244 ON A DOMINANT LANGUAGE FOR SCIENCE. 



the direct modes of expression and the short phrases of other countries 

 in the same way that they have abandoned the Gothic printed letters. 

 Should they correspond with strangers, they often have the politeness 

 to write in Latin characters. They willingly introduce in their publica- 

 tions terms taken from foreign languages, modifications sometimes 

 merely of form, occasionally fundamental. These attest the modern 

 spirit and the enlightened judgment of the learned men so numerous 

 in Germany. Unhappily, the modifications of form have no great im- 

 portance, and the fundamental changes take place very slowly. 



The more practical English language shortens sentences and words. 

 It willingly takes possession of foreign words, as German does ; but of 

 cabriolet it makes cab ; of memorandum it makes mem. It makes use 

 only of indispensable and natural tenses — the present, the j)ast, the 

 future, and the conditional. There is no arbitrary distinction of gen- 

 ders ; animated objects are masculine or feminine ; the others are neu- 

 ter. The ordinary construction is so sure to begin with the principal 

 idea, that in conversation you may often dispense with the necessity of 

 finishing your sentences. The chief fault of the English language, its 

 inferiority in comparison with German or Italian, consists in an orthog- 

 raphy absolutely irregular, and so absurd that children take a whole 

 year in learning to read.* The pronunciation is not well articulated, 

 not well defined. I shall not go as far as Madame Sand in her amusing 

 imprecations on this point ; but there is truth in what she says. The 

 vowels are not distinct enough. But, in spite of these faults, English, 

 according to the same clever writer, is a well-expressed language, quite 

 as clear as any other, at least when English people choose to revise 

 tJeir MMS., which they will not always do, they are in such a hurry ! 



English terms are adapted to modern wants. Do you wish to hail a 

 vessel, to cry " stop " to a train, to explain a machine, to demonstrate 

 an experiment in physics, to speak in few words to busy and practical 

 people, it is the language par excellence. In comparison with Italian, 

 with French, and, above all, with German, English has the efl'ect, to 

 those who speak several languages, of offering the shortest cut from 

 one point to another. I have observed this in families where two lan- 

 guages are equally well known, which often occurs in Switzerland. 

 When the two languages are German and French, the latter almost 

 always carries the day. "Why?" I asked of a German-Swiss estab- 

 lished in Geneva. " I can scarcely tell you," he replied ; "at home we 

 speak German to exercise my son in the languages, but he always falls 

 back into the French of his comrades. French is shorter — more con- 

 venient." Before the events of 1870, a great Alsatian manufacturer 

 sent his sou to study at Zurich. I was curious to know the reason why. 

 " We cannot," he said, " induce our children to speak German, with 



* Surprised, on one occasion, by the slowness with which intelligent English children 

 learned reading, I inquired the reason. Each letter has several sounds, or you may say 

 that each sound is written in several ways. It is therefore necessary to learn reading word 

 for word. It is an affair of memory. 



