Cree language

“ Neither were Latin and Greek introduced into our schools for the sake of training the pupils in logic, no matter how much it may occasionally be insisted upon that exactly this is their real value. But it is not necessary to waste many words on this matter, especially since all competent classical scholars—also those who insist upon a privileged position for the classical languages in our schools—have long ago given up as unscholarly the idea that the Latin (or Greek) language should be more logical in construction than, for [7] instance, French or English. ”

“ Its scholars are beginning to see that the idea of classical Greek ever becoming a universal language for men of culture is a vain dream, and that a nation’s speech, like its life, must undergo continual modification. ”

“ The mass of boys who now learn nothing because Greek and Latin mean nothing to them, would gladly assimilate something which would be useful to them in after life: for instance, some smattering of their own history, some mastery of the English tongue, or the knowledge of a modern language. ”

“ It is civilization which counteracts the natural tendency to multiply dialects, and which is ever striving to absorb the manifold dialects that exist into a single tongue. All the social conditions of civilized life tend to break down dialects, to assimilate languages, and to create a common medium of intercourse. A common government, a common literature, a common history and a common law, all require a common language. The Macedonian Empire made Greek the language of the East, and Rome effectually stamped out the various idioms of its subjects in the West. ”

“ Intermarriages had, however, taken place to a great extent; from which, and the daily intercourse with the natives, a species of language came to be spoken which was currently called French, but which might, certainly with equal propriety, be called Cherokee. Of course this new tongue modified itself with the exigencies of those who spoke it; and as the French ingredient declined, the Milesian preponderated, till at length it became far more Irish than French.
Nothing assists barbarism like a dialect adapted to its own wants. ”

“ To start with the practice of speaking will facilitate the acquisition of a new language under any system of pronunciation; only this must distinctly be said, that the scholar who has learned to read Greek with a vocalisation and an accentuation invented by himself for himself has deliberately cut himself off from all intelligible communion with the people whose literary tradition he values so highly, and with whom to maintain a familiar intercourse, both in a political and a literary point of view, should be no secondary consideration with the wise. ”

“ The modern Greek declines innumerable words which formerly belonged to different declensions after the type of ταμίας, turning βασιλέας, ἄνδρας, and the like, into nominatives singular, and in the English which is unchecked by a literary tradition I comed is already more common than I came. Analogy is constantly at work throughout the whole domain of language—in pronunciation, in formal grammar, in syntax, and in sematology—building up and reconstructing what phonetic decay and change of meaning have tended to pull down. ”

“ Dialect, as is proven by Burns, Lowell, Riley, Dunbar, often gets nearer the heart than the language of the schools is able to do, and for home-spun philosophy, for mother-wit, for folk-lore, and for racial humor, for whatever is quaint and peculiar and native in any people, it is the only proper medium. Poets of the finest art from Theocritus to Tenny{219}son have so used it. Genius here as elsewhere will direct the born poet and instruct him when to use dialect and when the language that centuries of tradition have refined and standardized and encrusted with poetic associations. ”

“ They borrowed all words in ph, ch and th from the Greeks. We have preserved the characters, but have mostly lost the aspirate; ph has invariably the sound of f; ch, in Greek derivatives, generally that of k; and th has become the representative of two simple consonants. With this change of pronunciation, the orthography should have changed; philosophy should now be written filosofy; and chorus, korus; th might become a single character and be called Eth. [F]
But it was the fate of our language to be shaken by violent revolutions, and abandoned to accident or the caprice of unskillful heads. ”

“ It is a common error in etymology to endeavor the deriving all the radical words of our western European languages from the Latin and Greek; or indeed to derive constantly the primitives of any one language from any particular tongue. When we do this, we seem to forget that all have been subject to alterations; and that the greater and more polite any nation is, the more subject, (partly for improvement, and partly out of a luxurious wantonness) to new model their language. ”

“ As philology grew up into a systematic body of knowledge, it centered its first interests on Latin and Greek, then on Sanskrit and the other older Indo-European languages. These happened to have inflective processes unusually well developed. They also happened to be the languages from which the native speech of the philologists was derived. What is our own seems good to us; consequently Indo-European was elevated into the highest or inflective class of languages. As a sort of after-thought, Semitic, which includes Hebrew, the language of part of our Scriptures, was included. ”

“ But every person with the slightest pretence to education spoke Greek. Greek was universally the State language, and the exclusive language of all literature and science, It formed also for the merchant, the trader, and the traveller, as well as for the courtier, the government official, and the soldier, the organ of intercommunication among the myriads of mankind inhabiting these large portions of the Old World. ”

“ The absurdity of assuming that the student of Philology could separate a single language or dialect from the group to which it belongs, that he could isolate Anglo-Saxon from Gothic, or Middle English from Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic of the Cymbry from the Celtic of the Gaels, is not greater than to assume that the study of our Literature can be severed from the study of those literatures which stand in precisely the same relation to it as one of those dialects stands to the others in the same group. ”

“ The Greek καλέω and the English call have as little connection as the Latin sanguis and the Mongol sengui, “blood,” or the modern Greek mati for ὀμμάτιον, and the Polynesian mata, “an eye.” To compare words of different languages together because they agree in sound is to contravene all the principles of scientific philology; agreement of sound is the best possible proof of their want of connection, [348] since each language has its own phonology and consequently modifies the forms of words in a different fashion. ”

“ It is an interesting question connected with the subject of style, whether a knowledge of other languages is necessary to give an English writer a full command of his own. Among the arguments urged in behalf of the study of Greek and Latin in our colleges, one of the commonest is the supposed absolute necessity of a knowledge of those tongues to one who would speak and write his own language effectively. The English language, we are reminded, is a composite one, of whose words thirty per cent are of Roman origin, and nearly five per cent of Greek ”

“ What we are accustomed to call languages, the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and Spain, must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of speech. The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, and in spite of the tyranny exercised by the classical or literary idioms, the day is still very far off which is to see the dialects, even of such classical languages as Italian and French, entirely eradicated. ”

“ But the Greek has no such precise rules ; and hence any literal translation of a Greek author is full of tautology. The tendency of modern languages is to become more correct as well as more perspicuous than ancient. And, therefore, while the English translator is limited in the power of expressing relation or con- nexion, by the law of his own language increased pre- cision and also increased clearness are required of him. The familiar use of logic, and the progress of science, have in these two respects raised the standard. ”

“ We can do even more. Suppose we had no remnants of Latin; suppose the very existence of Rome and of Latin were unknown to us; we might still prove, on the evidence of the six Romance dialects, that there must have been a time when these dialects formed the language of a small settlement; nay, by collecting the words which all these dialects share in common, we might, to a certain extent, reconstruct the original language, and draw a sketch of the state of civilization, as reflected by these common words. The same can be done if we compare Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Slavonic. ”

“ This idea of a universal grammar was due partly to the influence of an age which believed the ultimate analyses of logic to represent the thoughts of primitive [34] man, partly to the unmethodical comparison of a variety of languages, some ancient, some modern, and some as unrelated to one another as Greek and Hebrew. But it was also in some measure the result of a revived study of the old Greek theories about language. ”

“ If it could be a scientific question which of the two is the elder sister, Greek or Latin, Latin, I believe, could produce better claims of seniority than Greek. Now, as in the modern history of language we are able to explain many things that are obscure in French and Italian by calling in the Provençal, the Spanish, the Portuguese, nay, even the Wallachian and the Churwälsch, we can do the same in the ancient history of language, and get light for many things which are difficult and unintelligible in Greek and Latin, by consulting Sanskrit, Zend, Gothic, Irish, and even Old Bulgarian. ”

“ Thus were synonyms and homonyms destroyed, and thus was shown the impossibility of really translating one word into another, from so-called dialect into so-called language, and from a so-called mother-tongue into a so-called foreign tongue.
But the attempt to classify languages agrees ill with this correct view. Languages have no reality beyond the propositions and complexes of propositions really written and pronounced by given peoples for definite periods. That is to say, they have no existence outside the works of art, in which they exist concretely. ”

“ The pronunciation is ruled by the practice of the present, not by philological facts or fancies as to the pronunciation of the past. No doubt, as Heraclitus says, πάντα ῥεῖ, all things flow, as in the universe, so in language, there is no fixation—there is always change. But the changes which take place in living languages, like English or Greek, are of a very different kind from those which take place when a language like Latin becomes dead, and rises to a new life in the form of such specific varieties as Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. ”

“ If there is no authority for accent in the ancient grammarians, then as little is there for quantity. The fact of the existence of the one as a living characteristic of the spoken [Pg 49] and written language of ancient Greece, stands exactly on the same foundation as the other. ”

“ It must be borne in mind also, with how much greater ease a living language can be acquired than a dead one; so that were it only for the sake of the speedy mastery of the ancient dialect, a thorough practical familiarity with the spoken tongue ought first to be cultivated. The present practice, indeed, of teaching Greek in our schools and colleges, altogether as a dead language, can be regarded only as a great scholastic mistake ”

“ No ancient Greek ever thought of learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian neighbors. He considered it a privilege to speak Greek, and even dialects closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express oneself in any but one's own language. ”

“ We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome. ”

“ Diversity can exist solely in the means, and within the bounds permitted by the attainment of the end." Yet this same diversity becomes a real divergence not only in sounds, but in the use of sound made by the linguistic sense in respect to the form of language, or rather, in respect to its own idea of the form of the determinate language. "Languages being merely formal, the operation of the linguistic sense by itself should produce mere uniformity; the linguistic sense must exact from every tongue the same right and legitimate construction that is found in one of them. ”