USE OF LANGUAGE.
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COLLATERAL READING.
protests. The latter wrote: “First let the mother-tongue be studied, and teach everything through the mother-tongue, so that the learner’s attention may not be diverted to the language.” Again: “To learn Latin before learning the mother-tongue is like wishing to mount a horse before knowing how to walk.”
The Port Royalists also joined in this protest against the humanists. They wrote: “People complain, and complain with reason, that in giving their children Latin we take away French; and to turn them into citizens of ancient Rome, we make them strangers in their native land.”