Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/129

Rh the improvement of the vernacular dialects. The latter, it is said, are utterly incapable of representing European ideas; and the natives must therefore have recourse to the congenial, accessible, and inexhaustible stores of their classical languages. To adopt English phraseology would be grotesque patchwork; and the condemnation of the classical languages to oblivion, would consign the dialects to utter helplessness and irretrievable barbarism.

The experience both of the East and West demonstrates, that the difficulty which this argument supposes never can exist. If the national language can easily express any new idea which is introduced from abroad, a native term is usually adopted. But, if not, the word, as well as the meaning, are imported together from the same fountain of supply. This is the ordinary process; but the supply of words is not always limited to the strict measure of our wants. Languages are amplified and refined by scholars, who naturally introduce the foreign words with which their minds are charged, and which, from their being in the habit of using them, appear to them to be more expressive than any other. Hence that wealth of words, that choice of verbal signs,—some of domestic and others of foreign origin; some borrowed from cognate, and others from radically different