Dead Methods in Modern Languages There is another fallacy which requires a brief notice. There is a certain school of educationalists who have a strong conviction of the great value of the study of Greek and Latin as a means of training the mind: many of them, indeed, when reminded of the fact that the majority of those who learn these languages at school never acquire even an elementary practical knowledge of them, reply that this really does not matter much, as they still get the benefit of the mental training. Those who hold these views also urge the convenience of the study of dead languages which is the result of not having to attend to pronunciation, and having to deal only with a limited literature which has been thoroughly worked up for educational purposes. Many of them further believe that the present methods of teaching modern languages have the contrary effect of weakening the mind and making it more superficial. Some of them think this is inherent in the nature of modern languages. Others, more liberal-minded, think that the fault lies in the methods of instruction. They argue that if modern languages were taught like dead languages, they would have the same beneficial effect on the mind. Hence instead of assimilating the study of dead to that of modern languages, we are advised to reverse the process. These views are often further combined with antiquarian and etymological fallacies. Thus I was once told by an American pupil of the late Professor Zupitza, of Berlin, that it was a mistake to suppose that Zupitza was not interested in Modern English literature; that, in fact, he had been lecturing on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, but in a more scientific spirit than a purely literary specialist. It turned out that this superiority consisted in his making his pupils translate the beginning of the drama into Anglo-Saxon so as duly to impress on them the continuity of the language! There is something very unreal about this 'dead-alive' philology. Some-often insignificant-modern text is taken, and elaborately commented upon with a long historical and critical introduction, and elaborate notes are added on points of grammar, etymology, style, and perhaps metre, the editor not being conscious of the absurdity of teaching metre without a previous knowledge of phonetics on the part of the students. The text is hardly ever genuinely colloquial, and is often antiquated, so that the method practically means teaching one language by means of another language. It is not that this kind of study is necessarily objectionable in itself; but it is not the thing to begin with-it should come at the very end, not at the beginning of the course. The reader may be reminded once more that the question whether the study of dead or of modern languages affords the best training for the mind is one which has nothing to do with the question, which is the best way of learning languages. The only question we have to deal with is whether the extension of the old methods of studying dead languages to the study of living languages would make the acquisition of the latter easier. Our answer to this question must be an unhesitating negative. CHAPTER XVIII ORIENTAL LANGUAGES THE study of the Oriental and of the other remoter languages has many analogies with that of dead languages. In the first place, the inaccessibility of these languages, and the difficulty of obtaining native teachers, generally obliges the beginner to approach them from the point of view of the study of dead languages. Secondly, in these languages the true colloquial element is generally even more inaccessible than in European languages, and the divergence between it and the written language is nearly always much greater: classical and vulgar Arabic, written and spoken Japanese, are distinct, mutually unintelligible languages, which have to be treated in separate handbooks and grammars. Even the books which profess to deal with the colloquial form of these languages often give only an approximation to the true colloquial. Thus Green's Practical Arabic Grammar, which 'was originally undertaken to meet the requirements of English officers in Egypt,' gives a language which is a mixture of classical with modern Egyptian and Syrian Arabic, containing forms which would be quite unintelligible to an uneducated Egyptian, such as haza, 'this' (classical hādā), the learner's confusion being further increased by the occasional insertion of texts in the classical form. Yet this book-which is mainly on the Ahn plan-has lived through at least three editions (third edition 1893). Under these circumstances the learner is often obliged to master a dead form of the language as the only stepping-stone to its colloquial form. When the colloquial language is split up into a number of local dialects which are often practically independent languages, the unity of the literary language is certainly an inducement to beginning with it; thus classical or literary Arabic is the only link by which the different 'vulgar' Arabic dialects of Syria, Egypt, Marocco, etc., can be realized as variations of one language. But when we have really practical guides to the genuinely colloquial forms of each living dialect or language, the only rational course will be to begin with one definite modern dialect, and then work back to the literary language. To learn classical Arabic as a preparation for modern Egyptian Arabic, or written as a preparation for spoken Japanese, would then be as absurd as to learn Latin as a preparation for the practical study of modern Italian. Adherence to Native Methods One of the greatest external hindrances to the study of Oriental languages is the adherence to the native methods of exposition and the native terminology in each language. It is evident that a method which suits an Oriental may not suit a European. Indeed, we may go a step further, and say that a method which suits the one is tolerably certain not to suit the other. To the Oriental 'time is no object,' for he can give his life to his one object of study-the literary form of his own language-which, besides, he already knows to some extent. To him, writing and learning grammar merely means writing and analyzing something that he is already partially familiar with. He learns to read his own crabbed and defective alphabet with comparative ease, not only because he has plenty of time to give to the study, but also because the solution of each orthographic riddle is more or less known to him beforehand. For the same reason in his grammars and dictionaries he can find his way through an abstract and complicated arrangement which baffles the foreign learner, to whom the matter is as unfamiliar as the form. The difficulties of terminology are alone a serious obstacle. Thus, in Arabic the unhappy beginner is expected from the first to remember the three short vowels by their Arabic names fatha, kasra, damma, and has, besides, to remember a number of other technical terms relating to orthography and pronunciation which are not clearly explained to him, and even then are difficult to understand and remember-and all this in addition to having to learn a new alphabet. When the learner has at last mastered sixteen or more pages of orthographic absurdities, he has not learnt a single fact about the language itself. The details of Hebrew orthography-which take up nearly twenty-two pages in the very brief grammar of Strackare even more repulsive and irritating to any one used to a rational method of learning languages. One cannot blame the scribes who evolved these preposterous orthographic complexities for they knew no better; although it is a pity that when the Arabs borrowed their system of writing from a Christian people, they did not adopt the Coptic instead of the Syriac alphabet. But there is no reason why European learners should be hampered with them just at the time when they require to be able to give their undivided attention to the very real difficulties that encounter them in the language itself. So also it is excusable in the Chinese that they regard the addition of a stopped consonant to a vowel as a kind of tone, because the peculiar character of their writing made it possible for them to dispense with any minute analysis of sounds; but it is nevertheless annoying to look up a Chinese word or 'character' in a dictionary, and then to be told merely that it has the 'entering' tone (zip fin), or, in plain English, that it ends in some one of the stopped consonants t, k, p; the result being that unless we know how the word is pronounced in those modern Chinese dialects which still keep the final stops, and are able to check their often conflicting evidence by knowing the pronunciation of some word given as a rhyme to our word, we are left in an unpleasant state of uncertainty as to its pronunciation. In many Oriental languages the same difficulties of unnecessary technicality and confused statements follow us through the grammar and dictionary. Everywhere a new terminology and new arrangements, which have to be learnt over again in each language. Hence even Sanskrit, which in itself is not more difficult than Latin, and whose alphabet is remarkably rational and phonetic in spite of its complexity, was at first considered unattainable by Europeans. Texts The want of texts suitable for beginners is as keenly felt in Oriental as in dead languages. There are few of them that can show such a collection of comparatively simple and colloquial |