The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

These then appear to be the only three processes known by which memorized matter can be developed and expanded into original composition. What we have called grammatical construction is the classical and almost universal method. What we have called ergonic construction is embodied more or less unsystematically in a number of language-courses and the more enlightened books of instruction. Conversion is also practised, but still in a sporadic and desultory fashion.

Now, some thirty years ago the reform movement started. In several different countries bands of zealous pioneers took up arms against the then prevailing system and sought to put an end to it. The reform prospered. The reformers have carried all before them, and the daring innovators of twenty or thirty years ago now enjoy the prestige that their efforts have earned for them.

What was the nature of this reform? What abuses has it swept away? And for what innovations have we to thank it? It would appear, on analysis, to have had a threefold object:

(a) To promote the rational and systematic study of pronunciation by means of phonetic theory and transcription.

(b) To promote the idea that a language is used primarily as a means of communicating thoughts.

(c) To promote the idea that foreign languages should be learned by methods approximating to those by which we learn our native tongue.

The first two objects have certainly been attained; phonetics is the order of the day, and both teachers and students have to use phonetic symbols whether they like it or not; moreover, the new generation does recognize that the deciphering and analysis of ancient texts is not the primary use of language.

The third object has not been so successfully pursued; indeed, we are still very far from learning the foreign tongue by the same processes as those by which we learnt our own. The chief reason for this failure was a bad diagnosis of the chief evils of the system hitherto employed. Many of the reformers and most of their disciples imagined ‘translation’ to be the root of the evil, and so translation in every shape or form was banned; there must be no bilingualism at all, and so the mother-tongue must be excluded from the course, the lessons must be conducted entirely in the foreign language.

But translation and the use of the mother-tongue, as it turns out, are perfectly harmless and in many cases positively beneficial; the evil lay in the exaggerated attention which had always been paid to grammatical construction; that was the dragon that the St Georges might well have slain had not the red herring of ‘translation’ unfortunately been drawn across the track. As it was, the red herring was duly run down and annihilated, and the dragon still lives!