4446. LANGUAGE (Italian), French, Spanish and.—[continued].
To a person who would
make a point of reading and speaking French
and Spanish, I should doubt the utility of learning
Italian. These three languages, being all
degeneracies from the Latin, resemble one another
so much, that I doubt the probability of
keeping in the head a distinct knowledge of
them all. I suppose that he who learns them
all, will speak a compound of the three, and
neither perfectly.—
To T. M. Randolph, Jr. Washington ed. ii, 177.
Ford ed., iv, 405.
(P.
1787)
