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Updated: May 9, 2025
In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother-tongue.
If he had been composing verse himself, instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no matter how artistic, would have "communicated" nothing whatever to an American professor ignorant of the Chinese language.
Hector stood with his arm on Rob's shoulder, and the tears rolling down his cheeks. He would not have wept but that the sobs of his son shook him. "Rob of the Angels," Alister said in their mother-tongue, "you must make an apology to the Sasunnach gentleman for drawing the knife on him. That was wrong, if he had killed all the deer in Benruadh."
He spoke even of Lhassa and of the Dalai Lama, whom he had seen and adored. Each long, perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off from his race and his mother-tongue. He slipped back to thinking and dreaming in the vernacular, and mechanically followed the lama's ceremonial observances at eating, drinking, and the like.
They have an educated Indian clergyman who can scarcely speak English, while Mr. Gilfillan speaks the Chippewa as fluently as his mother-tongue. They have few quarrels, no thieving, no drunkenness, no abject poverty. They are not more perfect than others of human kind, but according to their light and sphere they are as good as a similar average of whites anywhere.
Although it must be allowed that our young hero's progress in the learned languages was not astonishing, yet an early passion for reading, growing stronger and stronger by application, repaid him at last with a tolerable knowledge of the mother-tongue.
Even could he show what the pronunciation of Shakspeare's day was, it is idle to encumber his edition with such disquisitions, for we shall not find Shakspeare clearer for not reading him in his and our mother-tongue. The field of philology is famous for its mare's-nests; and, if imaginary eggs are worth little, is it worth while brooding on imaginary chalk ones, nest-eggs of delusion?
Hence the present work is eminently the record of his personal experience. It presents in vivid outlines and with striking illustrations the action of political causes with which he has been as familiar as with the alphabet of his mother-tongue.
We are the blind votaries of a species of ancestral language-worship, which, with all its erudition, tends to narrow our linguistic scope. A study of Japanese would free us from the fetters of any such family infatuation. The inviolable rules and regulations of our mother-tongue would be found to be of relative application only.
"I thank God that we can find them nearer home, in our own soil; that strains of the noblest sentiment that ever swelled in the breast of man, are breathing to us out of every page of our country's history, in the native eloquence of our mother-tongue, that the colonial and provincial councils of America exhibit to us models of the spirits and character which gave Greece and Rome their name and their praise among nations.
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