Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/37

I.] anxious that her child should grow up duly accomplished, gives it a French nurse, and takes care that no English be spoken in its presence; and not all the blood of all the Joneses can save it from talking French first, as if this were indeed its own mother-tongue. An infant is taken alive from the arms of its drowned mother, the only waif cast upon the shore from the wreck of a strange vessel; and it learns the tongue of its foster-parents; no outbreak of natural and hereditary speech ever betrays from what land it derived its birth. The child of a father and mother of different race and speech learns the tongue of either, as circumstances and their choice may determine; or it learns both, and is equally at home in them, hardly knowing which to call its native language. The bands of Africans, stolen from their homes and imported into America, lost in a generation their Congo or Mendi, and acquired from their fellow-slaves a rude jargon in which they could communicate with one another and with their masters. The Babel of dialects brought every year to our shores by the thousands of foreigners who come to seek a new home among us, disappear in as brief a time, or are kept up only where those who speak them herd together in separate communities. The Irish peasantry, mingled with and domineered over by English colonists, governed under English institutions, feeling the whole weight, for good and for evil, of a superior English civilization, incapacitated from rising above a condition of poverty and ignorance without command of English speech, unlearn by degrees their native Celtic tongue, and adopt the dialect of the ruling and cultivated class.

No one, I am confident, can fail to allow that this is a true account of the process by which we acquire our "mother-tongue." Every one recognizes, as the grand advantage connected with the use of language, the fact that in it and by it whatever of truth and knowledge each generation has learned or worked out can be made over into the possession of the generation following. It is not necessary that each of us study the world for himself, in order to apprehend and classify the varied objects it contains, with their qualities and relations, and invent designations for them. This has