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Updated: June 9, 2025
In this, as a practical man who felt the greatest respect for erudition without personally possessing a proper share of it, he allowed himself to be thoroughly guided by 'men of learning and judgment. He had been told that the only reason why we do not 'attain to the greatness of soul and intellect of the ancient Greeks and Romans was the length of time we give to learning these languages which cost them nothing. In bringing up the boy, to whom the best masters were given, the procedures chosen were therefore such that young Michel, in his sixth year, spoke Latin thoroughly before he was able to converse in his own mother-tongue.
His friend the doctor was at the trouble of repeating to us several times, till we had pretty well learned them by rote, some of the most necessary inquiries for food and provender, in the vernacular. When we had written these down in the characters, and after the orthography of our mother-tongue, we felt fully prepared for all contingencies.
The child should be trained when quite young to think in terms of music, in the same way in which it is trained to think in its mother-tongue. The fundamental work should be taken in class, not at an individual lesson, and should be compulsory for all children.
For poetry, I think, she has far more inclination than for philosophy; so also she likes to ride better than to walk, which last she does only in case of necessity. The ugly cacophony of our mother-tongue here in the north melts on her tongue into the sweet and mellow euphony of Italian and Hindu speech.
"No, no I cannot desert my mother-tongue!" said Jasmin. "It preserves the folk-lore of the district; it is the language of the poor, of the labourer, the shepherd, the farmer and grape-gatherers, of boys and girls, of brides and bridegrooms. The people," he said to M. Dumon, "love to hear my songs in their native dialect.
Therefore, as the poetic faculty was now slowly asserting itself in Donal, it was of vast importance that he should know what the genius of Scotland had been able to do with his homely mother-tongue, for through that tongue alone, could what poetry he had in him have thoroughly fair play, and in turn do its best towards his development which is the first and greatest use of poetry.
We say fortunately, for whatever discords and inconvenience may arise at the time from the rivalry of different dictionaries, it can not be doubted that each effort contributes vastly to enrich our mother-tongue, and render easier the future task of the 'coming man' who is, years hence, to form from the whole one perfect work.
Though the Ketterings and he spoke the same mother-tongue, words bore different values for him, and full communion was impossible. But his estimation of them was more of the nature of passive mental apprehension than of active criticism. He himself, however, had been criticised and he knew it, for Alice and Mary had at length made him feel that he did not satisfy their conception of a gentleman.
What wish remains to be formed, when the deaf and dumb man is enabled to learn by himself a foreign language, when he translates it, and writes it, as well as those of whom it is the mother-tongue?
From reading Burns, Donal learned also not a little of the capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region, lingering only here and there in the hollow pools of old memories, that Donal had never learned it; and the lowland Scotch, an ancient branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther from the original sources of laughter and tears.
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