Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Grammar of the English
Language is a growth, and, like every other growth, is primarily dependent upon an inward vital energy. It has its origin and its development in answer to an instinctive desire of the soul to express its thoughts and feelings. The power of speech is stimulated by the presence of external objects, and takes its actual form by means of an unconscious ability to imitate the vocal symbols which chance to be made the conventional representatives of thought. It matters not to what nation or people the child may belong: be he English, French, German, or Chinese, it is all the same. The speech which he hears in his childhood becomes his vernacular tongue, and all others are foreign.
Place him among the cultivated and refined, and he employs, he knows not why, the pure and polished speech of his guardians and associates. On the contrary, let him fall among the rude and illiterate, and he as readily and as surely accepts for his native language, his mother tongue, their perverted words and incorrect modes of expression.
Unfortunately for the teacher, the period for direct cultivation does not come till after instinct and habit have given a degree of permanency to these malformations which have grown into a vital union with all that is good in the child's style of speaking. The task of correction has become doubly difficult, requiring the uprooting of old expressions and the planting and nurturing of new. Just what should be done to give to the child a knowledge of a foreign language, must now be done to establish a correct and refined use of his own. It is not abstract principles that he wants, but rather a practical use of good, well-authorized expressions. These he will adopt, not by repeating rules, but by discarding the faulty and using the good. He learns to speak good English by speaking good English. He learns the use of new expressions by using them. Of what consequence, then, is it how he obtains them, - whether by rule, or by direct dictation from the teacher? The time for the teacher to commence this process of cultivation is the day the pupil enters school.
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