United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Gibbie thought with himself this could hardly hold, for there was John the Baptist; he answered her, however, that Donal could speak very good English if he chose, but that the affected tone and would-be-fine pronunciation of Fergus Duff had given him the notion that to speak anything but his mother-tongue would be unmanly and false.
We should have had plenty of printed copies of Holy Scripture in the mother-tongue of English people, had these versions never been made and circulated to attack and injure Holy Church, without whom the originals could never have existed. Scattering of our old MSS. in Sixteenth Century. Same now in public libraries. Collections.
He spoke English admirably, but in emotional moments he lapsed into the language that is more familiar than their mother-tongue to all Russians of his rank. "It is so with us all. She loves Russia, our poor Russia, agonizing in the throes of a new birth; while we we love her, the woman.
27. -Litterator- and -grammaticus- are related nearly as elementary teacher and teacher of languages with us; the latter designation belonged by earlier usage only to the teacher of Greek, not to a teacher of the mother-tongue. -Litteratus- is more recent, and denotes not a schoolmaster but a man of culture.
Only our language has come to us with the brand of the fatherland upon it. In our mother-tongue prevails the same principle of dualism, the same conflict of elements, which not all the lethean baptism of the Atlantic could wash out. The two nations of England survive in the two tongues of America.
I can remember when I used carefully to corral all my slang words in apologetic quote-marks, as if they were range-cattle to be fenced out from the home herd our mother-tongue which we brought with us from the East, and which you have preserved in all its conscientious purity. But I give it up.
She wished to learn French and Italian as she had learned her mother-tongue, by picking up, instead of beginning at the beginning, and learning grammar. She did pick up wonderfully well, to be sure, but she found that would not answer at school.
Her gown was of a dark print; she had no ornament except a ring with a single ruby. She was working a bit of net into lace. She could speak Gaelic as well as any in the glen perhaps better; but to her sons she always spoke English. To them indeed English was their mother-tongue, in the sense that English only came addressed to themselves from her lips.
Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white a poor white of the very poorest. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him.
Milton's secret lies in his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited vocabulary. He wielded it as his own, as a second mother-tongue, the native and habitual idiom of his thought and feeling, backed by a massive frame of character, and "a power which is got within me to a passion."
Word Of The Day