Vernacular language

“ Those who have wondered at the sterile results of Vernacular education in those countries will, perhaps, not be surprised when they realize the handicap imposed by a traditional written idiom which is no longer the spoken language of the country. ”

“ Now every person at all acquainted with Philology, knows that foreign language to be easiest to himself which bears the greatest resemblance to his vernacular tongue in its structure, syntax, the sequence of its words in sentences, and the identity or similarity of many of its terms with corresponding ones in his own language. It will be evident to any individual, that in these particulars the French resembles our language much more than the Latin. ”

“ The great difficulty of translation is to give the thought expressed in one language in the idiom of another. A dialect may be used by the highest as well as the [229] lowest within its range; a patois is distinctly illiterate, belonging to the lower classes; those who speak a patois understand the cultured form of their own language, but speak only the degraded form, as in the case of the Italian lazzaroni or the former negro slaves in the United States. Vernacular, from the Latin, has the same general sense as the Saxon mother tongue, of one's native language, or that of a people ”

“ Not all the tongues that are learnt, either, are to be learnt to the same nicety of perfection, but only to the extent really needed. Each language should be learnt separately—first, the Vernacular, which ought to be perfectly learnt, and to which children ought to be kept for eight or ten years; then whatever neighbouring tongue might be desirable, for which a year would be long enough; next, Latin, which ought to be learnt well, and might be learnt in two years; and so to Greek, to which he would give one year, and Hebrew, which he would settle in six months. ”

“ How our English vernacular has changed ever since the days of the famous virgin queen, not to mention the more radical changes of the far-remote days of the ill-starred Richard II! A spoken language is constantly changing. It grows and develops, or languishes and decays, upon the lips of those who employ it as their mother-tongue, now incorporating into itself new expressions and idioms and now casting off such as are old and worn out. ”

“ Again, when Christianity came with the authority of Rome and in the Latin language, now imbued with an additional sanctity, there ensued in all nations a struggle between the vernacular and the foreign tongue for obtaining the rank of a literary language—a struggle from which the languages of the Continental nations, as well as of Britain, emerged only slowly and late. ”

“ Like most other nations in the East, we have been accustomed, up to this very day, to use a written language, divided within itself into several styles, which is considerably different from the vernacular. ”

“ No text-books in the vernacular will be allowed in any Government school, supported wholly by the Government; no oral instruction in the vernacular will be allowed at such schools. The entire curriculum must be in the English language.
2. In contract schools supported in part by missionary societies, the vernacular may be used only for the reading of the Sacred Scriptures, and for oral instruction in morals and religion and where it is deemed to be an auxiliary to the English language in conveying such instruction. ”

“ The vernacular or oral language is never taught, but is universally spoken. It has been evolved from the ancient language by a natural and regular process, similar to that which has produced the Romance languages from the Latin, or the Russian, Bulgarian and Servian from the Reforms of Coraës.old Slavonic. It has developed on parallel lines with the modern European languages, and in obedience to the same laws; like them, it might have grown into a literary language had any great writers arisen in the middle ages to do for it what Dante and his successors of the trecento did for Italian. ”

“ So long as there is a potent literary tradition keeping the core of the language one and indivisible, vernacular variations can only tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to promote the abundance, suppleness, and nicety of adaptation of the language as a literary instrument. ”

“ The Indians all know the vernacular. They have been carefully shut away from any other language by the Government restraints that surround all reservations, shutting out everything that would educate or civilize. The vernacular is used in the mission schools to teach English and the truths of the gospel to those who understand no other language. ”

“ Some discussion has arisen which must, I believe, bear useful fruit regarding the relative merits of the classical languages Importance of Indian classical languages. of this country as compared with the vernaculars, as objects of University study. I will not anticipate the results of this discussion. No one estimates more highly than I do the importance of vernacular education; no one has a higher estimate of the capabilities of some of our Indian vernacular languages; no one has higher hopes as to the space which they may one day fill in the literature of India. ”

“ At the same time, and as the importance of the vernacular languages becomes more appreciated, the vernacular literatures of India will be gradually enriched by translations of European books, or by the original compositions of men whose minds have been imbued with the spirit of European advancement, so that European knowledge may gradually be placed in this manner within the reach of all classes of the people. ”

“ The new vernaculars were already assuming importance; men were likely [496] to be chosen for positions of ecclesiastical eminence (almost the only ones in which study of literature was becoming possible) , because of their bilingual skill, or to be driven by such positions to study of the vernacular. And this bilingualism was likely not merely to barbarise even their Latin style, but to draw them away from the study of classical Latin, and still more Greek. ”

“ Difficulties of the Vernacular Our difficulty in understanding the vernacular of a dialect-speaker arises in great measure from the fact that many of the sounds being unfamiliar to us, we cannot tell which syllable belongs to which word, and so we cannot rightly divide up the sentence into its component parts. ”

“ Advice of this last-mentioned kind calls to mind a third class of guide-books, intended to assist those who, without them, would realise how vain is the help of man when he can't understand what you say. The need for such became more and more evident as time went on and Latin became less and less the living and international language it had been but recently. The use of vernaculars was everywhere coming to the front as nationalities developed further, and in many districts where it had been best known its disuse in Church hastened its disuse outside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If it is so easy why do they not learn modern languages. They cannot speak a word of any language but their own, and even the few sentences of Latin and Greek they can parrot-like repeat, no foreigner can understand, as they pronounce them with the English vowel sounds. ”

“ My present belief is that no one mind can ever reach another in reality, and that each human being speaks and understands only one language—his own language—and every one else's language is what you English people call a 'damned foreign tongue.' Excuse me, dear one, my words may not be academic, but they are supposed to be philosophic. ”

“ No people would have perceived more clearly, as no people perhaps is less adapted to perceive than we English are, the element of necessary truth contained in the Frenchman's epigram that 'language is given us to conceal our thoughts', or could more clearly distinguish between the duty of saying what you mean and the equally important but not always compatible duty of saying what you mean to say. ”

“ Vernaculars should be the medium of education. It cannot be seriously contended that English should become the common language of the whole of India. Even if it is possible, it is doubtful if it is desirable. We cannot hope to develop any great literature in the English tongue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working men, was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed. ”

“ Not only is some knowledge of dialects needful for any true understanding of the history and character of our language, but the standard speech has in the past derived much enrichment and what is called 'regeneration' from the picturesque vocabularies of local vernaculars. ”

“ In my first advocacy of the importance of studying English—in a quarterly review article printed seventeen years ago—I concede "that the study of the vernacular is almost valueless as a means of education, or as an instrument of intellectual culture and discipline." ”

“ Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. ”

“ The plain truth after all is, that those who are unwilling to take the trouble to understand any language, or any dialect of any language, with which they are previously unacquainted, generally consider such new language or such dialect barbarous ”

“ To be sure the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth letters made the English word 'ice'; the eighty-third and two following made 'sir'; and in the midst of the document, in the second and third lines, I observed the words, "rots," "mutabile," "ira," "net," "atra."
"Come now," I thought, "these words seem to justify my uncle's view about the language of the document. In the fourth line appeared the word "luco", which means a sacred wood. It is true that in the third line was the word "tabiled", which looked like Hebrew, and in the last the purely French words "mer", "arc", "mere." " ”

“ And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to understand English conditions, and the English dialect, which has more and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the separation. We have so constantly read English literature, and kept ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to them as they are with regard to us ”

“ It is an anomaly to apply the works of German writers on the voice to the study of the English language, or to that of any other than the German language; or to apply books written from an English standpoint to the study of any language except the English—the movements of the tongue, and, in sympathy therewith, of countless other muscles, being different for every language. ”

“ Between the second and third class of languages, there are a multitude of intermediate tongues which have sprung up out of that intermixture of races and nations, occurring at all periods of history, and necessarily affecting more or less language itself. ”

“ "There is the disadvantage of not knowing all languages," said Conseil, "or the disadvantage of not having one universal language." ”

“ In the most civilized countries the vernacular had been elevated to the dignity of the classical tongues by being made the literary vehicle of such poets as Politian and Bembo, Ronsard and Du Bellay. A vernacular literature of great beauty, too important to be overlooked, began to spring up on all sides. ”

“ And if, as I before remarked, we should in vain seek for that common and original language, from which all those now spoken on the face of the earth can be derived, both ethnographically and geologically, may we not still find in art a universal language intelligible to all men? ”

“ English scholars have studied Greek and Latin for a thousand years, and the languages of the Continent and of the Orient in more recent times. English churchmen have introduced words from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, through Bible and prayer-book, sermon and tract. From all this it results that there is scarcely a language ever spoken among men that has not some representative in English speech. The spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race, masterful in language as in war and commerce, has subjugated all these various elements to one idiom, making not a patchwork, but a composite language. ”