Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/572

566 pupils were taught to speak and to write the language, to use it in the affairs of every-day life. It was not only the Latin of books, but of the playground, of the street, of public discussion. While it was not the speech of the common people, it was the general medium of correspondence, of law and of diplomacy, until superseded by French. One needs but to read the letters of Erasmus or the Letters of Obscure Men to see what a facile medium of expression it was. How easily a foreign language may be acquired is daily demonstrated in the public schools of our large cities. The children of the immigrants who come into this country by tens of thousands from all parts of the world usually learn English, to them a foreign tongue, in a year or less. "Were it not so common the phenomenon would be called marvelous. Children do not employ the principle of association; they simply yield to the natural instinct to imitate. Unconsciously they strive to reproduce speech-sounds until they get them to conform to those they hear uttered in their presence. When they begin to talk, usually in the second year, their enunciation and pronunciation are very defective. But by constant though unconscious effort they approximate more and more nearly to the correct sounds until they attain complete conformity. When they are engaged in learning two or three languages at the same time they rarely confound them. They usually answer in the language in which they are addressed. Children under favorable conditions before they are old enough to attend school learn a list of some thousand of words without knowing how. Their vocabulary grows faster than their minds. It is easier for them to learn the words that designate common things in two or three languages than to comprehend an unfamiliar idea. After the age of mental maturity the task becomes more and more difficult and is rarely accomplished correctly. There are, however, here and there persons who can, by an effort, reproduce any speech-sound they hear, as long as their auditory apparatus is unimpaired.

Contrary to the popular belief, the ability to speak several languages is not a mark of mental power. It merely indicates a retentive memory of a certain kind and a knack for imitating sounds. Sir Richard Burton relates in one of his books that once when near Jeddah he was accosted by a man in Turkish. Getting no response, he tried Persian; then the same silence made him try Arabic. When his listener still kept silent he grumbled out his astonishment in Hindustani. That also failing, he tried in succession Pushtu, Armenian, English, French and Italian. When Burton could no longer restrain his risibilities, he admitted his nationality and chatted for some time with the stranger in English, which he spoke very well. Professor Starr says in his "The Truth about the Congo" that members of the Bantu tribes are often met with who speak several languages readily. A recent denominational periodical gives the names of several men who preach in four different languages and a larger number in three. One clergyman is