Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/40

18 described gives general correctness and facility, it is far from conferring universal command of the resources of the English tongue. This is no grand indivisible unity, whereof the learner acquires all or none; it is an aggregation of particulars, and each one appropriates more or less of them, according to his means and ability. The vocabulary which the young child has acquired the power to use is a very scanty one; it includes only the most indispensable part of speech, names for the commonest objects, the most ordinary and familiar conceptions, the simplest relations. You can talk with a child only on a certain limited range of subjects; a book not written especially for his benefit is in great part unintelligible to him: he has not yet learned its signs for thought, and they must be translated into others with which he is acquainted; or the thought itself is beyond the reach of his apprehension, the statement is outside the sphere of his knowledge. But in this regard we are all of us more or less children. Who ever yet got through learning his mother-tongue, and could say, "The work is done?" The encyclopedic English language, as we may term it, the English of the great dictionaries, contains more than a hundred thousand words. And these are only a selection out of a greater mass. If all the signs for thought employed for purposes of communication by those who have spoken and who speak no other tongue than ours were brought together, if all obsolete, technical, and dialectic words were gathered in, which, if they are not English, are of no assignable spoken tongue, the number mentioned would be vastly augmented. Out of this immense mass, it has been reckoned by careful observers that from three to five thousand answer all the ordinary ends of familiar intercourse, even among the cultivated; and a considerable portion of the English-speaking community, including the lowest and most ignorant class, never learn to use even so many as three thousand: what they do acquire, of course, being, like the child's vocabulary, the most necessary part of the language, signs for the commonest and simplest ideas. To a nucleus of this character, every artisan, though otherwise uninstructed, must add the technical language of his own craft—names for tools, and