IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MIND AND LANGUAGE

languages, entirely ignores a fact upon which I would lay the utmost stress in this paper—which, indeed, is the gist of this paper—that only a very small minority of English or American people have more than half mastered the splendid heritage of their native speech. To this neglected and most significant limitation the amount of public attention given at present is quite surprisingly small. [Footnote: My friend, Mr. L. Cope Cornford, writes apropos of this, and I think I cannot do better than print what he says as a corrective to my own assertions: “All you say on the importance of letting a child hear good English cleanly accented is admirable; but we think you have perhaps overlooked the importance of ear-training as such, which should begin by the time the child can utter its first attempts at speech. By ear-training I mean the differentiation of sounds—articulate, inarticulate, and musical—fixing the child’s attention and causing it to imitate . As every sound requires a particular movement of the vocal apparatus, the child will soon be able to adapt its apparatus unconsciously and to distinguish accurately. And if it does not so learn before the age of five or six, it probably will never do so. By the age of two—or less—the child should be able to imitate exactly any speech-sound. Our youngsters can do so; and, consequently, the fact that they had a nurse with a Sussex accent ceased to matter, because they learned to distinguish her talk from correct English. So in the case of a foreign nurse; the result of a foreigner’s influence would be good in this way, that it would train a child to a new series of speech-sounds , thus enlarging its ear capacity. Nor need it necessarily adopt these speech-sounds as those which it should use; it merely knows them; and if the foreigner have a good accent, and speaks her own tongue well, the child’s ear is trained for life, irrespective of expression . Experience shows that a child can keep separate in its mind two or three languages—at first the speech-sounds, later the expression. Modes of expression need not begin till after five, or later. With regard to music, every child should begin to undergo a simple course of ear-training on the sol-fa system as elaborated and taught by McNaught, because the faculty of so learning is lost—atrophied—by