"Mother tongue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... business in his own vernacular. He thinks and calculates better in French. Frequently when you engage him in conversation in English and the question of business comes up, you find that he instinctively lapses into his mother tongue. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... daddy, and they were richt weel made," replied the lad, whose mode of speech was entirely different from his grandfather's: the latter had learned English as a foreign language, but could not speak Scotch, his mother tongue being Gaelic. ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... clothes enough in August to melt them. Nobody would have guessed from Bob's presentation now that he had ever been aloft on a dark night in the Atlantic, or knew the hundred ingenuities that could be performed with a rope's end and a marline-spike as well as his mother tongue. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... ambition had been to see her son's name among the long list of clergymen of the family who had been ministers to the neighboring church of Stentrohult. She finally yielded, and the best possible use was made by Linnaeus of Dr. Rothman's tuition. Latin, then the mother tongue of all scientists and scholars, he wrote ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... whose force he felt to be telling on himself, from making any world for his thought in the minds of others—like a poet among people of a strange speech, who may have a poetry of their own, but have no ear for his cadence, no answering thrill to his discovery of the latent virtues in his mother tongue. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulates their heroes, and consecrates morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of that wisdom and valor and generosity we have. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... While yet a teacher at Leipzig he announced a course of lectures to be delivered in the German language. The outcry was great against him; but he persevered, and henceforth delivered all his lectures in his mother tongue. Since his time the use of Latin, as a colloquial, has gradually decreased, and at the present day the German is the chief language employed at the universities. Thomasius was also the first to combat the system of prosecutions ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... taken into consideration. It is a sort of honourable exile for a man to spend sixteen years of his life on a foreign service, with a family growing up, who enjoy very rare opportunities of conversing with any of their own countrymen, and still less of their countrywomen, in their mother tongue. I take some liberty in venturing to offer these wholly unauthorized remarks on a subject of some delicacy; and only wish I could flatter myself they have any chance of reaching influential quarters, and not being forgotten. Mr. Craig's position, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... that content themselves with their Originall reference, and that have scarce any other agreement among them than what depends upon the common tie and union that they have with their first principle, which in reallity is no more then this famous Mother Tongue of which some make a mystery without well understanding what they say: For altho it hath subsisted in its selfe before the first confusion, yet we must not think of discoursing of it at the same rate, nor put our minds upon ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... a Convocation was held in England, composed of British and American Episcopal Bishops. They had no difficulty in communicating with one another because all spoke their mother tongue. But suppose they had representatives from Spain, France and Germany. The lips of those Continental Bishops would be sealed because they could not speak to their English brothers; their ears also would be sealed because they could not comprehend ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... worthy-minded Che-hsein knits his brow for a moment in a profound study, and then, lightening up suddenly, delivers himself of "No savvy," a choice morsel of pidgeon English that he has somehow acquired. This is the full extent of his knowledge, however; but, feeble glimmer of my own mother tongue though it be, it sounds quite cheery amid the wilderness wild of Celestial gabble in the office. For although the shackles of authority hold in check the murderous mob, howling for my barbarian gore outside, a constant ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... whose duty it was to instil a knowledge of his graceful mother tongue into the minds of a score of restless and unappreciative young Britons, found the facetious gentlemen of the Upper Fourth a decided "handful." They seemed to regard instruction in the Gallic language as an unending source of merriment. ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... foreigners cannot understand English? Why will you not depend upon us? Why will you not tell us what you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country? It would save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance causes us. I will address this person in his mother tongue: 'Here, cospetto! corpo di Bacco! Sacramento! Solferino!—Soap, you son of a gun!' Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beautiful, grave-eyed brunette, gracious in manner, sweet of voice, the finest type that her class and environment can produce. Isabel was well read, musical, traveled; she spoke two or three languages besides her mother tongue. She had been adored all her life by three younger brothers, by her charming and simple, half-invalid mother, and her big, clever father, and now, all the girls were beginning to suspect, was also adored by the very delightful Eastern man who ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... browning foliage, merry country folk and song; a gleam of a better world after the dull and solemn North: a glorious sensation of being at home among people who like myself dared to say something graceful and to do something wanton; the beloved flexible and vigorous sounds of my mother tongue, and the great joy of the people's craving for beauty and elegance down into the very lowest circles: roughness and wildness not without a certain dignity, not simply rude and coarse as with the Northern barbarians: ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... may be 'twixt ape and Plato; 'Tis the man who with a bird, Wren, or eagle, finds his way to All its instincts; he hath heard The lion's roaring, and can tell What his horny throat expresseth, And to him the tiger's yell Comes articulate and presseth On his ear like mother tongue." * ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... where his granddaughter lived, and claimed her. His heart was empty he said. They would go to Maduro, though so many long, long years had passed since he, then a strong man of thirty, had seen its low line of palm-clad beach sink beneath the sea-rim; for he longed to hear the sound of his mother tongue once more. And so the one French priest on Marutea blessed him and the child—for Rime had become a Catholic during his stay in the big plantation—and said that God would be good to them both in their long journey across the ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... cried. "Momser! Ganef! Nebich!" By which Abrahm Kantor, in smiting mother tongue, branded his offspring with attributes of apostate and ne'er-do-well, of idiot ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... down the valley," he said, continuing to speak in French, which was a second mother tongue to him. "She must have gone to Sor Teresa. He has induced her to go by some trick. He would not dare to send her ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... all must agree, that in one of the severest trials which ever tested the moral qualities of man, he fulfilled his duty with simplicity and strength. Nor is it possible for the people of England, at such a moment, to forget that he sprang from the same fatherland, and spoke the same mother tongue. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... diverging corridors, but not once did Woola hesitate. It was at the opening to one of these corridors upon my right that I presently heard a sound that spoke more plainly to John Carter, fighting man, than could the words of my mother tongue—it was the clank of metal—the metal of a warrior's harness—and it came from a little distance up ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comprehensive vision and open-mindedness the manifold regions of our country and the multifarious callings of our people; you no longer feel yourselves to be addressing the millions of good people whose mother tongue you speak, indeed, the best people of your day and generation; you do not dream of disciplining yourselves to be men and heroes, or of striving to be at one with the widely ramified nation and the still more widespread spirit of humanity. Aimlessly yielding to your artistic whims, crotchets, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... service of real patriotism, he composed a work on the grammar and orthoepy of the Latin language. Cicero and himself were the only Romans of distinction in that age, who applied themselves with true patriotism to the task of purifying and ennobling their mother tongue. Both were aware of the transcendent quality of the Grecian literature; but that splendor did not depress their hopes of raising their own to something of the same level. As respected the natural wealth of the two languages, it was the private opinion of Cicero, that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... there lay the cause of the unhappiness of the people and of the best of kings. A third addressed a few words to her in German: the Queen told her she did not understand it; that she had become so entirely French as even to have forgotten her mother tongue. This declaration was answered with "Bravo!" and clapping of hands; they then desired her to make a compact with them. "Ah," said she, "how can I make a compact with you, since you have no faith in that which my ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... mother tongue,' said the man; 'you're what goes by the name of a learned gentleman. Thank ye, sir. You'll be a counsellor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... university, and were supposed to possess all the erudition which mankind has hoarded up from age to age. Greek and Latin were as familiar to them as the bab-ble of their childhood. Hebrew was like their mother tongue. They had grown gray in study; their eyes were bleared with poring over print and manuscript by the light of ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... poor Pink, (this was an old household name which he retained amongst us from an incident of his childhood,) was so in an immoderate degree. Being a great reader, (in fact, he had read every thing in his mother tongue that was of general interest,) he was pretty well aware how general was the ridicule attached in our times to the subject of ghosts. But this—nor the reverence he yielded otherwise to some of those writers who had joined ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... I could travel the remaining few miles through quiet county places alone. This last one hundred and fifty miles, however, had been the most trying part of the whole journey. My English was a trifle halting; all our teachers spoke German as their mother tongue at the school, and the last two years I was the only English-born pupil. Captain Green was an old East Indian officer, like my own dead father, and very readily undertook the care of a troublesome chit of a girl across the ocean, in memory of the strong ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... mother tongue of the Bantu people living in Zanzibar and nearby coastal Tanzania; although Kiswahili is Bantu in structure and origin, its vocabulary draws on a variety of sources, including Arabic and English, and it has become the lingua ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... The whole race were at free quarters in the little castle nigh to Bruxelles which Frank had taken; rode his horses; drank his wine; and lived easily at the poor lad's charges. Mr. Esmond had always maintained a perfect fluency in the French, which was his mother tongue; and if this family (that spoke French with the twang which the Flemings use) discovered any inaccuracy in Mr. Simon's pronunciation, 'twas to be attributed to the latter's long residence in England, where he had married and remained ever since ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... generous endowment of warm, rich words, wherewith to do justice to the imaginings. All the beauty, dignity, and glory of English logography seem to be his: he marshals an array of adjectives and phrases which seem all of the blood royal of our munificent mother tongue. Oftentimes his page sounds like the deep-rolling anthem of a mighty cathedral organ. Might and music are in his syllables; and without sifting his sentences for a noble thought or a beautiful idea, we may be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... but few worthy representatives in Russia, if we omit the poet Derzhavin, whom Pushkin accused of having a poor knowledge of his mother tongue, and whose monotonous work shows signs of genius ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... splendid! ... You have a bewitching Riga enunciation, the most correct of all the German ones. And so, let us continue in my tongue. That is far sweeter to my ear—my mother tongue. All right?" ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... my life—it is Lancelot Carnegan. I hail from Ireland, as you may suppose; and perhaps you may have already discovered a touch of the brogue—but it has been well-nigh washed out of me; still, though we children of Erin roam the world over, we never entirely get rid of our mother tongue." ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... governess. The second generation of immigrants to this country learns our speech even while it may continue the tongue of the native land. The third generation—if it mix continuously with speakers of English—relinquishes entirely the exercise of the mother tongue. The succeeding generation seldom can speak it, frequently ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... her adopted country. They who understand the French language will be interested in observing that most of the errors which the writer falls into are those which result naturally from the usages of her mother tongue. ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... spoke once more their mother tongue of love and faith with an accuracy which told of lifelong rehearsal within their secret hearts. When the golden bowl was broken, its holy contents, flowing free, poured ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... necessary for the singer. Above all you must know how to pronounce and sing in your own language. So many do not think it necessary to study their own language; they think they know that already; but one's mother tongue requires study as ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... that among the nations visited by the missionary Theophilus, in the time of Constantius, were "the Assyrians on the verge of the outer ocean towards the East ... whom Alexander the Great, after driving them from Syria, sent thither to settle, and to this day they keep their mother tongue, though all of the blackest, through the power of the sun's rays." The Arab voyagers of the 9th century say that the island was colonised with Greeks by Alexander the Great, in order to promote the culture of the Socotrine aloes; when the other Greeks adopted Christianity ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... fellow-men; he had also to add a simple and concise commentary. In this letter there was a passage dealing with schools, and the priest on that topic remarked that "by divine and human law every nation may ask that its children should be instructed in their mother tongue." When Mass was finished, the mayor of the village assembled the parishioners and notified them that henceforward, by order of the lieutenant, there would no longer be in the village a Croatian but an Italian school. And in order to mollify ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... in her, young and warm, aglow, but looking like the dead woman and the woman of the frieze—the woman of the lamp—bowls—the statue—come to life, speaking to him in English more sweetly than if it had been her mother tongue. The English abuse their language. Yasmini caressed it and made it do its ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... Place, infamous across the world, were cleared of open houses of shame. Where the artful scarlet woman plied her deadly trade the streets are now full of children, and the houses once red with sin are now shops of new citizens, who have yet their mother tongue and the strange garb of lands across ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... stature; [102:3] he seems to have laboured under the disadvantages of imperfect vision; [102:4] and his Palestinian Greek must have sounded harshly in the ears of those who were accustomed to speak their mother tongue in its Attic purity. But, though his "bodily presence was weak," [102:5] he speedily convinced those who came in contact with him, that the frail earthly tabernacle was the habitation of a master mind; and though mere connoisseurs ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... travelling increased, in a certain number of Englishmen, the tendency we have already noticed, to feel contempt towards their mother tongue. There are persons, wrote George Pettie in 1581, "who will set light by my labours, because I write in English: and those are some nice travailours who retourne home with such queasie stomachs that nothing will downe with ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the Mohican language as fluently as their mother tongue, would then explain to the Indians the contents of the chapter read, in their native language, and sometimes Agnes would sing one of the fine songs which she had cleverly translated ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... Paganorum animabus post mortem, a famous doctor of the Ambrosian College in Milan. Bishop Fotherby in his Atheomastix, Doctor Dove, Doctor Jackson, Abernethy, Corderoy, have written well of this subject in our mother tongue: in Latin, Colerus, Zanchius, Palearius, Illyricus, [6682]Philippus, Faber Faventinus, &c. But instar omnium, the most copious confuter of atheists is Marinus Mercennus in his Commentaries on Genesis: [6683]with Campanella's Atheismus Triumphatus. He sets down at large the causes of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... experience. The book was published in 1666. A short period of freedom was followed by a second offence and a further imprisonment. Bunyan's works were coarse, indeed, but they showed a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience. They therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... other languages which are inwardly known to man, not in languages which he does not understand." Schwedenborg here took up the angels, and to explain their own ideas to them observed, that they most likely appeared to speak his mother tongue, because, in fact, it was not they who spoke, but himself by their suggestion. The angels held out, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Heloise by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposed that Abelard should enter the canon's house as her tutor, and Fulbert's avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d'amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Heloise seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratto s'apprende,[65] and Minerva was not the only goddess ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... to spend some of his time with the little chap after that. He would bring books and read to him in his mother tongue, or tell him wonderful stories. The poor little chap was so happy to see him and always used to kiss 'Uncle Nick,' as Karl taught the boy to call him. And when the little fellow died, Karl wept just as though ...
— The Marx He Knew • John Spargo
... I have my flies abroad. Your bath Is famous, Subtle, by my means. Sweet Dol, You must go tune your virginal, no losing O' the least time: and, do you hear? good action. Firk, like a flounder; kiss, like a scallop, close; And tickle him with thy mother tongue. His great Verdugoship has not a jot of language; So much the easier to be cozen'd, my Dolly. He will come here in a hired coach, obscure, And our own coachman, whom I have sent as guide, No creature else. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... Madge, Richard Jennifer. She's meat for your betters, sir!" rasped the old man, lapsing into the mother tongue, as he did now and then ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... e.g., tacai iama 'a high mountain,' xiguei ideiri 'frequent comings and goings,' caxicoi (10 fito 'a wise man,' cavaij mono 'a wretched thing,' aiaui coto 'a dangerous thing,' umare tuqi no cuchi 'one's natural, or mother tongue.' There are also adjectives ending in na which, when they are placed before nouns, do not alter the construction; e.g., qirei na coto 'a clean thing.' All the adjectives, except those ending in no, change their form in some way when they occur before verbs. Those that end in ai change ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... his person as of his mind; his body (as Langbaine expresses it) "being as handsome as his soul. He was, says he, an expert linguist, understanding not only Greek and Latin, but French and Italian, as perfectly as his mother tongue; an excellent orator, and at the same time an admirable poet, a quality which Cicero with all his pains could never attain." The editor of his works applies to him the saying of Aristotle concerning AEschron the poet, "that he could not tell what AEschron could ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... master his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells us how the readers of SCHELLING were surprised and enraptured by a wealth of new expressions and new turns of speech in their mother tongue. But all these belonged to Behmen, or were fashioned on the model of his symbolical language. As it is, with all his astrology, and all his alchemy, and all his barbarities of form and expression, I for one will always take sides with the author of The Serious Call, and The Spirit of Prayer, ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... "Isolation and National Individuality," has been in large degree the result of a cultural process based upon isolation. The historical nations of Europe, biologically hybrid, are united by common language, folkways, and mores. This unity of mother tongue and culture is the product of historical and cultural processes circumscribed, as Shaler points ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... words in another language, and how increasing familiarity with such words brings greater rapidity and ease of comprehension; and if we consider that the same process must have gone on with the words of our mother tongue from childhood upwards, we shall clearly see that the earliest learnt and oftenest used words, will, other things equal, call up images with less loss of time and energy than ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... of the east had had for the Hellenic. The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator, and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever- widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690 was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before; that opportunities ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... question these little sibylline leaves, and make the Marguerite tell me whether I am destined to a prison all the days of my life. What! you never heard of the old flower sortilege? Why, Gretchen, I thought every little German maiden learned it in the cradle with her mother tongue!" ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... only started when perception of depth and movement alone are considered. If we hear Chinese, we perceive the sounds, but there is no inner response to the words; they are meaningless and dead for us; we have no interest in them. If we hear the same thoughts expressed in our mother tongue, every syllable carries its meaning and message. Then we are readily inclined to fancy that this additional significance which belongs to the familiar language and which is absent from the foreign one is something which comes to us in the perception itself as ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... mother tongue—may serve as a last example. We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the mouth and tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter. We have probably spoken for years and years before we became aware that the letter h is a labial sound, and until we have to utter ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... this metaphysical contest our arms are too unequal; you speaking in your mother tongue, which I scarcely lisp, might bring forth huge volumes, while I could hardly oppose pages; and the public, who would read neither production, might take the weight of the books ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... expressed himself similarly. We quote from the recently published Service. "Music is a language, a mother tongue, a more mellifluous and articulate language than words, in comparison with which speech is recent and temporary. There is as much music in the world as virtue. In a world of peace and love music would ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... interested in the growth and future of Canada should turn their attention to it. For, unless we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own mother tongue. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... language, thank God; there is no quick and easy way of imparting instruction in a foreign language. By and by all the Alaskan natives will be more or less bilingual, but the intimate speech and the most clearly understood speech will still be the mother tongue. The singing done, there was preaching through an interpreter, and then each individual present "gave testimony," which consisted for the most part in the recitation of a text of Scripture. Then there were individual prayers ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... cried, with power and joy in his voice. In that moment, no doubt the greatest in his life of gambling, he unconsciously went back to the use of his mother tongue. ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... to learn upon Continental trips. It took me three years of hard work to recover from the sort of French which I learned at school, and I am not well yet. The French spoken by Trehayne was the French of the nursery. It was almost, if not quite, his mother tongue, just as his English was. Trehayne's French accent did not fit into Trehayne's history as retailed to us by Dawson. From that moment I plumped for Trehayne as the ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... of flowers in pre-eminently the language of refined and modest Courtship; millions have conveyed a message by presenting a flower which they dare not have uttered in their mother tongue. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... encouraged and delighted with their excellent foregoing, others have followed, to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as in other arts. This did so notably show itself, that the philosophers of Greece durst not a long time appear to the world but under the masks of poets. So Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides sang their natural philosophy in verses: so did ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... early. It is true that as far as speaking a foreign language is concerned, the earlier a child begins it the better. But this is not true of learning to read the language. The sounds of the foreign language that we have not learned in childhood in speaking the mother tongue are usually difficult for us to make. The organs of speech become set in the way of their early exercise. In reading the foreign language, correct pronunciation is not important. We are concerned with getting the ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... terrible, a daple-leck for a table-leg, bepples for pebbles, tisasder for disaster, schimnastig dricks for gymnastic tricks, let-bencil for lead-pencil, &c. The peculiarity of Germans pronouncing in their mother tongue s like sh when it is followed by a t or p, and of Germans in southern Germany often also final s like sh, naturally produced in their American jargon such results as shplit, shtop, shtraight, shtar, shtupendous, shpree, shpirit, &c; ish(is), ash(as), &c.; and, by analogy led to shveet(sweet), ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... to James Whitcomb Riley is Edmund Vance Cooke (born 1866). He has the same philosophy of cheerful kindliness, founded on a shrewd knowledge of human nature. Verse is his mother tongue; and occasionally he rises above fluency and ingenuity into the pure air ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... civilisation. But who are those that now begin to fill their places? Aliens, Orientals and worse now received without surprise into the peerage of England and the great offices of justice. And the names which recall Elizabeth and whose syllables are a part of our mother tongue, are obliterated by such jargon ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... strategic Cherokee method. Nevertheless, to give him full sway, that everything possible might be said in contravention of the proposition, the old trader lapsed into the Indian speech, that was indeed from long usage like a mother tongue to them both. He stayed here, he said, from choice, it was true, but for the sake of the trade that gave him wealth, and with wealth he could return to the colonies at any time, and go whither he would in all the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Judea and Assyria: that is, the language spoken at the courts. After the fall of Samaria the Hebrew inhabitants of Northern Israel were largely carried into captivity, and their place was taken by colonists from Syria, who probably spoke Aramaic as their mother tongue. The fall of the Jewish Kingdom hastened the decay of Hebrew as a spoken language—not that the captives forgot their own language, as is generally assumed, but after the return to Judea the Jews found themselves, a ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... fog, in torrid zone and regions of perpetual ice to free the seas of the traitorous monster who had, in the twentieth century, hoisted the black flag of piracy and murder. For three years this ceaseless war was waged, and then, with her wonderful patience exhausted, the great sister nation of the mother tongue joined her fleets and armies with those of the battle-worn Allies and peace came to a ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... less wit, or more beauty: all her features were fine and regular; but her shape was not good: yet she was slender, straight enough, and taller than the generality of women: she was very graceful, danced well, and spoke French better than her mother tongue: she was well bred, and possessed, in perfection, that air of dress which is so much admired, and which cannot be attained, unless it be taken when young, in France. While her charms were gaining ground in the king's heart, the Countess of Castlemaine amused herself in ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic should be himself. To be carried away by the popular current ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... did. But the scoundrel explained it afterwards by telling me that although a Turkish subject, he had lived in Algiers and France since he was a child, and had quite forgotten his mother tongue. But he was employed in a confidential position in the Turkish Embassy at Paris, owing not only to family influence, but to his intimate acquaintance ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of the eighteenth century, the political and intellectual life of Germany showed no signs of its imminent awakening. French supremacy was undisputed. French was spoken by polite society, and only the middle and lower classes consented to use their mother tongue. French literature was alone fashionable, and the few scientific works that appeared were published in Latin. Life was hard and sordid. Thought and imagination languished. Such writings as existed were empty, pompous, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the famous chapel-master, Galuppi or Buranelli, who was on his way to St. Petersburg with two friends and an artiste. He did not know me, and was astonished to find a Venetian dinner awaiting him at the inn, as also to hear a greeting in his mother tongue. As soon as I had pronounced my name he embraced me with exclamations of surprise ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... which good Hellenes can well do without. The Athenian lad will never need to crucify the flesh upon Latin, French, and German, or an equivalent for his own Greek. Therein perhaps he may be heavily the loser, save that his own mother tongue is so intricate and full of subtle possibilities that to learn to make the full use thereof is truly a ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... been gaining ground, but they have had hard work to displace the older and more popular theories. It is insisted by many that the student's time should be used in studying general literature, and thus learning the fluent and correct use of his mother tongue. It is also insisted that the study and discussion of forms and inflections is an ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... one has ever thought of questioning the existence of an instinct of vocal imitation. On the contrary, this instinct is everywhere recognized. In childhood we learn to speak our mother tongue by imitating the speech of those about us. "Talking proper does not set in till the instinct to imitate sounds ripens in the nervous system." (The Principles of Psychology, Wm. James, New ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... excuses for us, Giusippe, it is quite true that we Americans are as a rule pitiably ignorant about languages. Here is this boy, Jean, who knows not only his mother tongue but French, German and English besides. Isn't that a rebuke to us, with our fine schools and our college educations? It makes me ashamed of myself. Do you, little girl, try and do better than I have. Well, young man, what do you say to ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... and suffering. Her appearance awoke all those chivalrous feelings which are the honor of the military profession. She was speechless with emotion. The officer addressed her with kind and respectful inquiries. Those were the first words of her mother tongue she had heard for four weeks. Like the breath of the "sweet south" blowing across the fabled lute, those syllables, speaking of home and friends, relaxed the tension to which her nerves had been so long strung and she wept. Twice she essayed to tell how she happened to be found in such a melancholy ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... in great danger of losing my English. I find 'tis not half so easy to me to write in it, as it was a twelvemonth ago. I am forced to study for expressions, and must leave off all other languages, and try to learn my mother tongue.—Human understanding is as much limited as human power, or human strength. The memory can retain but a certain number of images; and 'tis as impossible for one human creature to be perfect master of ten different languages, as to have, in perfect subjection, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... time to be able to make it converse. Busy teaching it difference between a coup and a plot. Hasn't grasped it yet, its mother tongue being Norman-French. But ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... as the machine journeys in its cutting process. To his convictions nothing will solve this problem but mental action. He thinks and dreams of cause and effect. His mind seems to forget all the words of his mother tongue but cause and effect. He talks and preaches cause and effect in so many places that his associates begin to think he is mentally failing, and will soon be a subject for the asylum. He becomes disgusted with their lack of appreciation, seeks seclusion and formulates the desired addition ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... brought her home, in spite of the opposition of her relations. I cannot tell whether she were warmly welcomed at Walwyn Court by any one but the dear beautiful grandmother, a Frenchwoman herself, who was delighted again to hear her mother tongue, although she had suffered much among the Huguenots in her youth, when her husband was left for ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of 2,000,000. Mr. Jones, the minister, is intimately acquainted with Mrs. Bebb, who carefully instructed her distinguished son in the good old language of Wales, so that, at the time of his recent canvass for office, he was able to address the Cambrian portion of his constituency in their mother tongue. ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... they and all who knew him liked him well. But at the end of that time, on a wild winter's night, he came back to them, dressed in opossum skins, with scarce a vestige of European clothing about him. His beard had grown down over his chest, and he had nearly forgotten his mother tongue, but, when speech came to him again, he told ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... must be eighteen years of age, and the subjects are:—Biblical history and the Bible, Christianity and moral philosophy, popular psychology, pedagogics and the science of teaching, school-keeping, the mother tongue and the reading of suitable works in it, mathematics, geography, history, the statistics of Finland, natural history, calligraphy, writing of short essays, drawing and modelling, singing and instrumental music, elementary anatomy, physiology, and the care of small children ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... new friend's hand in his and wrung it warmly. "Don't you see what it is?" he exclaimed, half beside himself with this vague hope of some unknown solution. "Don't you realize how the thing stands? Don't you guess the truth? This isn't a Polynesian, dialect at all. It's our own mother tongue. The bird speaks English!" ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... use a language with which you are not thoroughly acquainted and familiar, unless in some very urgent case to render your idea more clearly. Always speak in your native and mother tongue, not coarsely like the dregs of the people, or poor chamber-maids, but like the most refined and well-to-do citizens, with erudition and elegance. And in your discourse take care to observe the rules of decorum and modesty, and be sure to avoid rather risky tales; do ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... conscience, really betrayed them into the power of Rome. The Bohemians had specified four points as the condition of peace with Rome: The free preaching of the Bible; the right of the whole church to both the bread and the wine in the communion, and the use of the mother tongue in divine worship; the exclusion of the clergy from all secular offices and authority; and in cases of crime, the jurisdiction of the civil courts over clergy and laity alike. The papal authorities at last "agreed that the four articles of the Hussites should be accepted, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... pounded by his iron jaws, would not rest with his comrades in the peaceful coral cemetery! In the midst of the struggle, it was the despairing cry uttered by the unfortunate man that had torn my heart. The poor Frenchman, forgetting his conventional language, had taken to his own mother tongue, to utter a last appeal! Amongst the crew of the Nautilus, associated with the body and soul of the Captain, recoiling like him from all contact with men, I had a fellow-countryman. Did he alone represent France in this mysterious association, evidently ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... Is English not your mother tongue, or do you want me to repeat it in French, by way of making it clearer? ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... religious motive, as here, was quite as influential as the spirit of trade monopoly. Las Casas, in making the same quotation from the Journal, remarks, I. 351: "All these are his exact words, although some of them are not perfect Castilian, since that was not the Admiral's mother tongue." ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... and understand what you can. Characters are not every man's construction, though they be writ in our mother tongue; and what I have written, being of no other nature, if they fit not your humour they may please a better. I make no comparison, because I know you not, but if you will vouchsafe to look into them, it may be ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... reach of human help, he exclaimed, "Welcome, oh, man, in this fearful solitude! If thou canst, succor me, thy fellow-man, who must otherwise perish with thirst!" Then remembering that the tones of his dear German mother tongue were not intelligible in this joyless region, he repeated the same words in the mixed dialect, generally called the Lingua Romana, universally used by heathens, Mohammedans, and Christians in those parts of the world where they have ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... premises to be appropriated for the interment of protestant dissenters; part of the profits to be applied to the use of a religious society in Carr's lane, at the discretion of the trust; and the remainder, for the institution of a school to teach the mother tongue. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... the Anglo-Saxon race is shown as strongly here as in the mother country in your spirited devotion to manly sports and pastimes; and when we think of the other ties that bind us—a common faith, a common literature, the same dear mother tongue—what other conclusion can be drawn by the intelligent traveller than this—that the ties which bind the colonies to the mother country are stronger than those which any legislature or statesmanship could contrive, and that they are inherent in the innermost life of the people. Gentlemen, you ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... attributed to his intimate familiarity with English. The fine nuances of the language do not escape him, and he can use it not with precision merely but with audacity and power. Long years of close and sympathetic association with the literature of England has made English well-nigh a second mother tongue to this fine and appreciative critic. But he is more than a critic. He has more than a little of the true poet's insight and the true poet's gift of song. All this has combined to give us a body of translations which, for fine felicity, stand ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... on, "was a very well-informed man; now since he was not writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturally select that which was currently adopted by the choice spirits of the sixteenth century; I mean Latin. If I am mistaken, I can but try Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the savants of the sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I am therefore entitled to pronounce ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Auchtermuchty wad at that time hae been ruined and lost for ever. But Robin was a cunning man, an' had rather mae wits than his ain, for he had been in the hands o' the fairies when he was young, an' a' kinds o' spirits were visible to his een, an' their language as familiar to him as his ain mother tongue. Robin was sitting on the side o' the West Lowmond, ae still gloomy night in September, when he saw a bridal o' corbie craws coming east the lift, just on the edge o' the gloaming. The moment that Robin saw them, he kenned, by their movements, that they were craws o' some ither warld ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... associations, like those canons which regulate the number of acts in a play, or of syllables in a line. To this fundamental law every other regulation is subordinate. The situations which most signally develop character form the best plot. The mother tongue of the passions ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but those severely kept, plainly put down, and in the mother tongue, that every man may understand. Every city shall have a peculiar trade or privilege, by which it shall be chiefly maintained: [627]and parents shall teach their children one of three at least, bring up and instruct them in the mysteries of their own trade. In each town these several tradesmen ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... he passed, traveling by sea or land through many seasons, till he came to a wonderful island where he saw a man plowing in the fields. And the wonder was, that the man was calling familiar words to his oxen, "such wordes as men speken to bestes in his owne lond." Startled by the sound of his mother tongue he turned back on his course "in gret mervayle, for he knewe not how it myghte be." But if he had passed on a little, says the old record, "he would have founden his contree ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... them from their native country, as many Persian words are current in Hindostan. We ought rather to wonder the number of Hindostanie words in the Gypsey language, is so considerable, than to require it should be greater, to furnish sufficient proof of the Hindostanie language being the Gypsies' mother tongue. ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... as has been taken has never yet been seen except as following after and in consequence of a desire to obstruct; that this is our nomenclature, and that we can no more be expected to change it than to change our mother tongue at ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... a poem can be imitated from its mother tongue. A stanza or two may be expanded into a ballade in English containing an elaboration of the original thought. It is perfectly allowable to offer a composition of this sort for sale provided the source ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... English perfectly well, although his conservatism as a Canadian induced him to prefer his mother tongue as a vehicle for general conversation. But I remarked that his anecdotes of Walker were always related in English, and on these occasions, therefore, for my benefit alone: for but little of the Anglo-Saxon tongue appeared to be known to, or at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Dunster was, at twelve years old, a sturdy thoroughgoing English lad, with the strongest possible hatred to all foreigners, whom with grand indifference to natural history he termed "locusts sucking the blood of Englishmen." Not a word or command would he understand except in his mother tongue; and no blows nor reproofs had sufficed to tame his sturdy obstinacy. The other pages had teased, fagged, and bullied him to their hearts' content, without disturbing his determination to go his own ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... another. At best the Roman alphabet, though beautiful and practical, is not so beautiful as the Greek nor nearly so efficient for representing English sounds as the Cherokee syllabary invented by the half-breed, Sequoyah, is for representing the sounds of his mother tongue. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... in a foreign language, among customs and ways of thought which it takes a lifetime to understand: they are using their mother tongue and handling matters that they have known from childhood. He cannot tell a lie and is ashamed to deceive: they are trained in a thrifty policy which saves the truth for a last resort in case everything else should fail. He would ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... knowledge of the language of some of the neighbouring tribes, and it proved not unlike that of the Little Cherry Indians. Francois found in the village an Indian who had been brought up among the Spaniards of the Pacific Coast, and who still spoke their language as readily as he spoke his mother tongue. He questioned him eagerly about the distance to the Spanish settlements and the difficulties of the way. The man replied that the journey was long. It was also, he said, very dangerous, because it must be through the country of the Snake Indians. This Indian assured Francois ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... voices I used to hear Round such a fireside, Speaking the mother tongue old and dear; Making the heart beat, With endless tales of wonder and ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... heures vingt. Par ici, Meess. Je m'occuperai de vous. Et des bagages aussi—all right," quite the ring of one's mother tongue. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... stood upon English shores; once again he heard his mother tongue spoken all around him, once again he felt the charm of quiet, sweet English scenery. Seventeen years had passed since he had taken Dora's hand in his and told her he cared nothing for all he was leaving behind him, nothing for any one in the world save herself—seventeen ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity. The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native tongue. Secondly, manners. Example ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... In our own mother tongue we have something similar. The dialect of Canaan, the importations of Judaism, the irruptions of Hebraic idioms, phrases and names into Puritanism, and the ejaculations of the camp-meeting, which vein and color our English speech, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... come from certain parts of the vast hinterland speak Mandarin almost as a mother tongue, while those from the seaboard and certain adjacent parts of the interior have nearly as much difficulty in acquiring it, and quite as much difficulty in speaking it with a correct accent, as ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... old mechanical way of teaching the alphabet. The multiplication table is now frequently taught experimentally. In the acquirement of languages, the grammar-school plan is being superseded by plans based on the spontaneous process followed by the child in gaining its mother tongue. Describing the methods there used, the "Reports on the Training School at Battersea" say:—"The instruction in the whole preparatory course is chiefly oral, and is illustrated as much as possible by appeals to nature." And ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... to teach a child to be one as the other. Of what benefit is a smattering of foreign language, except to make people ridiculous? and that class is already sufficiently large; far better that they learned to speak and spell their mother tongue with a commendable degree of accuracy, or that they learn to train future families in consonance with the laws of nature, and save to health the time spent in poorly-ventilated rooms, where, under the pressure of the modern school system, everything ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... all-fired hurry?" questioned Simon. "You'll stay as long as ever you like. It can't be as long as I should like. Stay a while for my sake. Just consider. It's years since I've heard my mother tongue spoken as you speak it, and I'm sore longing to have a chat with a friend who isn't a Crow Indian. Your young partner'd like to stay, if I know anything of boyhood. The adventure would suit him, and to-morrow the Crows are going out on a buffalo hunt. ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... now that the sharpness of excitement had gone out of it, was a very pleasant voice. The broken words he used assured Nan that his mother tongue must be French. He was probably one of the "Canucks" she had heard her cousins speak of. French Canadians were not at all strange to Nan Sherwood, for in Tillbury many of the mill hands were ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... outright, to think how much trouble they had both been taking to speak to each other in French, each supposing the other to be some outlandish foreigner, when, after all, they were both Americans, and could talk perfectly well together in their own mother tongue. Such adventures as these, however, are very frequently met with, in ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... of the ball of the Khedive," he continued in his English, which was, though amazingly fluent and ready, a literal sounding translation of the French, which was in reality his mother tongue. "My sister thinks she can arrange that invitation. You are sure that you will be returned at ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... though its progress might be checked for a few days by attention, or increased in the same ratio by neglect, would in the end have unquestionably fulfilled its mission. The College of Physicians, by the king's command, issued simple and intelligible directions, in the mother tongue, for the sick. Certain of their number, amongst whom was the reader's acquaintance, Doctor Hodges, were appointed to attend the infected; and two out of the Court of Aldermen were required to see that they duly executed their dangerous ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... habiliments, it would seem," observed Francisco, regarding his son with twinkling eyes. "But come, Lucien, I am all impatience to begin the work of under-secretary of state! You bear in remembrance, I trust, that I can read and write nothing save my mother tongue?" ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... no more, among the dead, who found is being built, or the like, acceptable. 'Simple-minded common people and those of culture were alike protected against it by their attachment to the idiom of their mother tongue, with which they felt it to be directly at variance.' So Mr. White informs us. But the writers whom I have quoted are formidable exceptions. Even Mr. White will scarcely deny to them the title of ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... of Paris in the hole, and when it rained the wretched man was squeezed until the blood came out of his mouth and eyes, and he died in agony. But how comes it that you speak to me in English? If we are both Arabs, why not talk the mother tongue?" ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... modern French historians, Karl was really and truly a German king, proud, no doubt, of his Roman subjects, and of his title of Emperor, and anxious to give to his uncouth Germans the benefit of Italian and English teachers, but fondly attached in his heart to his own mother tongue, to the lays and laws of his fatherland: feelings displayed in his own attempt to compose a German grammar, and in his collection of old national songs, fragments of which may have been preserved to us in the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... to catch the ropes and climb up, so a chair was sent down, and we were hoisted in as ladies usually are, and received so hearty an English welcome from Captain Peyton and all on board that I felt myself at once at home in every thing except my own mother tongue. I seemed to know the language perfectly, but the words I wanted would not come at my call. When I left England I had no intention of returning, and directed my attention earnestly to the languages of Africa, paying none to English composition. With the exception of a short interval in Angola, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another the revolutionary traditions of 1793-95 Thus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it without recollections of the old, and has forgotten in its use his own ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... the mission with which I am charged—because the messenger in the mission with which I am charged, must come, according to prophecies, from the Slavonian nation, from the country called Illyria or Illyricum, from the town, named in my mother tongue Kamnik, in Greek and Latin Lithopolis, in German ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... seat for, Kirsty?' asked Gordon, calling her by her name for the first time, and falling into the mother tongue with a ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... was produced by translators, who in later times have corrupted our idiom as much as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injury the Scotch have greatly contributed; for composing in a language which is not their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial and formal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing to the perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves on the bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English of Addison and Swift. Our journals, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... a number of adventures. Not the least of his difficulties was, that he never knew what was said to him, and that he pursued his inquiries among people who never knew what he said to them. Still, with an unshaken confidence that the English tongue was somehow the mother tongue of the whole world, only the people were too stupid to know it, Mr Meagles harangued innkeepers in the most voluble manner, entered into loud explanations of the most complicated sort, and utterly renounced replies in the native language of the respondents, on the ground that they were ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... tolerated. The country churches of the Protestant denominations are chiefly conducted by Hawaiian pastors, the Roman Catholic by French and German priests, who are mostly good linguists and speak Hawaiian, English and Portuguese, besides their mother tongue. Wherever there is a large collection of English speaking people a Protestant church is usually supported by them. In Honolulu there is a large number of churches, Congregational, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist and Mormon. There is a Sunday ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... Yucatan is; but it is yet the vernacular of the people. The Spaniards themselves, who strived so hard to wipe out all vestiges of the ancient customs of the aborigines, were unable to destroy it; nay, they were obliged to learn it; and now many of their descendants have forgotten the mother tongue of their sires, and ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... effort to fan the embers into flame again. The descendants of the two nationalities dwelt apart; there were the French parishes and the Scotch and English parishes, and, although each nationality spoke the same mother tongue, still the spread of schools and churches fostered the different languages of the fatherland, and perpetuated the distinction of race which otherwise would have disappeared by lapsing into savagery. In an earlier chapter I have traced the events immediately pre ceding the breaking out of the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... one of the temples, and made away with, without any being the wiser. I will choose two comrades for you; men of discretion, and courageous without being quarrelsome. With them, too, you will, ere long, begin to recover your mother tongue; which you will never do, so long as you only talk these heathen languages with ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... walk in the afternoon through the streets of the town, and afterward compare international notes once more with our cordial English clergyman. It is renewedly grateful to hear again the mother tongue spoken understandingly by a stranger. The utter and unaccountable absence of our own countrymen's faces and voices from these Pyrenean resorts gives one constantly a touch of regret. One longs occasionally ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... . Language generally % 560. Language. — N. language; phraseology &c. 569; speech &c. 582; tongue, lingo, vernacular; mother tongue, vulgar tongue, native tongue; household words; King's English, Queen's English; dialect &c. 563. confusion of tongues, Babel, pasigraphie[obs3]; pantomime &c. (signs) 550; onomatopoeia; betacism[obs3], mimmation, myatism[obs3], nunnation[obs3]; pasigraphy[obs3]. lexicology, philology, glossology[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Nor has any man yet drawn fully from any but that of his native tongue. We can no more draw our mental sustenance from two languages than we can think in two. Man can have but one deep source from whence come healing waters, as he can have but one mother tongue. So it was with Watt. He had Scotland and that sufficed. When the boy absorbs, or rather is absorbed by, Wallace, The Bruce, and Sir John Grahame, is fired by the story of the Martyrs, has at heart page after ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Philosophers may think) is, to the rest, in Things; so, in Words (whatever supercilious Pedants may talk), every one's mother tongue is to all other Languages. This hath still been the Sentiment of Nature and true Wisdom. Hence, the greatest men of Antiquity never thought themselves better employed than in cultivating their own country idiom. So Lycurgus did honour to Sparta, in ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... I suppose she is competent to produce a decent translation, though one or two errors of orthography in her note rather afflict the eye; but I know that it is not unusual for what are considered well-educated French women to fail in the point of writing their mother tongue correctly. But whether competent or not, I presume she has a right to translate the book with or without my consent. She gives her address: Mdlle B—- {373} W. Cumming, Esq., 23 North Bank, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... end of the colonial period over one-half of the 170,000 inhabitants of the province were descendants of the original Dutch—still distinct enough to give a decided cast to the life and manners of New York. Many of them clung as tenaciously to their mother tongue as they did to their capacious farmhouses or their Dutch ovens; but they were slowly losing their identity as the English pressed in beside them to ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... 1892. When a boy he visited England, and he had an English tutor for some time in Cairo. He then went to school in Lausanne, and from there passed on to the Theresianum in Vienna. In addition to Turkish, his mother tongue, he acquired fluency in Arabic, and a good conversational knowledge of English, French and German. He was still at college in Vienna when the sudden death of his father raised him to the Khedivate; and he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
