HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM, a method of teaching languages, so called from the inventor, an English merchant of the name of James Hamilton, b. about 1769. Having removed to Hamburg in 179S, he took lessons in German, on the understanding that he was not to be troubled with the grammar of the language. He and his teacher read together a German book of anecdotes, the pupil translating word for word after his teacher; and after twelve lessons, Hamilton found himself—so at least we are told—able to read an easy German book. His attention was thus drawn to the subject of learning foreign languages; and finding himself, after a life of vicissitudes, in the city of New York, about the year 1815, he wrote a treatise expounding his views, and commenced putting them in practice. He undertook to teach adults in fifteen lessons to translate the Gospel of St. John from Fgench into English, but found, we are told, ten lessons sufficient. After teaching for 5 time with great success in America, he returned in 1823 to England, and visited the chief cities, everywhere crowds of pupils, not withstanding that his system was denounced by many as quackery. He died in Dublin iu 1831.
The Hamiltonian method was only one stage in the reaction—begun as early as the time of Comenius (q.v.), and carried on, among others, by Milton and Locke—against the pedantic method of beginning to teach a foreign or dead language by making the learner commit to memory a complete set of grammar rules before he had acquired sufficient practical acquaintance with the language itself in its concrete form, to give the rules any meaning. Hamilton's method of procedure may be shortly summed up as follows: Supposing Latin to be the language to be learned, Hamilton put into the pupil's hands the Gospel of St. John in Latin, with an interlinear version; so literal as
to show the gender as well as the number of nouns, etc., and the mood, person, and tense of the verbs. The idioms were not translated by corresponding idioms, but each word by its literal equivalent in English. A fundamental point with Hamilton was to give the primitive, and not the derivative signification of the word, and to give the same signification to the seine word in whatever connection it might stand. 'When the pupil had by this practice got a considerable knowledge of the vocables and accidence of the language, he was practiced in turning the English version back into the Latin. Hamilton undertook iu this way to give boys of eleven as much knowledge of Latin in six months as they usually learn at our public schools in six years. One obvious defect of this method is, that no language admits of a word-for-word and uniform translation into another; the method is in this respect misleading. Besides, one great use of learn ing languages is as a mental discipline, and in this point of view the Hamiltonian system is useless. It may be useful in the case of adults who wish to acquire, with as little labor as possible, a limited power of reading and speaking a language; and in any case, a language once begun to be learned on Hamilton's principles, may be afterwards prosecuted on a better method, thus avoiding the painful initiatory stages of the gram matical method. The necessity, however, of having recourse to the crude method of Hamilton, is superseded in the practice of most modern teachers, who contrive to make the practical and grammatical knowledge of a language go hand in hand.