Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/351

Rh Languages in which a written literature is not much developed, and a people among whom the art of writing is not much in vogue, take the factor of personal presence into account. Men who are familiar with the Turkish have noted a marked difference between its colloquial and its written form. It makes conversational sentences concise to the verge of obscurity, because in case of doubt the speaker can be asked to explain, whereas in writing it almost rejects the use of pronouns of the third person and employs a style like that of legal documents, full of repetitions of nouns coupled with "the said," "the afore mentioned," and so on. Discourses spoken, not read, to popular audiences are usually prolix. Every thought is elaborated; the same idea is presented in a number of different guises, as we may note in preaching, in political harangues, and especially in pleas before juries. How much the personal equation has to do with comprehension is easily realized if we read a drama, or even a monologue, and afterward hear the same from the lips of a competent actor or elocutionist. It is almost like a restoration of the dead to life. The ancient Greeks fully grasped the importance of the spoken word as compared with the dead letter of the written page. Homer's characters talk a great deal. Herodotus brings many of his men and women on the stage and lets them tell their own story. When Thucydides wishes to put before his readers the motives that inspire the different parties in their conflicts with each other he selects a representative of each, and brings him forward that he may present his side of the case in his own person. Plato traverses the whole domain of philosophy; but in order to relieve his doctrines as far as possible of their abstruse character he places before his readers a number of interlocutors in order to give them a lifelike setting. Few persons, when reading a novel, stop to think that the conversations so often reported to have taken place between two persons in strict privacy, or even soliloquies, are absurdly impossible.

The morphology and syntax of the Greek are so varied; their proper management requires such a high degree of grammatical and rhetorical skill; the precise meaning of a passage so often depends upon the nice choice and exact position of a particle; the tone of voice and stress with which it is uttered, that we can readily understand the aversion of those to whom it was native to the cold and lifeless word, even though we can not fully enter into the minutiæ of the causes which prompted the feeling. We have no means of knowing how many words with their definitions the human memory is capable of retaining.

There is, of course, a limit in practise; hardly in theory. The problem is closely related to that of the acquisition of foreign languages. There is not much difference between the ability to read several foreign languages and the ability to define the same number of words in one's own. Although the number of words in the largest English dictionaries