574 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 227 



standing the important position already assigned 

 it among the recognized essentials of education. 

 The striking inefficiency of the old method of 

 teaching foreign languages has been proved year 

 after year by barrenness of result ; but neverthe- 

 less, if popular text-books are a criterion, lan- 

 guage is still taught in the same old way. An at- 

 tempt is made to learn it only consciously, and 

 letters and the literary language are falsely re- 

 garded as synonymous with sounds and the spoken 

 language. Worse than all, with the old method 

 of translation, the foreign language has been 

 studied within the native language ; and, while 

 foreign words and forms have indeed been taught, 

 no attempt has been made to teach or to learn 

 with the foreign language the foreign mode of 

 thought. 



It is Sayce, again, who affirms axiomatically 

 that language consists of sounds, and not of let- 

 ters. Sweet, too, insists no less strikingly that 

 language-study is concerned notvvith dead letters, 

 but with living speech It is accordingly the 

 spoken form of every language that should form 

 the basis of its study, which should furthermore 

 proceed from the stand-point of the sentence, and 

 not from that of the word. Upon these funda- 

 mental points all recent writers on the study of 

 language are substantially agreed. With one ex- 

 ception, the writers cited above would, however, 

 eliminate from the question the factor which I 

 have called the theoretical knowledge of lan- 

 guage, and would make its practical command the 

 one end in view. Techmer alone regards the 

 practical acquisition of a language of primary im- 

 portance, but would base upon it theoretical study 

 with the idea of making the knowledge of the 

 new language more perfect and firmly fixed. 

 What is here of less weight from its bearing on 

 the subject is his characterization of this theoreti- 

 cal study of language as "an educational means 

 of bringing the harmonious and homogeneous de- 

 velopment of the mind to its highest possible per- 

 fection." The true place which the theoretical 

 study of language should hold is best of all stated 

 by Storm, in his ' EngHsche Philologie' (Heil- 

 bronn, 1881). He vvould. neither eliminate it en- 

 tirely, on the one hand, nor would he give it un- 

 due prominence, on the other. The theoretical, 

 he maintains, is practical in a higher sense, be- 

 cause it facilitates the comprehension and acqui- 

 sition of the facts. 



The pronunciation of a foreign language should 

 form the first stage of its instruction, and this 

 can only be taught on the basis of scientific pho- 

 netics. Whether the instruction should proceed 

 at the outset through the medium of phonetic 

 transcription, is a point upon which not all writers 



are agreed. Techmer, in the light of his own 

 experience, is against it. Sweet is outspoken in 

 favor of it : he would entirely discard the ordi- 

 nary orthography, and substitute for it one purely 

 phonetic ; and in this dictum he is followed by 

 many others. Vietor has practically applied this 

 theory to German for English learners in his 

 ' German pronunciation,' which is worthy of a 

 wider distribution than it has thus far had in this 

 country : even if it is found impracticable to use 

 it in its entirety as a text-book in the class-room,, 

 its material will prove of the utmost value for 

 the wealth of suggestion that it contains. Unpro- 

 ductive as is our whole present system of language- 

 teaching, this matter of pronunciation, which 

 recent writers on the subject almost with one 

 voice maintain should be a foundation principle, 

 is, nevertheless, the weakest element of all. The 

 ordinary text-book gives at the beginning a few 

 pages on pronunciation, unscientific in character, 

 and consequently imperfect and inexact, and 

 utterly inadequate even with constant and pains- 

 taking iteration, as every teacher knows, to con- 

 vey the information desired. In learning the 

 sounds of a foreign language, the course to be 

 followed is from simple sounds to syllables, to 

 words, and finally to sentences. With words and 

 sentences, meanings are also to be associated : 

 such sentences should, further, be the natural 

 sentences of language, which are precisely the 

 ones that cannot be constructed a priori. There is 

 no place in language-instruction for Ollendorffian 

 sentences like " The merchant is swimming with 

 the gardener's son, but the Dutchman has the 

 gun." 



When the foreign sounds and sound-complexes 

 have once been thoroughly mastered, and not 

 until then, a reading-book, containing connected 

 texts written in the simplest and most colloquial 

 style, and embodying as few infrequent words 

 and phrases as possible, is to form the main foun- 

 dation for the study of the new language. Sweet 

 expresses himself most definitely as to the ar- 

 rangement of such a book. It should have, first, 

 descriptions of nature and natural phenomena, of 

 the different races of men, their dwellings, food, 

 and dress, because the elementary vocabulary of 

 material things, phenomena, and actions, is most 

 easily embodied in descriptions of this character ; 

 narrative pieces come next ; and. lastly, idiomatic 

 dialogues, and longer pieces which combine all 

 three elements. These texts should be, it is hardly 

 necessary to state, both interesting and entertain- 

 ing, in order perfectly to fulfil their purpose. At 

 the end of this stage of the instruction the learner 

 will have an easy command of a vocabulary, not 

 wide, it may be, in range, but thoroughly prac- 



