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Updated: May 9, 2025
For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary.
Another force the force clerical the power of clerks, arises; the might of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force embodied, as often before, as priestcraft the strength of priests: craft meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force, too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes malignant.
Mellicent, who took everything in deadly earnest, summoned up courage to give a mild little squeak of a reply. "Wee mais hier soir, il pleut;" and in the silence that followed Robert was visited with a mischievous inspiration. He had had French nursery governesses in his childhood, and had, moreover, spent two years abroad, so that French came as naturally to him as his own mother-tongue.
Finding it poor but proud, he had made it a millionaire. And the assertion was put forward with the same seriousness that he displayed when declaring that there were three men only of his time who really knew their mother-tongue Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and himself.
So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of Béranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as Homer, though an Ionian, was still a Greek. We think he does prove that neither Mr.
When by her couch her son may stay, And press her hand, and watch her eyes, And feel, though she revives to-day, Perchance his hope to-morrow dies. It is not thus, believe me, sir, With this enchantress she will call Our second mother: Frenchmen err, Who, cent'ries since, proclaimed her fall! Our mother-tongue all melody While music lives can never die.
The spirited talk, flying thus helter-skelter through the gamut of opinion, went forward chiefly in German, which the foreigners of the party spoke with various accents, but glibly enough; only now and then did one of them spring over to his mother-tongue, to fetch a racy idiom or point a joke.
But his lack of learning he could never write a despatch without strange torturings of his mother-tongue was more than made up by a quenchless love of the Fatherland, by a robust common sense, which hit straight at the mark where subtler minds strayed off into side issues, by a comradeship that endeared him to every private, and by a courage that never quailed.
I cannot call it my mother-tongue, but it is my love-tongue. Why, when thou art from me, I am loving thee in Irish all day long, and thou never knowest what my heart says to thee! It is a sad lack in thy all-completeness, dear heart.
Some Germans also of our day are of such a kind that if they are able to preach a little English, no matter how broken and jargonlike it is spoken, they are inflated with such senseless pride that they would no longer preach a thing in their mother-tongue nor care the least for the order of the Church, if it were not a question of bread and of keeping the good will of some obdurate Germans.
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