"Mother tongue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ferrara, belongs to the history of all mediaeval warfare; and his sudden and premature death revives the historical tradition though in a new form. The intermediate details of his minstrel's career are of course imaginary; but his struggle to increase the expressiveness of his mother tongue again ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... distinct words, and the Italian about seventeen thousand, in the present state of our sciences. I know not how many the Chinese may contain; but if we were to write our languages in the Chinese method, it would be the business of a whole life for a man to learn his mother tongue, so as to read and write ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... higher, but that it has no machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower. In that noble romance, the "Republic" (which is now, thanks to the Master of Balliol, as intelligible to us all, as if it had been written in our mother tongue), Plato makes Socrates say that he should like to inculcate upon the citizens of his ideal state ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his purpose. 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 ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... ma'am, please," he whispered into her ear by way of a return of the introduction. His little mother tongue had evidently suffered a slight twist by his birth and sojourn in a foreign country, but it served to express the normal condition of all ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the circumstances having been communicated to the government, a party was sent in quest of him. After some trouble he was discovered, and brought into the settlement; but the results of his past life with the blacks were, that he had entirely forgotten his mother tongue, and had acquired new ways and sympathies that long deterred him from assimilating to those of the whites. Considering his many and peculiar vicissitudes, a remission of the penalty to which he was liable was obtained ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... same image in The Life of Milton (Works, vii. 104):—'He might still be a giant among the pigmies, the one-eyed monarch of the blind.' Cumberland (Memoirs, i. 39) says that Bentley, hearing it maintained that Barnes spoke Greek almost like his mother tongue, replied:—'Yes, I do believe that Barnes had as much Greek and understood it about as well as an Athenian blacksmith.' See ante, iii 284. A passage in Wooll's Life of Dr. Warton (i. 313) shews that Barnes attempted to prove that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Duke of Perse came to his feet again, an angry gleam in his eyes. "My lords," he began hastily, "it must certainly have occurred to you before this that our beloved Prince's English, which seems after all to be his mother tongue, is not what it should be. Butting in! Yesterday I overheard him advising your son, Pultz, to 'go chase' himself. And when your boy tried to chase himself—'pon my word, he did—what did our Prince say? What did you say, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... entitled: "Ecce Sponsus" and "De gradibus amoris." Likewise he translated "The Hours of the Blessed Virgin," and certain of the Hours from the Latin into the Teutonic tongue, so that simple and unlearned Laics might have in their mother tongue matter wherewith to occupy themselves in prayer on holy days; and also that the faithful, reciting these Hours, or hearing them recited by other devout persons, might the more readily keep themselves from many vanities and from idle ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... 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 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... easy trip, that we could take horses to within a short distance of the summit, and that when we got there the splendid view would include St. Sauveur, Argeles, Bareges, Gavarnie, &c. &c. And we answered the burly native in his sister tongue (patois was his mother tongue), or as near to it as we could, and said, "Have three horses ready by half-past ten at this hotel, and we will start." Then, delighted, he smiled and bowed, and disappeared down ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Above all we have enshrined our beliefs in a marvellous liturgy, which is ever old and ever new, and which had the good fortune to be put into English at a day when the force of expression in our Mother tongue was peculiarly virile, yet peculiarly lovely. I know of nothing in the whole range of English literature that will compare with the collects as contained in our Book of Common Prayer, for beauty, for form, for condensation and for force. They are a string of pearls. And indeed, what ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... brought into English through the writings of scholars, and every new scientific discovery is marked by the addition of new terms of Latin derivation. Hence, while the simpler and commoner words of our mother tongue are Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon forms the staple of our colloquial language, yet in the realms of literature, and especially in poetry, words of Latin derivation are very abundant. Also in the ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... I ham so," replies Billy, who appears to be in some difficulty just now with his mother tongue. ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... dog." Very poor verse is "doggerel." It is told of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, that when a young nobleman refused to translate some inscription over an alcove, because it was in "dog-latin," she observed, "How strange a puppy shouldn't understand his mother tongue." ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... as early as the days when he learned reading and writing. Estrangement from the land of his birth set in when he left the monastery of Steyn. It was furthered not a little by the ease with which he handled Latin. Erasmus, who could express himself as well in Latin as in his mother tongue, and even better, consequently lacked the experience of, after all, feeling thoroughly at home and of being able to express himself fully, only among his compatriots. There was, however, another psychological influence which acted to alienate ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... times I have been in Leipsic, and the daughter of the merest pauper there can do more than she can. What have I not seen in the way of needlework! I gaped with admiration. And she cannot even speak Armenian properly, and that is her mother tongue! Can she write a page without mistakes? Can she pronounce ten French words fluently? Yes, tell me, what can she do? What does she understand? She will make a fine housekeeper for you! The man who takes her for his wife is ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... me to a school in the neighbourhood, where I learned the first rudiments of my mother tongue, writing, reading, and simple arithmetic. The school closed at half-past four o'clock in the afternoon; when I returned to the Lodge, for so the cottage was called in which we resided, and which stood just within the park at the head of the noble avenue ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... understand them very easily, as they were written in his mother tongue. He was greatly excited by the narrations themselves, and pleased with the flowing smoothness of the verse in which the tales were told. In the latter part of his course of education he was placed under the charge of Aristotle, who was ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... themselves" have failed to progress "to the top and pitch" of their possible perfection—"poore soules after many years travelling being found in the same place and going the same pace!" He hopes that this book on Perfection which he is now giving "common vulgar people in their own mother tongue," though it is a way that is "high and hard and almost unheard of amongst us," may help men to grow up into their full stature and to come to "the uttermost steps of Jacob's Ladder which reacheth into the heavens." ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... it 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
... 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 he ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at that time more used than at present, the principal nations of Europe wanted to have this work in their mother tongue. Grotius, on examining the Dutch translation, found the translator often wilfully deviating from the true sense of the original. The Great Gustavus caused it to be translated into Swedish: a translation of it into English was preparing in the year ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... 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. Garston threw such an amount of eloquence into ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... I mean? Is English not your mother tongue, or do you want me to repeat it in French, by way of making it clearer? Don't ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Testament of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart. He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Elliot had in hand. They, like himself, had been bred in the studious cloisters of a 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 babble 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 ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is the literary herald of a century which, in the earlier half at least, is remarkable in the use it makes of our mother tongue for the exercise of common sense. The Revolution of 1688 produced a change in English politics scarcely more remarkable than the change that took place a little later in English literature and is to be seen in the poets and wits who ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... passion is not so rare as absurd—as on the singular contrast between the character and intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the thoroughgoing Whig was scandalised by the man ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... ye," interposed Bounce, "knows, nothin' but his own mother tongue. We do live pretty middlin' so so hereabouts when we ain't starvin', w'ich it isn't for me to deny is sometimes the case, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... comical as it is, to become a habit. This is the way the southern ladies acquire the thick and inelegant pronunciation which distinguishes their utterances from the northern snuffle; and I have no desire that S—— should adorn her mother tongue with either peculiarity. It is a curious and sad enough thing to observe, as I have frequent opportunities of doing, the unbounded insolence and tyranny (of manner, of course it can go no farther), of the slaves towards ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... difference between them. For a period of seven centuries the entrances or passes into the Grampians constituted a boundary between both the people and their language. At the south the Saxon language was universally spoken, while beyond the range the Gaelic formed the mother tongue, accompanied by the plaid, the claymore and other specialties which accompanied Highland characteristics. Their language was one of the oldest and least mongrel types of the great ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... 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
... distant seas for most of 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
... with loving recognition, he was grateful to the end of his life. His grandmother and this nurse taught him to read and write. In his seventh year he began the study of foreign languages; German, French,—which was as his mother tongue to him,—and mathematics, which he hated. At nine the passion of reading possessed him and he devoured his father's library, which included the French erotics, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. His own first poetical ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... been soundness itself at the rendezvous were now a putrefying mass of sores. The itch broke out again, virulent and from all accounts incurable. Fits returned with redoubled frequency and violence, the sane became demented or idiotic, and the most obviously British, losing the use of their mother tongue, swore with many gesticulatory sacres that they had no English, as indeed they had none for naval purposes. Looking at the miserable, disease-ridden crew, the uninitiated spectator was moved to tears of pity. Not so the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... I thought of Christianity only as something which every one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God had caused ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... 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
... to her friend Hermia:—Is all the counsel that we two have shared. The sister's vows, &c. Shakspeare had never read the poems of Gregory Nazianzen; he was ignorant of the Greek language; but his mother tongue, the language of Nature, is the same ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... them, stowed in old-fashioned corner and window cupboards; good editions, in good bindings, and an excellent very choice selection of subjects and authors. There were books in various languages of which Faith could make nothing—but sighs; in her own mother tongue there were varieties of learning and literature enough to distract her. All however that the owner could know of other hands about his books, was that there ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Kiunguju (name for Swahili in Zanzibar), English (official, primary language of commerce, administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken in Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the 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, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... or Swahili (official), Kiunguju (name for Swahili in Zanzibar), English (official, primary language of commerce, administration, and higher education), Arabic (widely spoken in Zanzibar), many local languages note: Kiswahili (Swahili) is the mother tongue of 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 franca of central and eastern Africa; the first language of most people ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... action as has been taken has never 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 ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... about 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 in ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... appropriate ideas follow unfamiliar 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... themselves are not strange to me; they seem to me merely out of place and in the way. I can easily understand why Myers and Ruskin wanted them, even needed them. It was because they carried a meaning not easily borne by more obvious and more hackneyed nouns. 'The words of our mother tongue', said Lowell in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association of America, 'have been worn smooth by so often rubbing against our lips and our minds, while the alien word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In our critical ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... to discuss "the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... 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 is easy and pleasant, but some fine morning the popular man wakes up to find himself stranded and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... whole numbers of six figures each. The newly-fledged under-graduates imagined that they knew six languages, and yet they knew no more than five thousand words at most of the twenty thousand which composed their mother tongue. And hadn't he seen how they cheated? Oh! he knew all their tricks! He had seen the dates written on their finger nails; he had watched them consulting books under cover of their desks, he had heard them whispering to one another! But, he concluded, ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... the 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
... the "learned blacksmith" has no learning at all. He had, indeed, an unusual facility in acquiring words, but he knows nothing of languages; not having in any a particle of scholarship; of the philosophy, even of his mother tongue, being as ignorant as the bellows-hand in his smithy at Worcester. But because of this not uncommon faculty of acquiring words—acquiring them as Zerah Colburn did a certain mastery of figures, without being able to comprehend ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... government made a decree "that whatsoever they were that should rede the Scriptures in the mother tongue, they should forfeit land, catel, body, lif, and godes from their heyres forever, and so be condempned for heretykes to God, enemies to the crowne, and most errant traiters to the land." The next year, in ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... 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
... read the missive. I did not know the English language perfectly, but Yolanda, who spoke it as if it were her mother tongue, translated as she read. I had always considered the island language harsh till I heard Yolanda speak it. Even the hissing "th" was music on her lips. Had I been a young man I would doubtless have made a fool of myself for the sake of this beautiful child-woman. When she had finished ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... to begin the task again, but was killed in a raid. I, too, in my fighting youth, had plans for the work; but blindness struck me before I could find peace to labor in. So now all that remains of the mother tongue here is my own knowledge and these tattered scraps. And, if you save us not, soon all, all will ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... spent a roving and unsettled childhood, for wherever the father was sent the mother and children followed. The first three years of his life were spent in Elba, where he learnt to speak the Italian dialect spoken in the island in addition to his mother tongue. Then for three years the family was in Paris and Victor got a little education in a small school. But in 1805 the father was appointed to a post in the army of Naples, and in the autumn of 1807 his wife and children joined him at Avellino. Two years later General Hugo was invited ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... wanting in all the three above-mentioned conditions, which must concur, in order that in the benefit conferred there may be ready Liberality; and our Mother Tongue possesses all, as it is possible to show thus manifestly. The Latin would not have served many; for if we recall to memory that which is discoursed of above, the learned men, without the Italian tongue, could not have had this service. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... culture, there was little general acquaintance with the Bible except among the educated. During all that time there was no real room for a further translation. One of the writers[1] says: "Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible in the mother tongue; while the illiterate majority were in no condition to feel the want of such a book, the educated minority would be averse to so great and revolutionary a change." When a man cannot read any writing it really does not matter to him whether ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... 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
... de Miranda. I pass my life with my wife, children, and friends; my pursuits are hunting and fishing, but I keep neither hawks nor greyhounds, nothing but a tame partridge or a bold ferret or two; I have six dozen or so of books, some in our mother tongue, some Latin, some of them history, others devotional; those of chivalry have not as yet crossed the threshold of my door; I am more given to turning over the profane than the devotional, so long as they are books of honest entertainment that charm by their style and attract and interest ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Dr. Campbell was ahead, and after an hour's talk he suddenly turned upon his companion: "Mackay!" he exclaimed, "this jabbering in Chinese is ridiculous, and two Scotchmen should have more sense; let us return to our mother tongue." ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... 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 ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... relations. Esperanto is only put forward as a second language which if universally adopted would enable the natives of every land to communicate easily with any foreigner, no matter what might be his mother tongue. ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various
... Francais by 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 ballads of Hildebrand ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... his brothers. Dr. Draper says: "In the action of Fort Washington Henry Bedinger heard a Hessian captain, having been repulsed, speak to his riflemen in his own language, telling them to follow his example and reserve their fire until they were close. Bedinger, recognizing his mother tongue, watched the approach of the Hessian officer, and each levelled his unerring rifle at the other. Both fired, Bedinger was wounded in the finger: the ball passing, cut off a lock of his hair. The Hessian was shot through the head, and instantly expired. ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... he was French, I began to talk to him in his own language, which was my mother tongue, and so we were quickly friends. I told him that my parents were both dead and that I had no home, and he being of a kind-hearted, sympathetic nature, invited me to go home with him, which ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... affectation of all things foreign, which, in speaking, led to the most variegated use and misuse of foreign words. Patriotically-minded men, on the contrary, endeavored to cultivate the purity of their mother tongue the while they enriched it; this, above all, was the ambition of the various "Linguistic Societies." Their activity, though soon deprived of a wide usefulness by pedantry and a clannish spirit, prepared the way for great feats ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... taken, and in Gaelic, for though Donald Finch was perfectly able in English for business and ordinary affairs of life, when it came to the worship of God, he found that only in the ancient mother tongue could he "get liberty." As Hughie listened to the solemn reading, and then to the prayer that followed, though he could understand only a word now and again, he was greatly impressed with the rhythmic, solemn cadence of the voice, and as he glanced through his fingers at the old man's face, ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... and a part which, as things are, very many of them will never obtain away from school, then we teachers must strive to give it them, even if the process seems shockingly frivolous to the grammarian or the geometrician. And, secondly, it is not true that the study of literature, even in the mother tongue, cannot be a discipline and a delight together. The two are very far from incompatible: indeed that discipline is most effective which is almost or quite unconsciously self-imposed in the joyous exercise of one's own faculties. The genuine footballer and the genuine scholar ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... that the text cannot be read without a dictionary: then the limit has been reached. But Caxton, Trevisa, and many others are well within it, and it is good to remove all obstacles which prevent the ordinary reader from feeling the continuity of his mother tongue. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... expression, patois, vernacular, dialect, idiom, speech, vocabulary. diction, mother tongue, tongue, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... his mother tongue is the birthright of every child. He should first of all be able to speak it correctly and with ease. He should next be able to read it with comprehension and enjoyment, and should become familiar with the best in its literature. ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... Englishman who knows no language but his own may travel well-nigh all over the world and everywhere meet some one who can speak his tongue. But what of the Welsh-speaking Welshman? What of the Basque and the Lithuanian who can speak only his mother tongue? Everywhere such a man is a foreigner and with all the foreigner's disadvantages. In most places he is for all practical ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 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 ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... beginning of his memory, and told his father all that he could remember. When he came to speak about his solitary musings in the garret, he said—and long before he reached this part, he had relapsed into his mother tongue: ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... 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
... 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 ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... cherish their own language lovingly; they wish their children to love it and be educated in it; but they know it will be for their interest to be familiar with English also, and to be educated in English, as well as French. Proscribe French, their mother tongue, and they will hate you and have nothing to do with your schools. Permit their own language to receive attention, and they are glad to have their children learn English also as soon and as fast as it can be imparted. Such was the view ...
— Bilingualism - Address delivered before the Quebec Canadian Club, at - Quebec, Tuesday, March 28th, 1916 • N. A. Belcourt
... just as valuable and reasonable an expenditure of time 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 valuable and practical seems ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... And shall I not imitate her in this as in all her high-born originalities?" Of course I didn't say that aloud, but just thought it to myself. And really I do wonder sometimes that your excellent father, when he taught you Latin, should have permitted you to take such liberties with our good mother tongue. But after all it is only another sign of your right Southern wilfulness. Do you not take even greater ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... copy of Dr. Cantwell "the hypocrite." He is a most gross abuser of his mother tongue, but believes he has a call to preach. He tells old Lady Lambert that he has made several sermons already, but "always does 'em extrumpery" because he could not write. He finds his "religious vocation" more profitable than selling "grocery, tea, small ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... by the said Raphael Fitch himselfe to Bengala, Malocca, Pegu, and other places in Anno 1583. as at large appeareth in a booke written by M. RICHARD HACLUTE a Gentleman very studious therein, and entituled the English voyages, I thought it not vnconuenient to translate the same into our mother tongue, thereby to procure more light and encouragement to such as are desirous to trauell those Countries, for the common wealth and commoditie of this Realme and themselues. And knowing that all men are not like affected, I was so bold to shrowd it vnder your worships protection, as being ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... in a strange place, but among those whom he loved and who lovingly cared for him. Pauline was the first to approach him. She asked him a question, and he answered in her own language, as naturally as if the French had been his mother tongue. Batoche was delighted to observe this, regarding it as a satisfactory normal symptom. Cary accepted a draught from the hands of his beautiful nurse, then lay back on his pillow as if quite refreshed. At that propitious moment, his eyes encountered those of ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... spices, carpets, and similar luxuries 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 matter ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... looks at, and appropriate that. Our countrymen once could do it. The stern Puritan of New England looked upon the grassy meadows beside the Connecticut, and found them all bubbling with fountains, and called his settlement "Springfield." But the American has lost the elementary uses of his mother tongue. He is perpetually inventing new abstract terms, generalizing with boldness and power and utter contempt of usage. But the rich idiomatic sources of his speech lie too deep for him. They are the glory and the joy of our motherland. You may take up "Bradshaw" and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... scorn; for the great doctors were none English men, neither they were conversant among English men, neither in case they could the language of English, but they ceased never till they had holy writ in their mother tongue, of their own people. For Jerome, that was a Latin man of birth, translated the Bible, both out of Hebrew and out of Greek, into Latin, and expounded full much thereto; and Austin, and many more Latins expounded the bible, for many parts, in Latin, to Latin men, among which they dwelt, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Jew Wasn't enough of it to make a pie We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves Well provided with cigars and other necessaries of life What's a fair wind for us is a head wind to them Whichever one they get is the one they want Who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months Worth while to get tired out, ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... Agnes, who spoke 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
... addressed thee fair and subtile words on yester even, O sweet and incomparable knight! there did enter into my presence a base enchanter who did evilly enchant and bewitch me, making me to do dire offence unto the mother tongue. Soothly this base born enchanter did cause me to write "arms," when soothly I did mean an "alms," and sore grievousness be come upon me lest haply thou dost not understand this matter ere this missive reach thee. I do beseech thee have a care to tell the fair princesses and glorious ladies ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... 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 ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... 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 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 people he ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... attacking Warburton he sought a diversion from the worry of domestic cares. Be that as it may, his Observations are the most pungent and dashing effusion he ever allowed himself. It was his first effort in English prose, and it is doubtful whether he ever managed his mother tongue better, if indeed he ever managed it so well. The little tract is written with singular spirit and rapidity of style. It is clear, trenchant, and direct to a fault. It is indeed far less critical than polemical, and shows no trace of lofty calm, either moral or intellectual. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... brought also a 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 pleased by the stately tread of their succession, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 be the universal language and men greet each other in the fields in ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... joy at finding himself within 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 ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... lands sought by every means in their power to put down the circulation of books which might have such mischievous results. And as one of Martin Luther's main arguments was that if men only read and studied the Scriptures for themselves in their own mother tongue, whatever that tongue might be, they would have power to judge for themselves how far the practice of the church differed from apostolic precept and from the teachings of Christ, it was thought equally advisable to keep out of the hands of the ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... glimpses of the Word of God, determined to have a Holy Bible in their own mother tongue, wherein before no book or page ever had been written in the history of their race. The consecrated brain and hand of their Missionaries kept toiling day and night in translating the book of God; and the willing hands and feet of the Natives ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... acquainted with many Indian tribes. He knew their customs, he understood their methods of warfare, and was well liked by the Indians themselves. He spoke their chief languages as well as he did his mother tongue. ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... gained to surrounding chemical and physical phenomena. A language course may seek to give pupils a stock of words designed to develop power to read the language in a very short time. Obviously, grammatical work and translations into the mother tongue will now be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. There is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... canon, originating in local and temporary 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... incidental corruption: you have shut up from him those whose thoughts strike home to our hearts, whose words are proverbs, whose names are indigenous to all the world, who are the standard of their mother tongue, and the pride and boast of their countrymen, Homer, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare, because the old Adam smelt rank in them; and for what have you reserved him? You have given him "a liberty unto" the multitudinous blasphemy of his day; you have made him ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... 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
... argue in the 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 world. But Otasite was ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... numbered," replied he in perfectly pure English, but with a sonorous ring in the articulation of the words, which betrayed the fact that he was not speaking in his mother tongue. "Senor," he continued, "I am dying; the doctor has candidly told me so, though I needed no such assurance from him. The dreadful pangs which shoot through my tortured frame are such as no man could long endure and ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... 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, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... fair 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 ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... appealing to her knowledge of his character to secure credit, for he was about to use his last means of persuasion, and as he spoke, in his eagerness he relapsed into his mother tongue,—"My lady, did I ever tell ye ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... franchise of all women possessing these qualifications. I still believe that this would have afforded the best solution of our peculiar difficulties and have spared us the un-American subterfuge of "mother tongue" and "grandfather" clause. If a vote could have been taken immediately after the notable address made by your distinguished president before the convention, I feel confident that women would have been admitted to the suffrage ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... indicated in the selections upon "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 |
