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practically impossible for great writers to achieve an immortality. The infusion of French modifying elements beginning from the Norman conquest, and of Hebrew originated by the intense study of our Sacred Records modified and moulded our language to a form which might suit the genius of Shakspeare.
The Japanese pedagogue does not permit similar modifying influences to come into the sphere of his thought and produce improvement in his language. He admits new words to any extent but the grammatical framework of the language remains. In translating Chinese he alters the order of words to suit his own syntax, instead of allowing the Chinese syntax to improve his own.
But what will these islanders now do with English? It will be well for the intellectual progress of Japan if under this new impulse, which forces the native mind onward in the path of educational improvement, it should become conscious of a power to renovate the native language. This would be worth more to the people than hundreds of steamers and thousands of miles of railways. The English language is much more fitted than the Chinese, to improve the Japanese language. There is more freedom in its syntax, and by its polysyllabic structure it is more akin to the Japanese and perhaps better able to lend to it elements of lasting utility.
The question mooted by Mori the Minister to Washington is of high importance in a way perhaps which did not strike his own mind. The substitution of English for the native language appears to many persons an impossibility, and therefore the proposition is regarded as absurd. But if the question be modified so as to refer particularly to the renovation of the native language by contact with European speech it becomes highly practical and interesting.
The position of Japanese in language as a cousin of the Tartar modes of speech and with them of the Tamul and other languages of South India, may be decided by the place assigned to the verb as already remarked. This may be regarded as a characteristic unique, uniform and conclusive. But it carried with it other laws such as the
