The colloquial linguistic faculty and its physiological groundwork / by Walter Hayle Walshe.

  • Walter Hayle Walshe
Date:
1885
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The colloquial linguistic faculty and its physiological groundwork / by Walter Hayle Walshe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    :3o CONCLUSION—ADDENDA. scientist seldom exhibit any distinctive colloquial linguistic aptitude, and conversely people, who acquire foreign tongues with exceptional ease are often otherwise dullards. Practice, as the proverb would have it, makes perfect. But in the matter • of languages use is much more effectual with some learners than with others. And, while linguistic faculty is in the main a congenital gift, it is in a secondary degree dependent on the amount of facility with which the cells concerned absorb material in different brains from the nutrient neuroglia, and in so far takes rank as an acquired potentiality. ADDENDA. Vide p. 16. And in truth Voltaire, sixty years before the day of Talleyrand, had written : ITs n'employent les paroles, que pour deguiser leurs pensees(Le Chapon et la Poulardc,. So too, Goldsmith, while the future diplomatist was vet in arms, suggested : the true use of speech is not so much to express ^our wants as to conceal them. (The Bee iii., 1759.) See Brewer, Reader's Handbook, p. 972. Vide p. 30. And greater, greater far than all these, Voltaire! That versatile genius managed during his few months' stay in England to acquire very considerable proficiency in the language, reading, as his biographers assure us, not only works of philosophy but of farcical literature, such as « Hudibras and Gulliver's Travels, with appreciative relish Yet without entering on the delicate ground of colloqu.al delivery, we may affirm his English education was anything but complete. Not only does he in his estimates of our phraseology occasionally prove critically unsound but falls every now and then into notable misconception of the mere meaning of words. An instance in point, wherein he in- forms his countrymen, preferment s.gnific benefice en Anglais, has just fallen under my notice (Les Ore.lles dn Comte de Chesterfield, ch. ij ft » easy to error arose of thus confounding the abstract and the con- crete significations, while the mistake shows to what a lamentable extent even the greatest human mind may be subjugated by the veriest trivialities, where a foreign tongue is concerned.
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