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Language is such a common product of social life and it prepares the ground for science. But science, as the exact formulation of general truths, attains a higher degree of social value, because it rises above the idioms of person or race and is universally acceptable in form and essence. Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the historical circumstances of its beginnings make it clear.
My visits to Mr. Walker first gave me the idea of making the negro describe his own character in a collection of purely Hamitic proverbs and idioms. It appeared to me that, if ever a book aspires to the title of "l'Africain peint par lui-meme," it must be one in which he is the medium to his own spirit, the interpreter to his own thoughts.
These she understood fairly, but the paragraph that filled her with dismay was a short French poem of three verses to be put into English prose. She read it again and again, but, from the idioms and inversions it contained, totally failed to comprehend its meaning.
Here's what the Post says: His conception and portrayal of the old-time Southern colonel, with his absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and phrases, his moth-eaten pride of family, and his really kind heart, fastidious sense of honour, and lovable simplicity, is the best delineation of a character role on the boards to-day.
"It is our name, our country; you must have thought that we were Protestants. Not at all. Our mother was a Canadian, French and Catholic by descent; that is why my sister and I both speak French, with an accent, it is true, and with certain American idioms, but yet in such a manner as to be able to express nearly all we want to say.
The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings! kissings!" Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!" Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry.
In endeavoring to identify localities from names given to them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European authors, this difficulty should always be taken into account. No blame can be attached to the writers for such defects; it should always be remembered that they did not know, still less understand, the idioms they heard.
He enters in his journal a happy dream of a walk with Lydia, and, waking, the recollection of the 16,000 miles between them; but in the meantime he heard from the critics at Calcutta, that his translation of the Gospels into Persian, done with the assistance of Sabat, was too full of Arabic idioms, and in language not simple enough for its purpose; and he therefore made up his mind to spend his leave of absence in making his way through Persia and part of Arabia, so as to improve himself in the languages, and submit his translation to more trustworthy scholars.
Later translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or "King James's Bible" , followed Wiclif's language in many instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative influence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost.
"If your conscience," says the man with the nose, "is indisposed toward foreign idioms ye might, to please yourself, smuggle the letter into the penultimate syllable." "'Tis well," says Tobin. "Ye're in the presence of Jawn Malone and Daniel Tobin." "Tis highly appreciated," says the man, with a bow.
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