CHAPTER, VII BEGIN WITH THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE THE second main axiom of living philology is that all study of language, whether theoretical or practical, ought to be based on the spoken language. The distinction between the literary and the colloquial form of the same language has considerably complicated the problem of learning languages. This distinction is not solely the result of the use of writing and printing, for even such unlettered savages as the Andaman islanders have an archaic poetical dialect which differs considerably from their ordinary spoken language; but writing-and, still more, printing-have naturally increased the divergence. In many Oriental languages the divergence is so great that the colloquial is no longer a mere variation of the literary form, but the two practically constitute distinct, mutually unintelligible languages. The Spoken the Source of the Written Language In European languages, where the difference is much less, most grammarians tacitly assume that the spoken is a mere corruption of the literary language. But the exact contrary is the case it is the spoken which is the real source of the literary language. We may pick out the most far-fetched literary words and forms we can think of, but we shall always find that they are derived from the colloquial speech of an earlier period. Even such forms as thou hast, he hath, were ordinary colloquialisms a few centuries ago, though they now survive only as fossil, dead colloquialisms side by side with the living colloquialisms you have, he has. Every literary language is, in fact, a mixture of colloquialisms of different periods. Every literary language must indeed in its first beginnings be purely colloquial. It is certainly difficult to realize that such a language as the classical Italian of Dante and Petrarch was originally nothing but a rough attempt to write down what were then considered the slovenly colloquialisms of Late Latin; but nevertheless such is the origin not only of Italian, but of all the other Romance languages as well. The tradition of the origin of Italian is still kept up in the word for 'translate,' namely volgarizzare, literally 'make popular.' Accordingly, it is now an axiom not only of Romance philology, but of philology generally, that the real life of language is better seen in dialects and colloquial forms of speech than in highly developed literary languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Practical Considerations Important as this principle is from a scientific point of view, it is still more so from a practical one, and for the following reasons: If we compare the written and spoken language of a given period, we shall find that the literary language is full of superfluous words and phrases, which the spoken language nearly always gets rid of. Thus in the English spoken language the idea 'sky' is expressed by this word only, while in the literary language it may also be expressed by heaven, heavens, firmament, welkin. So also the form hath was still used in literary prose in the last century in such phrases as the author hath. and it is still used in poetry and in the liturgical language of the Bible and Prayer-book, while in the spoken language the only form used is has. Again, nothing is more difficult than to give definite grammatical rules for the use of the subjunctive mood in literary English; in the spoken language the subjunctive is not used at all except in a few perfectly definite constructions, such as if it were. So also in spoken French the two most difficult tenses of the verb, the preterite indicative and subjunctive, have been supplanted by the perfect. So completely is the preterite obsolete that Passy, in his translation of the Gospel of Luke into modern French, discards it entirely, as in the beginning of the parable of the vineyard: ☎n ɔm a plããte yn viñ, i l a lwe a de viñrõ, e il e parti pur lõõtã (20. 9). According to Passy (Elementarbuch, 156), it occurs only in comic imitations of the South French dialect. Even in German the complicated rules for the inflection of proper names-Luise, gen. Luisens, Cato, Cato's, plur. Cato'ne, Leibnitz, plur. Leibnitz'e-are swept away bodily in the spoken language, which, as a general rule, does not inflect such words at all. Again, in literature the context is often vague, as in the Homeric méropes anthropoi, where méropes may mean any quality that can be predicated of men generally. So also in the Sanskrit Vēdas we have whole hymns, which, when epitomized, leave not much more than 'the bright shiner (that is, the sun) shines brightly.' In simple colloquial prose, on the other hand, the meaning of a word is generally quite clear from the context. The spoken language, too, is far stricter in its use of epithets: it hardly ever introduces an adjective or other qualifier except to convey some definite information. Thus in ordinary speech we do not talk of the bright sun' or 'the silver moon,' simply because the epithets convey no information -tell us nothing that is not already implied in the words sun and moon themselves. Even such a phrase as 'the sun shines brightly' has an uncolloquial ring about it, although it is not exactly anti-colloquial. We could say 'the moon is bright to-night,' because this really conveys information. The spoken language also prefers a simple paratactic arrangement of sentences. The complicated periods of literary prose would, indeed, often be unintelligible in speech. We see, then, that the advantage as regards clearness and definiteness is on the side of the spoken language: by starting from the spoken language we have less to learn, and we learn it accurately. Everything therefore points to the conclusion that in learned foreign languages we should follow the natural order in which we learn our own language: that is, that we should begin with learning the spoken language thoroughly, and then go on to the literary language. The psychological arguments for beginning with the spoken language are precisely analogous to those for beginning with a phonetic transcription (p. 12): if we learn the literary and the spoken language simultaneously, cross-associations are inevitable; and the only possible way of avoiding or minimizing these cross-associations is to learn the two forms of the language separately. The question, which of the two we ought to begin with, is easily answered. It is evident that our strongest and most direct associations ought to be with the spoken language, for in speaking we must have all our associations between ideas and words in perfect working order: we have no time to pick and choose our words and constructions, as when we are writing. So also when others are speaking to us, we must understand each sentence at once, or the whole statement becomes unintelligible, while in reading, as in writing, we can pause and consider as often as we like. If, then, we first get a thorough knowledge of the spoken form of the foreign language, and then proceed to learn its literary form, we shall be in exactly the same position as regards relative strength of associations as the natives themselves: we shall think in the spoken language, because our associations are directly with it, while at the same time we are able to understand the literary language, and, with a little effort at first, to write it; but we are no more able to speak the pure literary language than a native is. As it is, we too often reverse the process, and so do foreigners who learn English. They first of all imprint firmly on their memories the obsolete phraseology of the Vicar of Wakefield, or, at the best, of Washington Irving's Sketch-book, then add a few choice Shakespearisms, and finally season this heterogeneous mixture with such modern colloquialisms as they can gather from the pages of Punch and Dickens. The result is always unsatisfactory, and often leads to unintelligibility. Thus I remember a case in which a German, on being asked how a certain lady was, replied that she was (ræpt). As he tapped his forehead at the same time, the Englishman thought he meant to say that she had had a rap or knock on the head; but after a long discussion and many vain attempts to get at his meaning, it turned out that he was thinking of Shakespeare's phrase in Macbeth, 'how our partner's rapt' (= transported, in an ecstasy), and meant to convey the idea that she was out of her mind. Another foreigner, a Spaniard, was observed to speak English with perfect grammatical correctness, but with a curious old-fashioned stateliness of diction, which was at first assumed to be the natural accompaniment of the blue blood of Spain; it turned out, however, that the sole source of his colloquial English had been the dialogues in Dr. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. I remember myself that when I first began to talk German, I was complimented on the poetical diction I used. It is said that when Sir Walter Scott talked French to the ambassadors of Charles IX., they were amused and often puzzled to hear a Scotch adaptation of the language of Froissart and Joinville. CHAPTER VIII DIFFICULTIES OF LANGUAGE LEARNING a language means overcoming difficulties, and each language has its own peculiar difficulties. External Difficulties Some of the difficulties may be purely external-due not to anything in the language itself, but to the circumstances under which it is learnt. Perhaps there is a want of text-books and other helps; the beginner is perhaps met with the cheerful warning, You will have to make your own dictionary, you know.' Or there may be text-books, grammars, dictionaries in plenty, but not in the learner's native language; thus no one can learn Finnish without knowing Swedish, and to many languages Russian is the only key. The difficulties caused by the written form of the language, such as the complexity of its alphabet-which, again, may be the result of the writing being partly hieroglyphic-the ambiguity or unphonetic character of its orthography, are all purely external: Arabic is still Arabic when transcribed into Roman letters, nor is Japanese any the more Japanese for being written in a mixture of disguised hieroglyphs and syllabic alphabetic writing, both borrowed from China. No existing system of writing is anything but an external disguise borrowed from some other language: Arabic is disguised Syriac writing, and the Russian alphabet is Byzantine Greek. Relations to the Native Language There is another class of difficulties which may be regarded as partly external, partly internal-those which depend on the |