Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/33

I.] answer it distinctly and truly will lay the best possible foundation for our further progress, clearing our way of more than one of the imperfect apprehensions, or the misapprehensions, which are apt to encumber the steps of students of language.

The general answer is so obvious as hardly to require to be pointed out: we speak English because we were taught it by those who surrounded us in our infancy and growing age. It is our mother-tongue, because we got it from the lips of our mother; it is our native language, inasmuch as we were born, not indeed into the possession of it, but into the company of those who already spoke it, having learned it in the same way before us. We were not left to our own devices, to work out for ourselves the great problem of how to talk. In our case, there was no development of language out of our own internal resources, by the reflection of phenomena in consciousness, or however else we may choose to describe it; by the action of a natural impulse, shaping ideas, and creating suitable expression for them. No sooner were our minds so far matured as to be capable of intelligently associating an idea and its sign, than we learned, first to recognize the persons and things about us, the most familiar acts and phenomena of our little world, by the names which others applied to them, and then to apply to them the same names ourselves. Thus, most of us learned first of all to stammer the childish words for 'father' and 'mother,' put, for our convenience, in the accents easiest for unpractised lips to frame. Then, as we grew on, we acquired daily more and more, partly by direct instruction, partly by imitation: those who had the care of us contracted their ideas and simplified their speech to suit our weak capacities; they watched with interest every new vocable which we mastered, corrected our numberless errors, explained what we but half understood, checked us when we used longer words and more ambitious phrases than we could employ correctly or wield adroitly, and drilled us in the utterance of sounds which come hard to the beginner. The kind and degree of the training thus given, indeed, varied greatly in different cases, as did the provision made for the necessary wants of