm that Hebrew was seriously considered as a replacement but came one vote shy of being adopted? –Terrence Levine, Mount Royal, Quebec
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Hebrew the national language? Oy, such meshugaas you talk. (And yes, Cecil knows the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish.) There was some discussion just after the revolution about switching to a language other than English, but it’s not known how serious this was–probably not very. Nonetheless there’s a 150-year-old legend that English was almost replaced, not by Hebrew but German. Supposedly it lost by one vote, cast by a German-speaking Lutheran minister named Frederick Muhlenberg. Some say the vote took place in the Pennsylvania legislature and that Muhlenberg voted against it because he didn’t want Pennsylvania to be isolated from the rest of the nation. Another version, commonly heard in Germany, says the proposal would have passed except that a German-speaking legislator went to the toilet at the crucial moment.
The Muhlenberg story was widely publicized by Franz Loher in his 1847 History and Achievements of the Germans in America. He wrongly set the event in the Pennsylvania legislature, over which Muhlenberg had previously presided, and also wrongly claimed that Muhlenberg was reviled by his fellow German speakers for selling them out. Germans did get on Muhlenberg’s case for later casting the deciding vote in favor of the Jay Treaty, which was viewed as anti-German; his brother-in-law stabbed him, and he lost the next election, in 1796. Loher conflated this genuine controversy with the trivial language debate, and the legend has survived ever since.
