PRIMITIVE PEOPLES AND SIMPLE LANGUAGE.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—With reference to the question raised by "A Dutch Sea Captain" in the Spectator of October 18th, viz., that "people without any schooling in languages .appare,ntly sooner acquire a working knowledge of a foreign speech than those who have had a training in linguistics," ;I think that the following passage from Bagehot's Physics and Politics _gives a better explanation of the matter than either a the two suggestions, or at least is a useful supplement to them :-- "Every educated .man has a large inward supply of ideas to which he can retire, and in which he can escape from or alleviate Unpleasant outward objects. But a savage or a child has no resource. The external movements before it are its very life ; it lives by what it sees and:hears. Uneducated people in civilized nations have vestiges of the same condition. If you send a house- maid and a philosopher to a foreign country of which neither knows the language, the chances are that the housemaid will catch it before the philosopher. He has something else to do'; he can live -in his own thoughts. But unless she can imitate the utterances, she is lost,; she has no life till she can join in the chatter of the kitchen. The propensity to .mimicry, and the power of mimicry, are mostly strongest in those that have least abstract minds."—(Collected Works, Vol. VIII., p. 66.) Hedgam, Bridgend.
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