Martinsburg herald. [volume] (Martinsburg, W. Va.) 1881-1920, 1903-02-28
CwHICAC0THE NEWBABEL
Professor Buck Finds Forty
Tongues Spoken There.
IT SURPRISES coEsTAETIEoPLE

University investigator Reveals
Amazing Facts In Regard TO ror-
eign Population OF the .syyirdy
City Newspapers In Ten Lam
gunmea and Church Services Held
In About Twenty.
Constantinople. with its mature rep
utation as the first Cosmopolitan city
Of the world. will now please pass the
palm to Chicago. says the Chicago
Tribune. As an Illustration of a be-
wildering mclanse Of races the sultan's
capital may be good enough for -
comparative degree. but for The supe-
latlye there Is now none but Chicago.
SO says a University OF Chicago pro-
fossor. Carl Darling Buck Of the com
paratlve pathology department, ii a
pamphlet the publication OF which
was announced recently as a part OF
the series Of decennial publications.
The pamphlet Is entitled "a Sketch OF
the Linguistic Conditions Of Chlcages
and awards first honora IN c~osmopolis
tanism 60 Chicago on the score OF there
being fourteen languages besides ling
lish spoken BY permanent colonies OF
more thar 10000 persons each and In
all some forty different tongues.
Professor Buck disposcs Of the claims
of ConstantlnopIe aud Cairo In d single
paragraph. Their cosmopolitanlsm IL
merely transient, while that OF Chicago
Is enduring. Travellers who have gone
into ecstasies over the spectacle of the
hordes and hor,ies OF strange vlsagcd
races tramping all day the riclsety old
bridge of the Golden Horn between
STEAMBOAT and Galata may know that
Chicago holds d dozen such quarters
where The confusion OF tongues is the
worst since Babel.
la fact. Professor Buck calls the I'm
gnistic situation which obtains Ia CHI
cago San unparalleled babel OF foreign
tongues" and them he continues:
II say unparalleled babel with aIi
due regard to claims OF Constantinople.
Cairo and other cities Of the orient.
past and present. In Constantinoplc.
with the heterogeneous constituency Of
the army and the harem, augmented by
the ranks of European officials and
visitors, the number of languages rep
resented may on occasion be as great
as In New York or Chicago. But 1t
must be remembered that only a few
of these languages are spoken by large
bodies of the population. whereas IN
Chicago there are some fourteen ian
guages besides lsusl " osell which
ia spoken by 1890 l3s ;
Newspapers appear
languages. and church services
heard in about twenty languages.
"Chicago Is the second largest Hose~
milan city In the world, the third Swed-
ish, the third Norwegian. the fourth
Polish. the fifth German, New York
being the fourth. In all there are some
forty foreign languages spoken by
numbers, ranging from half u dozen TO
half a million and a~ggregating ove O
Million
Professor Buck carried on his invesu-
cations by temporary residence in the
various colonies In Chicago, which are
really little cities within the metropo-
lis, each speaking it's own language.
clinging to Its hereditary customs and
In large part governing itself. Besides
the numbered statistics which he col
lected he studied the linguistic condi-
tons of the second and third genera
tons Of foreign born persons, finding
that the children Of immigrants gener-
ally speak English as well as their ma
tive tongue, but that the grandchildren
as a rule never learn the foreign IAN
guage and speak only English.
Here are the nationalities which Pro-
fessor Buck found IN the city and the
approximate number OF persons speak