'The Globe of Language': Thomas Prendergast and Applied Linguistics in the 1870s

Abstract

This article seeks an inroad into the neglected area of the history of applied linguistics by charting the reception of the idea of the 'globe of language' in the work of the mid-Victorian writer Thomas Prendergast (1806–1886), author of The Mastery of Languages (1864). Three characteristics stand out in Prendergast's approach to language acquisition: (1) the observation of how children acquire fluency in foreign languages in immersion situations, (2) the cognitive processes of memory and retention in the learning of a language, and (3) an insistence on the totality of the language, with the whole sentence as the starting point. In the 1870s, Prendergast's method of learning a foreign language was tried and tested by teachers and educationists, who eventually found it wanting, but his ideas, particularly his striking and original notion of the 'globe of language', seem to have caught the imagination of his contemporaries, in particular R. H. Quick (1831–1891) and Joseph Payne (1808–1876) in the field of education, and A. H. Sayce (1845–1933) and Henry Sweet (1845–1912) broadly in the field of philology. In the course of its reception we see a work of language reflection and language philosophy first being openly debated by a school of education, and then influencing, rather more covertly, the new phonetic school of 'practical' philology as it developed in the late 1870s.