(_A_) The heart of education as well as its phyletic root is the vernacular literature and language. These are the chief instruments of the social as well as of the ethnic and patriotic instinct. The prime place of the former we saw in the last chapter, and we now pass to the latter, the uniqueness of which should first be considered.
The Century, the largest complete dictionary of English, claims to have 250,000 words, as against 55,000 in the old Webster's Unabridged. Worcester's Unabridged of 1860 has 105,000; Murray's, now in L, it is said, will contain 240,000 principal and 140,000 compound words, or 380,000 words in all. The dictionary of the French Academy has 33,000; that of the Royal Spanish Academy, 50,000; the Dutch dictionary of Van Dale, 86,000; the Italian and Portuguese, each about 50,000 literary, or 150,000 encyclopedic words. Of course, words can really be counted hardly more than ideas or impressions, and compounds, dialects, obsolete terms, localisms, and especially technical terms, swell the number indefinitely. A competent philologist[2] says, if given large liberty, he "will undertake to supply 1,000,000 English words for 1,000,000 American dollars." Chamberlain[3] estimates that our language contains more than two score as many words as all those left us from the Latin. Many savage languages contain only a very few thousand, and some but a few hundred, words. Our tongue is essentially Saxon in its vocabulary and its spirit and, from the time when it was despised and vulgar, has followed an expansion policy, swallowing with little modification terms not only from classical antiquity, but from all modern languages--Indian, African, Chinese, Mongolian--according to its needs, its adopted children far outnumbering those of its own blood. It absorbs at its will the slang of the street gamin, the cant of thieves and beggars; is actually creative in the baby talk of mothers and nurses; drops, forgets, and actually invents new words with no pedigree like those of Lear, Carrol, and many others.[4]
In this vast field the mind of the child early begins to take flight. Here his soul finds its native breath and vital air. He may live as a peasant, using, as Max Müller says many do, but a few hundred words during his lifetime; or he may need 8,000, like Milton, 15,000, like Shakespeare, 20,000 or 30,000, like Huxley, who commanded both literary and technical terms; while in understanding, which far outstrips, use, a philologist may master perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 words. The content of a tongue may contain only folk-lore and terms for immediate practical life, or this content may be indefinitely elaborated in a rich literature and science. The former is generally well on in its development before speech itself becomes an abject of study. Greek literature was fully grown when the Sophists, and finally Aristotle, developed the rudiments of grammar, the parts of speech being at first closely related with his ten metaphysical categories. Our modern tongue had the fortune, unknown to those of antiquity, when it was crude and despised, to be patronized and regulated by Latin grammarians, and has had a long experience, both for good and evil, with their conserving and uniformitizing instincts. It has, too, a long history of resistance to this control. Once spelling was a matter of fashion or even individual taste; and as the constraint grew, two pedagogues in the thirteenth century fought a duel for the right spelling of the word, and that maintained by the survivor prevailed. Phonic and economic influences are now again making some headway against orthographic orthodoxy here; so with definitions. In the days of Johnson's dictionary, individuality still had wide range in determining meanings. In pronunciation, too: we may now pronounce the word _tomato_ in six ways, all sanctioned by dictionaries. Of our tongue in particular it is true, as Tylor says in general, condensing a longer passage, "take language all in all, it is the product of a rough-and-ready ingenuity and of the great rule of thumb. It is an old barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched, and tinkered into capability. It is originally and naturally a product of low culture, developed by ages of conscious and unconscious improvement to answer more or less perfectly the requirements of modern civilization."