Now, it is one of the commonest complaints of teachers in our secondary schools that they have to begin teaching Latin or
French to boys who have no knowledge whatever of grammar. Fancy the hopelessness of trying to teach an English boy the construction of a Latin or French sentence when he does not know what a relative or demonstrative pronoun means! This is the fate of so many a master that quite a number of them resign themselves to giving up a good part of their French or Latin hour to endeavouring to imbue their flock with some notions of grammar in general. They naturally try to appeal to their boys through the medium of their own language. But those who have incautiously upset their class from the frying-pan of qui, quae, quod, into the fire of English demonstrative and relative pronouns get a foretaste of the fire that dieth not. Facilis descensus Averni. Happy if they do not lose heart, and step downward from the fire to ashes—reinforced with sackcloth.
"I contend that that 'that' that that gentleman said was right." This is the "abstract and brief chronicle" of their woes—sometimes, indeed, the epitaph of their pedagogical career, if they are too sickened of the Sisiphean task of trying to teach grammar on insufficient basis. And this use, or abuse, of the hardworked word "that" is only an extreme case which illustrates the difficulty of teaching grammar to babes, through the medium of a language honeycombed with synonyms, homonyms, exceptions, and other pitfalls (can you be honeycombed with a pitfall?)—a language which seems to take a perverse delight in breaking all its own rules and generally scoring off the beginner. And for the dull beginner, what language does not seem to conform to this type? Answer: Esperanto.
In other words, it would seem that, for the grinding of grammar and the advancement of sound learning in the initial stage, there is nothing like an absolutely uniform and regular language,1 a
type tongue, something that corresponds in the linguistic hierarchy to Euclid or the first rules of arithmetic in the mathematical, something clear, consistent, self-evident, and of universal application.
1Cf. Sir Oliver Lodge: "It would certainly appear that for this purpose [i.e. educative language-learning for children] the fully inflected ancient languages are best and most satisfactory; if they were still more complete and regular, like Esperanto, they would be better still to begin with" (School Teaching and School Reform, p. 21: chapter on Curricula and Methods).
Take our sentence again: "I contend that that 'that' that that gentleman said was right." If our beginner has imbibed his first notions of grammar through the medium of a type language, in which a noun is always a noun, and is stamped as such by its form (this, by the way, is an enormous aid in making the thing clear to children); in which an adjective is always an adjective, and is stamped as such by its form; and so on through all the other parts of speech,—when the teacher comes to analyse the sentence given, he will be able to explain it by reference to the known forms of the regular key-language. He will point out that of the "thats": the first is the Esperanto ke (which is final, because ke never means anything else); the second is tiu (at once revealed by its form to be a demonstrative), the fourth kiu, and so on. As for the third "that," which is rather hard for a child to grasp, he will be able to make it into a noun in form by merely adding -o to the Esperanto equivalent for any "that" required. He will not be doing violence to the language; for Esperanto consists of roots, which habitually do duty as noun, verb, adjective, etc., according to the termination added. Those who know the value of the concrete and tangible in dealing with children will grasp the significance of the new possibilities that are thus for the first time opened up to language-teachers.
To sum up: Natural languages are all hard, and the beginner can never go far enough to get a rule fixed soundly in his mind without meeting exceptions which puzzle and confuse him. Esperanto is as clear, logical, and consistent as arithmetic, and, like arithmetic, depends more upon intelligence than upon memory work. If Esperanto were adopted as the first foreign language to be taught in schools, and all grammatical teaching were postponed until Esperanto had been begun, and then given entirely through the medium of Esperanto until a sound notion of
grammatical rules and categories had been instilled, it would probably be found that the subsequent task of learning natural languages would be facilitated and abridged. From the very start it would be possible to prevent certain common errors and confusions, that tend to become engrained in juvenile minds by the fluctuating or contradictory usage of their own language, to their great let and hindrance in the subsequent stages of language-learning. The skeleton outline of grammatical theory with concrete examples afforded by Esperanto would shield against vitiating initial mistakes, in much the same way as the use of a scientific phonetic alphabet, when a foreign language is presented for the first time to the English beginner in written form, shields him against carrying over his native mixed vowel system to languages which use the same letters as English, but give quite a different value to them. In both cases1 the essentials of the new instrument of learning are the same—that it be of universal application, that it be sufficiently different from the mother-tongue or alphabet to prevent confusion by association of ideas, that each of the new forms or letters convey only one idea or sound respectively, and that this idea or sound be always and only conveyed by that form or letter.
1i.e. scientific regular type grammar and scientific regular phonetic alphabet.