Foreign language

“ You may not be able to understand the language they speak, for many of them are foreign born, but in time you come to talk to them through the smile, the touch on the arm, or the clap of the hands, which signals are, after all, the universal language of the world. ”

“ Who will be able to teach a foreign language so well as the natives of each respective country? provided such persons have learned to comprehend the difference between the mode of production of their speech and that of their scholars. ”

“ But languages may be tempted to borrow beyond their actual needs when the foreign language and culture is higher prized than the native, and when, accordingly, the usage of such words is considered fashionable or tasteful. ”

“ Examine the adult who is supposed to have ‘learnt’ a foreign language; in the majority of cases you will find that his speech is pidgin-speech, that his sounds are wrong and wrongly distributed, that his inflexions are inaccurate, that his sentences are constructed on the model of his native language, that he uses foreign words in a way unknown to the native users of these same words. ”

“ —The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. ”

“ How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares! ”

“ I need not here point out the considerable importance to humanity of an international language—a language unconditionally accepted by everyone, and the common property of the whole world. How much time and labour we spend in learning foreign tongues, and yet when travelling in foreign countries we are, as a rule, unable to converse with other human beings in their own language. ”

“ If we compel a student to utter foreign words before he has learnt how to make the requisite foreign sounds, if we compel him to write a composition in a foreign language before he has become reasonably proficient in sentence-building, or if we compel him to talk to us in the foreign language before he has done the necessary drill-work, we are compelling him to use the pidgin form of the language. ”

“ What is the good of being educated and laboriously acquiring foreign tongues and lingoes—getting to know, for instance, what a ‘freight’ train is and what a bobolink—if I am to be prevented by a diseased patriotism from reading whatever I choose in any language I can? ”

“ In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself—where I learned to speak merely by speaking. This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching. I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time. A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand. ”

“ Yet we Europeans all know how difficult it is to distinguish apart the sounds in a foreign language. Which of us, for instance, could follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? ”

“ How much time, labour, and money are wasted in translating the literary productions of one nation into the language of another, and yet, if we rely on translations alone, we can become acquainted with but a tithe of foreign literature. ”

“ Every one speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is sometimes to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign language in official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of ideas. ”

“ Their study of foreign languages goes so far sometimes as to enable them to interject commonplace French phrases into their daily conversation, and render their prattle an affront to good taste as well an insult to the understanding. ”

“ The practice of receiving foreign words into our language, in a foreign orthography, is one of the most serious and growing evils which the friends of an elegant and regular language have to combat. The powers of many of the letters are very different in different languages. When therefore a French, or a German word is introduced into English, the letters should be translated—and the true sounds of the foreign words expressed in English characters of correspondent powers. ”

“ In their power of taking up foreign words into healthy circulation and making them truly their own, languages differ much from one another, and the same language from itself at different periods of its life. ”

“ Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by foreign neologisms. ”

“ If, as many prophesy, the English language becomes the standard tongue for business and diplomacy and literature, all the best products of every nation being made available by translation, at least, for those speaking English, it can become that ruling tongue only by slow degrees. Meanwhile, the chasm between citizens of a common country made by differing languages may be bridged by far greater effort on the part of older Americans gifted in the use of foreign tongues. ”

“ What may now sound to us like a perverted sense is often historically correct, for whereas learned influences, the introduction of foreign words—which makes for further specialization and differentiation of meaning—and the general march of civilization affecting manners, customs, and habits of thought, all tend to divert the normal course of language, the dialects have meanwhile kept the noiseless tenor of their way unmolested. ”

“ Before we know a new language truly, we have to realize that the words which at first seem equivalent to words in our own language often have a totally different atmosphere, a different rank or dignity from that which they occupy in our own language. It is in learning this difference in the moral connotation of a language and its expression in literature that we reap the real benefit of knowing a foreign tongue. ”

“ From the wider variety of interests among those who speak English, our language is perforce more hospitable to foreign words than French needs to be, since it is used rather by a conservative people who prefer to stay at home. ”

“ Thus equiped with a fine Estate, little Learning, and less Sense, and intirely ignorant of all Languages but his own, he launches into a foreign Nation, without the least knowledge of his own, where the sharpers will find him out, discover his Intellects, and make the most of him ”

“ Should any doting fathers be interested in the absorption of foreign languages into their sons' systems, the following mems from the diary of a University man, who has just returned from a tour abroad, whither he had gone expressly to perfect himself in European tongues, may be productive of some reflection. ”

“ He is too apt to get the impression that language means a collection of words which are isolated and independent, and that there must be a corresponding word in his native tongue for each new foreign word that he learns. ”

“ But the exact opposite of all that has so far been said takes place when a people gives up its own language and adopts a foreign one which is already highly developed as regards the designation of supersensuous things. ”

“ The fact remains that in all their adventures the muddle-headed inventions which we call foreign languages never bothered them in the least. They could always understand and be understood. If you can explain this, please do. ”

“ Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. ”

“ There is another phase of the popular leaning to the grandiose style, which is not less reprehensible than that which we have noticed; we mean the affectation of foreign words and phrases. As foreign travel has increased, and the study of foreign languages has become fashionable in [126] our country, this vice has spread till society in some places, like Armado and Holofernes, seems to have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps. ”

“ Foreign Languages Indispensible.It is highly desirable that such novices in diplomacy should learn foreign languages, for thus they will be protected from the bad faith or the ignorance of interpreters, and from the grave embarrassment of having to use them for the purpose of audiences with the sovereign. ”

“ With the diffusion of the study of modern languages, with the multiplication of translations—some famous works have appeared simultaneously in eleven tongues—with the growing international vocabulary of science, commerce and pleasure, the world feels more and more its essential unity. We can live and prosper without an international language ”

“ As there are fifty or more diverse languages, spoken by mankind, to say nothing of hundreds of different dialects, and as people now travel freely to all parts of the earth, the advantages of one common language for all nations are apparent to all who reflect on the subject. ”

“ The knowledge more particularly useful and necessary for you, considering your destination, consists of modern languages, modern history, chronology, and geography, the laws of nations, and the 'jus publicum Imperii'. You must absolutely speak all the modern Languages, as purely and correctly as the natives of the respective countries: for whoever does not speak a language perfectly and easily, will never appear to advantage in conversation, nor treat with others in it upon equal terms. ”

“ Beside all the various national languages and local dialects, our language will be used as a means of universal conversation. So shall our every word, for good or for ill, be a word spoken in authority to the whole world. ”

“ An American or an Englishman, or any one speaking English, could take with him a translatophone and travel around the world, understanding the language of every nation, of every people—the polished tongues of civilization, the speech of the scholars of the Orient, and even the jabber of the wild savages of Africa. ”

“ There is a necessity to choose and to spread the use of an international language, designed not to replace national idioms in the individual life of each people, but to serve in the written and oral relations between persons whose mother-tongues are different. ”

“ Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would the different languages be understood by all? ”

“ It must be such a language that every intelligent citizen of each nation can and will learn it, as the first language to be mastered after his mother-tongue, to be able to read it, speak it and write it, in his capacity as a citizen of the world, and as an intelligent citizen of his own nation. ”

“ Foreigners coming here think in their own language, even though they may be able to speak in ours; gradually they come to think in English, but still they dream in their mother-tongue; at last they dream, think, and speak in the language of the land, and become homogeneous with the nation. ”

“ Of course, everybody talks the language of his own country with his countrymen, but with the rest of the world he talks the general language--that is to say, we have nowadays to acquire but two languages to talk to all peoples--our own, and the universal. ”

“ Indeed, it is at these points of international contact that language is a real bar, actually preventing much intercourse that would otherwise have taken place, rather than in business, which is organized in view of the difficulty. ”

“ A foreigner, unacquainted with the language, could not glean the drift of a conversation in English, except perhaps a trifle from the tone of the voices and more from the natural signs used—the smiles and frowns, the expressions of the faces, the play of eyes, lips, hands and whole body. ”

“ It seems strange, also, when we recollect that in the employ of every nation there are numerous persons skilled in the language of every other nation of political or commercial importance, to serve the one as interpreters of the thoughts and words of the other, and to translate the ideas and ideals of these peoples for each other in any emergency that may arise. ”

“ In the meantime, it certainly behooves every one who approves of the wide-spread international acquaintance, understanding and conciliation, to examine this language which offers such great possibilities, since it has proved itself fully worthy of consideration in the brief time that it has existed as a living language. ”