Page:Cole (1885) The Hope of Sherbro's Future Greatness.pdf/21

—17— he continues wallowing in the mire and clay of stupidity. He sees differently from an educated man. He sees men like trees, walking, and sometimes takes trees for men.

The Sherbro language can be improved, but it needs education to shape it; and from what we have stated it may be clearly seen that an establishment of a good school in Sherbro, where science would be taught, and where amongst other languages the Arabic might be introduced, will do much for Africa. And we hail the day when through the miraculous influence of a proper education, a full, regenerated purified written language of this vast country shall spring from the ashes of the old, stepping forward to take its place in African nomenclature, when the cocoa-nut, now called “bell-poto,” or “white man’s palm-kernel,” shall be substituted by another word, denoting its property or quality.

The fact at present that the language, though defective, is composite, is a great encouragement for the future. There was no written Anglo-Saxon literature until after their education and the conversion of the people to Christianity by the Romans. How harsh and ridiculous would the Anglo-Saxon expressions, “Free-necked man” and “blood-weight” now appear to an Englishman. And one would be at a loss in retracing the word good-by to “Good be wud ye,” or God be with you, and the title, “beef-eater,” from buffet, a small side-board, and that from the 15,000 different words composing the works of Shakespeare, the champion of English literature, 1,154 are from other languages, which makes the English language, as Grimm says, “possesses a veritable power of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other language of man,” after a struggle of about two thousand years, to rein its present excellency, a composite and strictly borrowed language.

If we are to be truly civilized, it must be by the improvement of our language. He who hath no language of his