THE GROWTH OF A LANGUAGE 347 



Languages in which a written literature is not much developed, 

 and a people among whom the art of writing is not much in vogue, 

 take the factor of personal presence into account. Men who are fa- 

 miliar with the Turkish have noted a marked difference between its col- 

 loquial and its written form. It makes conversational sentences con- 

 cise to the verge of obscurity, because in case of doubt the speaker can 

 be asked to explain, whereas in writing it almost rejects the use of 

 pronouns of the third person and employs a style like that of legal 

 documents, full of repetitions of nouns coupled with " the said," " the 

 afore mentioned," and so on. Discourses spoken, not read, to popular 

 audiences are usually prolix. Every thought is elaborated; the same 

 idea is presented in a number of different guises, as we may note in 

 preaching, in political harangues, and especially in pleas before juries. 

 How much the personal equation has to do with comprehension is 

 easily realized if we read a drama, or even a monologue, and afterward 

 hear the same from the lips of a competent actor or elocutionist. It is 

 almost like a restoration of the dead to life. The ancient Greeks fully 

 grasped the importance of the spoken word as compared with the dead 

 letter of the written page. Homer's characters talk a great deal. 

 Herodotus brings many of his men and women on the stage and lets 

 them tell their own story. When Thucydides wishes to put before his 

 readers the motives that inspire the different parties in their conflicts 

 with each other he selects a representative of each, and brings him for- 

 ward that he may present his side of the case in his own person. Plato 

 traverses the whole domain of philosophy; but in order to relieve his 

 doctrines as far as possible of their abstruse character he places before 

 his readers a number of interlocutors in order to give them a lifelike 

 setting. Few persons, when reading a novel, stop to think that the 

 conversations so often reported to have taken place between two per- 

 sons in strict privacy, or even soliloquies, are absurdly impossible. 



The morphology and syntax of the Greek are so varied; their 

 proper management requires such a high degree of grammatical and 

 rhetorical skill ; the precise meaning of a passage so often depends upon 

 the nice choice and exact position of a particle; the tone of voice and 

 stress with which it is uttered, that we can readily understand the aver- 

 sion of those to whom it was native to the cold and lifeless word, even 

 though we can not fully enter into the minutiae of the causes which 

 prompted the feeling. We have no means of knowing how many words 

 with their definitions the human memory is capable of retaining. 



There is, of course, a limit in practise; hardly in theory. The 

 problem is closely related to that of the acquisition of foreign languages. 

 There is not much difference between the ability to read several foreign 

 languages and the ability to define the same number of words in one's 

 own. Although the number of words in the largest English dictionaries 



