Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/269

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S. I. APRIL 2, '98.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

261

LONDON, SATUEDAY, APE1L 2, 1898.

CONTENTS. -No. 14.

I* OTBS : The Study of Foreign Languages, 261 Scott on Grimms' 'Popular Stories,' 262 Chelsea, 264 Biblio- graphies Mead, 265 Anglicized Words" To the lamp- p 08 t "Burning Trees at Funerals, 26B Marifer "Who stole the donkey ? " Scott's ' Antiquary ' Scraps of Nursery Lore, 267.

QUERIES : " Dar bon " " Mela Britannicus " Bishop Morton" Esprit d'escalier," 267 Alfred Wigan=Leonora Pincott Robert FitzStephen "Spalt" Law Terms Henderson Dray cot Autographs Chambers's ' Index of Next of Kin' Portrait ot Serjeant Glynn Coins- Heralds' Visitation of Hampshire Duchies of Slesvig- Holstein, 268 Arms of De Kellygrew Hugh Massey Heraldic Castles Battle-axes Latin Ambiguities The Woodlands Novels with the same Name Hogarth Howard & Gibbs Christening New Vessels " Stron- gullion," 269.

REPLIES : The Possessive Case Samuel Wilderspin, 270 Source of Quotation Daniel Hooper W. Wentworth " Broaching the admiral" " Carnafor," 271 Ancestors- Sculptors Dante and Hindley ' Kockingham ' ' The Chaldee MS.' Plant-names Todmorden Rev. Richard Johnson, 272 Giraldi Cinthio " Grouse "Mr. Hansom Inscription Caen Wood " Hesmel," 273 "Trod" Registers of Guildhall Chapel Lancashire Customs " Plurality "Host eaten by Mice Wife v. Family, 274 Place-names Shakspeare's Grandfather, 275 "Dag daw" "By Jingo" "Culamite," 276 " Merry " Josiah Child, 277 Bumble in Literature "Scalinga" Words- worth and Bums, 278.

NOTESON BOOKS :BonwickV Australia's First Preacher' Harcourt's ' An Eton Bibliography 'Sweeting's ' Cathe- dral Church of Peterborough ' Quennell's 'Cathedral Church of Norwich' Bayne's 'James Thomson' Ser- geant's ' The Franks ' Tyack's ' Book about Bells ' Buchheim's ' Heinrich Heine's Lieder und Gedicbte.'

THE STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. A PARAGRAPH which has been going round the papers to the effect that the officers on board the Volta, bound for the Niger, are taking with them grammars of the Hausa and Yoruba tongues to study en route, raises very pertinently the question of how far England is abreast of other great colonizing powers in the possession of means for the study of Asiatic and African languages. The French plan of giving gratuitous public instruction is good only for residents in Paris, otherwise nobody can deny that a teacher (preferably a native) is always superior to a book. I myself learned more Yoruba in the course of a short personal acquaintance with the grandson of Bishop Crowther than I had ever been able to acquire from his grandfather's now classical Yoruba Grammar. What I have in my eye is, however, the man who cannot get a teacher, or cannot afford one, or from any other circumstance is driven tage comes in of the German system of writing all grammars with the home student n view. That the English publisher does lot do this, and is therefore by so much nferior, is patent to every philologist who
 * o rely upon his book alone. Here the advan-

has had anything like a long or varied expe- rience of grammars. There are two things wanting in a good grammar knowledge of the language taught and the capability for teaching. Of the two the latter is the more important, but, with a few brilliant exceptions, our books display only the former. In Allen's series of manuals, expensively got up as they are, and under the wing, as it were, of our Government, this is particularly conspicuous. They are written by men of the deepest learning so much is almost painfully visible on every page but I have failed to discern in a single one of them that magical prescience of the requirements of the learner without which no book which aspires to teach is com- plete. With the best will in the world, the English people seem incapable of realizing this. There was a little sixpenny book printed in "Yiddish" a few years ago, and circulated by philanthropists with a view of dissemi- nating a better knowledge of English among the East-End Jews. I read it from the first page to the last with deepening pity that a work of charity so well intended should have been carried out so badly. The trail of the amateur was all over it. The writer, of course, knew English well, but he had not the ghost of an idea now to impart it to others. The excellence of the Germans is not that they know more about languages than we do because, as a matter of fact, many German publications are actually founded upon infor- mation taken from our books but they know how to teach, and therefore a German retailing the facts of a language second hand will always improve on the original English work from which they were acquired. Take the case of the Sua'heli tongue, which is the lingua franca of the east of Africa, as Hausa is of the west. Steere is the accepted authority in English, but his work is absurdly pedantic when compared with the little two-shilling book, mainly founded on him, which is widely circulated by a Leipzig firm for the use of those going out to German East Africa. For a fraction of the price of Steere here is a handbook of nearly two hundred pages, which is superior to him in every respect, and with which a man would learn more in a month than the Englishman can teach him in a year. Uniform with this work the same German author (Seidel) has produced a far more prac- tical Malay Grammar than any we have, and this in spite of the fact that Germany has no interests in Malacca to compare with ours. In Persia Germany has also no interests, while to us, as the guardians of India, the Persian language (the French of the East) is all-important, yet we possess no such adequate