“The word ‘vernacular,’” says Hinsdale, “is derived from _vernaculus_, which comes from _verna_, a slave born in his master’s house; and it means the speech to which one is born and in which he is reared,—the _patrius sermo_ of the Roman, the _Mutter-sprache_ of the German, the mother tongue of the Englishman. Command of a noble vernacular involves the most valuable discipline and culture that a man is capable of receiving. It conditions all other discipline and culture.... The greatest mental inheritance to which a German, a Frenchman, or an Englishman is born is his native tongue, rich in the knowledge and wisdom, the ideas and thoughts, the wit and fancy, the sentiment and feeling, of a thousand years. Nay, of more than a thousand years; for these languages, in their modern forms, were enriched by still earlier centuries. To come back to the old thought, such a speech as one of these only flows out from such a life as it expresses, and is in turn essential to the existence of that life.”[13]
Parents who wish their children to possess the best instruments of thought cannot be too careful in the selection of teachers for them. Children whose mother tongue is a dialect should be trained in one or more of the languages that have been enriched by centuries of development and literary culture. The best that the people of Pennsylvania-German extraction can do for future generations is to make the transition as speedily as possible from their vernacular—so poverty-stricken in its vocabulary—to the English, with its abundant vocabulary and its unsurpassed literary treasures. In the English they will find the instruments of thought fitted to develop native powers that have been inherited from an ancestry of sturdy husbandmen, and strengthened through heredity by centuries of contact with the soil, even as the giant Antæus, in wrestling with Hercules, is fabled to have gained new strength as often as he came in contact with mother earth. The same advice will apply to the other nationalities who have come to live on American soil, even though they have brought with them a more developed vernacular. The English dictionary contains one hundred and twenty thousand words; but besides these words in common use, the dictionaries of the specialists contain several hundred thousand more, which may be called technical terms, and which serve as instruments of thought in scientific discussions and investigations. To these we next turn our attention.