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Updated: June 9, 2025
But, however much of his linguistic treasury Shakespeare shall be proved to have inherited ready-made whatever scraps he may have stolen at the feast of languages it is clear that he was an imperial creator of language, and lived while his mother-tongue was still plastic.
Even the Prince of Orange had kept the Burgundian tradition and considered French as his mother-tongue. He was surrounded and supported by a great number of French Huguenots and Walloon Calvinists. Owing to their smaller population the Southern provinces were rather over-represented in the States General, where the vote went by province and not by numbers.
Cahan wrote David Levinsky not in his mother-tongue but in the language of his adopted country may be taken as a sign that American literature no less than the American population is being enlarged by the influx of fresh materials and methods.
First of all, the knowledge of the mother-tongue began to shape itself into Latin grammar; Greek philology transferred its methods to the kindred idiom of Italy. The active study of grammar began nearly at the same time with Roman authorship.
Herman pronounced a chef d'oeuvre, and my father, to whom I sent it in triumph, returned a letter of false English with it, that parodied all my Hellenic barbarisms by imitating them in my mother-tongue.
This holds true of the literature in the mother-tongue of the Latins still more decidedly, if possible, than of the Roman literature in a foreign tongue; to a very great extent the former was not the work of Romans at all, but of foreigners, of half-Greeks, Celts, and ere long even Africans, whose knowledge of Latin was only acquired by study.
Yet Bacon had no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming that "English would bankrupt all our books."
To enable one's fellow-creatures to understand him in even his mother-tongue involves an amount of effort and energy, a complexity and facility in function, that can only be reached after months of practice in infancy; but to attain to that degree of perfection that makes an artist in speaking, how much greater is the expenditure in vital capital!
"Ah!" said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, "French!" "It was the mother-tongue of these colonists," Mrs. Weguelin explained to him. "Ah! like Canada!" cried Gazza. "But what a pretty bit is that!"
In a similar way greater importance came to be attached to instruction in Latin. The higher society of Rome began to feel the need, if not of exchanging their mother-tongue for Greek, at least of refining it and adapting it to the changed state of culture; and for this purpose too they found themselves in every respect dependent on the Greeks.
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