have been ready at hand through the less interested researches of
philosophers, and likewise through the critical studies of the scholars of
Alexandria on the ancient forms of their language as preserved in the
Homeric poems. But rules of declension and conjugation, paradigms of
regular and irregular nouns and verbs, observations on syntax, and the
like, these are the work of the teachers of languages, and of no one else.

Now, the teaching of languages, though at present so large a profession,
is comparatively a very modern invention. No ancient Greek ever thought of
learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world
into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by
adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian
neighbors. He considered it a privilege to speak Greek, and even dialects
closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes
time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express
oneself in any but one's own language. The Poles called their neighbors,
the Germans, _Niemiec_, _niemy_ meaning _dumb_;(58) just as the Greeks
called the Barbarians _Aglossoi_, or speechless. The name which the
Germans gave to their neighbors, the Celts, _Walh_ in old High German,
_vealh_ in Anglo-Saxon, the modern _Welsh_, is supposed to be the same as
the Sanskrit _mlechha_, and means a person who talks indistinctly.(59)

Even when the Greeks began to feel the necessity of communicating with
foreign nations, when they felt a desire of learning their idioms, the
problem was by no means solved. For how was a foreign language to be
learnt as long as either party could only speak their own? The problem was
almost as difficult as when, as we are told by some persons, the first
men, as yet speechless, came together in order to invent speech, and to
discuss the most appropriate names that should be given to the perceptions
of the senses and the abstractions of the mind. At first, it must be
supposed that the Greek learned foreign languages very much as children
learn their own. The interpreters mentioned by ancient historians were
probably children of parents speaking different languages. The son of a
Scythian and a Greek would naturally learn the utterances both of his
father and mother, and the lucrative nature of his services would not fail
to increase the supply. We are told, though on rather mythical authority,
that the Greeks were