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Only, in this latter case, the result depends on ourselves alone. If we die, it will be because we have wished it. Our language is not dead; on the contrary, although not widely spread, it is in itself much more alive than English, which as a literary language is in full decay. We may congratulate ourselves that our idiom is intact. Our civilization is old, but it has not yet lived its full life.
There are local differences sufficiently great to make it impossible for people to communicate when first brought together, but the vocabularies are sufficiently alike, and the morphology of the dialects is so similar that it is the task of only a short time for a person conversant with one idiom to acquire a speaking and understanding knowledge of any other in this region.
"And will readily excuse hearing it. But you can give me some idea of the sense in our own vernacular idiom?" "I shall prove a wretched interpreter," said M'Intyre, running over the original, well garnished with aghes, aughs, and oughs, and similar gutterals, and then coughing and hawking as if the translation stuck in his throat.
This idiom consists of the smallest possible amount of dictionary words, a few Scriptural names rather irreverently used, a very large intermixture of "git-ups" and ejaculatory "his," and a general tendency to blasphemy all round. We reached Tom's shanty at dusk.
Difficult indeed would have been that recognition to an unobservant beholder: no trace was left of the sullen bully or the village farrier; the expression of the face was mild and intelligent, more bashful than hardy; the brute strength of the form had lost its former clumsiness, the simple dress was that of a gentleman, to use an expressive idiom, the whole man was wonderfully "toned down."
They knew him to have been an old gentleman whose abhorrence of the vulgarity of crime had been equalled by his sensitive horror of illiterate, vulgar, or slangy speech; and they thus, to a certain extent, understood the painful nature of his present position, for the involuntary use of the idiom and ways of the society in which he was now condemned to mix was a part of his sentence.
Why, when Boccaccio sent to PETRARCH a copy of DANTE, declaring that the work was like a first light which had illuminated his mind, did Petrarch boldly observe that he had not been anxious to inquire after it, for intending himself to compose in the vernacular idiom, he had no wish to be considered as a plagiary? and he only allows Dante's superiority from having written in the vulgar idiom, which he did not consider an enviable merit.
The less common an idiom is, and the more obscure its terms, the more prolific is it as a source of error: a philosopher is sophistical in proportion to his ignorance of any method of neutralizing this imperfection in language. If the art of correcting the errors of speech by scientific methods is ever discovered, then philosophy will have found its criterion of certainty.
"Indeed, yes. I don't know how many drops more I shall drink. We get so fierce and reckless about our victuals. Will it be the spirit of the old counterfeiters who used to inhabit this island entering into us?" suggested Eva, using the English-Canadian idiom of the western provinces. "Without doot.
"Can you?" said Horace laughing, for indeed he spoke French with a fine English accent and idiom. "Let me hear you. Where did you learn it?" "Uncle Charles taught me; he is English," she answered, speaking correctly enough, with a pretty little accent. "Indeed!" cried Graham. "Your mother was English, then?" "Yes.
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