Chapter I: Theories of Language (2)

The French Encyclopædia was the manifesto of the “Aufklärung,” and the Encyclopædia devoted six of its volumes to grammar and literature. Grammar is divided into general and particular, and while general grammar is defined as “la science raisonnée des principes immuables et généraux de la parole prononcée ou écrite dans toutes les langues,” particular grammar is defined as “the art of applying to the immutable and general principles of the word whether pronounced or written the arbitrary and customary usages (_institutions_) of a special language.” In accordance with the lines thus traced out, Gottfried Hermann, in 1801, published his work, “De emendendâ ratione Græcæ Grammaticæ,” and G. M. Roth brought out his “Antihermes, or Philosophical Researches into the pure apprehension of Human Speech and Universal Philology” in 1795, and his “Outlines of pure Universal Philology for the use of Academies and advanced classes in the Gymnasia” in 1815. As yet neither families of speech nor the morphology of language were even dreamt of; and the “principles” derived from the school grammars of Greece and Rome, supplemented by the categories of modern philosophical systems, were supposed to apply to all languages alike. It was reserved for A. F. Bernhardi, the pupil of F. A. Wolf and Fichte, the friend of Tieck and Schlegel, to approach towards a truer conception of the nature and relationship of speech in his “Sprachlehre,” which he dedicated to his master Wolf. The first part of this work appeared at Berlin in 1801, under the title of “Reine Sprachlehre,” the second part, “Angewandte Sprachlehre,” being published in 1803, and the third part, “Anfangsgründe der Sprachwissenschaft,” in 1805. Bernhardi first caught sight of the fact that whereas, from a purely scientific point of view, the grammar of every language follows its own independent and peculiar line, for practical purposes we must dwell mainly upon those particulars in which it agrees with the grammars of other tongues.[21] According to Haym his book was “the first entrance of the spirit of the romantic movement into the sphere of real science.” Language is defined “as an allegory of the understanding, which expresses and represents itself, according to its inherent nature, through this externalization.” Hence a connection is sought between the sound and the thing signified; the initial liquid of _light_, for instance, indicates the sense of the word, whether used as a substantive or as an adjective. In the second part of his work Bernhardi discusses the relation of language to poetry on the one side, and to science on the other, and, as might have been expected from his definition of it as an allegory, regards it as being in its very essence the lyrical utterance of the primitive poet.[22]

Meanwhile the etymologists went on with their work of random guessing, with little heed to the labours of continental scholars upon a philosophy of grammar. In this country Dr. Murray’s “History of the European Languages” was posthumously published in 1823, in which he holds that all the manifold languages of the world are derived from a single primeval one which consisted of a few monosyllables, AG or WAG being the first articulate sound. To this primeval language the Teutonic, and not the Hebrew, “comes nearest;” and it is only fair to say that the relationship of Sanskrit and Persian to the Aryan dialects of Europe is recognized, and a full account given of the ancient Indian speech. In an appendix Dr. Murray also pointed out what we should now term the Aryan affinities of the Scythian words preserved by the classical authors. But his principles of etymology were the same as those of the Greeks; similarity of sound was sufficient to prove identity of origin. And every word, from whatever quarter it may be gathered, is forced to become a proof or an example of the descent of language from his nine monosyllabic interjections. A volume, published in 1800 by W. Whiter, under the ambitious title of “Etymologicum Magnum, or Universal Etymological Dictionary,” is not content even with the limits prescribed to himself by Dr. Murray. English, Greek, Latin, French, Irish, Welsh, Slavonic, Hebrew, Arabic, Gipsey, Coptic, and many more, are all mixed up together with the most impartial prodigality. The character of the work may be judged of by the assertion of the writer, “that from a hord of vagrant Gipsies once issued that band of sturdy robbers—the companions of Romulus and Remus;” this being based on the fact that the Gipsies “are in their own language called Romans, or Romani.” After this we need not be surprised at being told that the English _give_ and _shaft_, the Hebrew _gabbe_ (_sic_), the Chaldee _gavav_, the French _javeau_, the German _garbe_, and the Latin _sparum_, have all one and the same origin; or that _sepulcrum_ is derived from the Hebrew _kabar_, “to bury,” and the Celtic _pen_ from the Hebrew _phânâh_, “to incline.”

What has been termed the discovery of Sanskrit by Western scholars put an end to all this fanciful playing with words and created the science of language. The native grammarians of India had at an early period analyzed both the phonetic sounds and the vocabulary of Sanskrit with astonishing precision, and drawn up a far more scientific system of grammar than the philologists of Alexandria or Rome had been able to attain. The Devanâgari alphabet is a splendid monument of phonological accuracy, and long before the time of Saadia and Khayyug, the Hindu “Vaiyâkaranas,” or grammarians, had not only discovered that roots are the ultimate elements of language, but had traced all the words of Sanskrit to a limited number of roots. Their grammatical system and nomenclature rest upon a firm foundation of inductive reasoning, and though based on the phænomena of a single language, show a scientific insight into the nature of speech which has never been surpassed.

It is possible that the democratic movement of Buddhism which broke down caste and raised the inferior dialects and languages of India to the same level as the sacred Sanskrit of the Veda, had much to do with the extraordinary success of the Hindu grammarians. The immediate object of their investigation was the language of the Rig-Veda, which had become obscure and partly obsolete through the changes wrought by time upon the spoken tongue. The Rig-Veda, pre-eminently called “_the_ Veda,” is a collection of hymns and poems of various dates, some of which go back to the earliest days of the Aryan invasion of north-western India; the whole collection, however, may be roughly ascribed to at least the fourteenth or fifteenth century B.C. In course of time it came to assume a sacred character, and the theory of inspiration invented to support this goes much beyond the most extreme theory of verbal inspiration ever held in the Jewish or the Christian Church. The Rig-Veda was divided into ten _mandalas_ or books, each _mandala_ being assigned to some old family; and out of these were formed three new Vedas—the Yajur, the Sâma, and the Âtharva. The Yajur and the Sâma may be described as prayer-books compiled from the Rig for the use of the choristers and the ministers of the priests, and contain little besides what is found in the earliest and most sacred Veda. Along with the latter they sometimes go under the name of the Trayî or “Triad,” a name which implies that the Âtharva-Veda was not yet in existence when it was given. In fact, the Âtharva_n_a may be described as a collection of poems mixed up with popular sayings, medical advice, magical formulæ, and the like. It was assigned to the Brahman or fourth class of priests, who superintended the ritual, just as the Sâma-Veda was assigned to the choristers, the Yajur-Veda to the acolytes, to whom the manual work involved in a sacrifice was delegated, and the Rig-Veda to the Hotri, or priest proper, who had to recite portions of it, whence its name of Rig, or “Praise.” The period that must have elapsed before the hymns of the Rig could have been collected together, invested with a sacred character, and elaborated into a ritual, must have been considerable; but not until this was done, and the three supplementary Vedas composed, was the whole Veda or depository of sacred “knowledge” complete. At a later date came the Brâhmanas, or commentaries on the Veda, the object of which was to explain obscure passages in the old hymns, and the erroneous and absurd explanations sometimes offered show pretty plainly how much both the language and the ideas of the people had changed. The sacredness of the Veda was reflected upon the Brâhmanas themselves, and a time came when they too began to be regarded as divine, and to be superseded by the Sûtras, the “strings” or manuals of the grammarians. The diffuse style of the Brâhmanas made way for the scientific brevity of the Sûtras, and Hindu literature entered upon its Alexandrine stage. Even the grammar of the Brâhmanas became archaic; and accordingly, though the Veda was the primary object of the grammarians’ labours, the Brâhmanas also had a share in their regard. The Sûtras endeavour to explain the Veda and all connected with it—a principal part of their work being naturally an explanation of the Vedic language and grammar. But, before this could be effected, an accurate register of the facts was required, and the Masoretes of India accordingly divided and counted, not only the verses and words, but even the syllables of the Rig-Veda. According to Śaunaka, the teacher of Kâtyâyana, the 1,028 hymns of the Rig-Veda contain 10,616 (or 10,622) verses, 153,826 words (_padas_), and 432,000 syllables, eleven of the hymns being of later date than the rest; and since the number of syllables and words given by Śaunaka is the number found in our present texts, it is clear that the Rig-Veda has been handed down, from the sixth century B.C. to our own day, with the most perfect precision. This is the more astonishing at first sight, from its being handed down orally alone; but the labours of Śaunaka and his brother scholars had much to do with the result. The numbering of the syllables of the Veda led to the formation of the so-called Pada-text, in which the single words are divided one from another, instead of being run together in accordance with the laws of Sandhi. These laws require that the final letter of a word should be modified by the initial letter of the word that follows, the consequence being that two separate syllables (as in _tad śrutwâ_, “having heard that”) are made to coalesce into one (_tachchhrutwâ_). To resolve these amalgamated syllables was to discover the phonetic rules and principles which regulated the pronunciation of Sanskrit, and to lay the foundation of a scientific phonology.

But a more important work remained behind. Kautsa, a grammarian of the fifth or sixth century B.C., tells us that the language of the Rig-Veda had by that time become so obsolete as to be understood with difficulty, and yet the exact recital of the hymns had come to be regarded as indispensable for the performance of religious service. The Prâtiśâkhyas, the oldest production of the grammatical school, show a surprising acquaintance with the physiological facts of phonetic utterance, and far surpass the most advanced labours of the Greeks in the same direction. The Nighantavas, a little later, contain a list of rare Vedic words, and perhaps started the controversy which broke out shortly afterwards among the grammarians as to the origin of the nouns. Śâka_t_âyana and his followers, the Nairuktas, or Etymologists, maintained that they were all derived from verbs; while his opponents, Gârgya and others, called the Vaiyâkaranas or Analyzers, sought to show that some at least had a different origin. In the end, however, the party of Śâka_t_âyana proved victorious, and the result was not only the formation of the Sanskrit dictionary, but, what was far more important, the clear enunciation of the doctrine of roots. In the hands of Yâska and Pânini the doctrine became fruitful in consequences; the classical language of India was thoroughly analyzed, and the essential part of each word marked off from its formative suffixes. In short, a scientific grammar was created. The _Nirukta_, or “Etymology,” of Yâska is a model of method and conciseness, though it is thrown into the shade by the grammar of Pânini. This was the crowning work of the Hindu grammarians, and, composed as it was in the fourth century B.C., may well excite our astonishment and admiration. In eight books, and about 4,000 short rules, it sums up the principles of Sanskrit phonology, the declension of the noun and the conjugation of the verb (which agree in the main with those worked out by the Greek grammarians), the nature of the adverbs and other particles, the rules of syntax, which are interspersed among the various divisions of the accidence, the etymology of words, with an exhaustive list of “primary” and “secondary” formative suffixes, and a minute analysis of composition which has been the basis of modern attempts to deal with this intricate subject. As an appendix to his Grammar, Pânini also compiled a list of roots (_dhâtus_, or “elements”), amounting in all to about 1,700.

The brevity and compactness of the work was much aided by the algebraic system of symbols by which the various terms of grammar were expressed. Thus, in Pânini, a verbal termination is denoted by _l_, the endings of the primary tenses by _lt_, those of the secondary tenses by _ln_, the special tenses and moods being pointed out by an inserted vowel, as _lât_ for the present, _lot_ for the imperative, and so on. The mathematical character of this device shows the precision with which the several rules of grammar had been ascertained and laid down, as well as the instinctive recognition that there was a science of grammar as well as a science of mathematics. It only remained for a later generation of Western scholars to demonstrate that such was really the case.

It may seem strange that this later generation was so long in coming. Already, at the end of the sixteenth century, an Italian, Philippo Sassetti, during a five years’ residence in India, had made himself acquainted with Sanskrit, and drew attention to the likeness between the Sanskrit numerals and other words and corresponding words in his native language.[23] Another Italian, Roberto de Nobili, who went to India in 1606 as a missionary, actually transformed himself into a Brahman, in order to win over the Hindus; and after acquiring a knowledge not only of Tamil and Telugu, but also of Sanskrit, “showed himself in public, dressed in the proper garb of the Brahmans, wearing their cord and their frontal mark, observing their diet, and submitting even to the complicated rules of caste.”[24] One of his converts—so at least Professor Max Müller thinks—composed the curious Ezur, or fourth Veda, which professes to be a lost Veda that he came to preach, and “contains a wild mixture of Hindu and Christian doctrine.” Fifty years after De Nobili a German missionary, named Heinrich Roth, was able to dispute in Sanskrit with the Brahmans, and in 1740 a Frenchman, Père Pons, sent home a comprehensive and fairly accurate report upon Sanskrit literature. It was not till 1790, however, that the first Sanskrit grammar was published in Europe, at Rome, by two German friars, Hanxleden and Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomeo, whose real name was Philipp Wesdin. Some years before (in 1767) the Frenchmen Cœurdoux and Barthélemy had written from Pondicherry to the Academy to express their opinion that a relationship existed between the vocabularies of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and to prove that this relationship could not be accounted for by the hypothesis of borrowing. Their letter, however, though read in 1768, was not printed until 1808, after the death of Anquetil-Duperron, and at the end of one of his Mémoires. Meanwhile English and German scholars had entered the field, and the opinion expressed by the French missionaries had become a belief of the learned world.

In 1784 the Asiatic Society was founded at Calcutta, and its first members did their utmost to extend a knowledge of the Sanskrit language and literature. Halhed, in the preface to his “Grammar of Bengali,” published in 1778, had noticed the “similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek;” and Sir William Jones,[25] addressing the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1786, states that “no philologer could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason,” he goes on to say, “though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.”

Here, then, was the great discovery made. It required a man like Sir William Jones, who united the tastes of the poet and _littérateur_ with those of the linguistic scholar to overcome the prejudices of a classical education, and to admit that the languages of Greece and Rome had the same origin as the languages of the despised Hindu. It required still greater insight and sobriety to trace them all from a common source, rather than to magnify the newly acquired Oriental speech by making it the parent of the languages of the West; and though we may now smile at his attempt to explain classical mythology by comparing its personages with Indian deities with similarly sounding names, Sir William Jones deserves to be remembered as the pioneer of comparative philology. He stands out in honourable contrast to Dugald Stewart, the Scotch philosopher of common sense, who, in absolute ignorance of even a single Sanskrit character, undertook the task of proving that Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature were alike the inventions of the Brahmans, and that they were forged after the model of Greek and Latin in order to deceive European scholars. It was not the first time that philosophy and common sense have found themselves opposed to unwelcome knowledge.

Lord Monboddo, Stewart’s fellow-countryman, showed himself a sounder critic and a more unprejudiced inquirer.[26] His friend, Wilkins, the translator of the “Bhagavadgîta” and “Hitopadeśa,” and author of a Sanskrit grammar, proved to his satisfaction that Sanskrit was “a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer,” and that the likeness between Sanskrit on the one side, and Greek and Latin on the other, demonstrated the descent of all three from some common primæval tongue. The Scotch judge accordingly found a niche for the new discovery in his theory which derived mankind from two tailless apes, and the languages of the world from the Osirian language of Egypt. Sanskrit, it was plain, had been introduced into India by Osiris, just as Greek had been brought into the Peloponnesus by the Pelasgians. Not only the numerals, “the use of which must have been coeval with civil society,” or the words of common life, but even the grammatical forms of a verb like _asmi_, “I am,” are produced in evidence of the relationship of the classical languages of Europe and of India. As early as 1795 Lord Monboddo was not far from the discovery of that Indo-European family of speech which has been the starting-point and foundation of the science of language.

Both Sir William Jones and Lord Monboddo, however, did no more than draw aside the curtain for a moment and reveal the new world that lay behind. It was reserved for Germany to accomplish what England had begun. The genius of Leibniz had already prepared the way by overthrowing the belief that Hebrew was the original language from which all others are to be traced, and by setting missionaries and others to work in compiling vocabularies, grammars, and phrase-books of the manifold dialects of the world. Thus, in thanking Witsen, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, for a translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Hottentot, he writes: “Remember, I implore you, and remind your Muscovite friends, to make researches in order to procure specimens of the Scythian languages, the Samoyedes, Siberians, Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Tungusians, and others;” and his sound scientific instinct makes him ask (in his “Dissertation on the Origin of Nations,” 1710): “Why begin with the unknown instead of the known? It stands to reason that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend, step by step, to the most ancient tongues.”[27] He found an illustrious convert in Catherine of Russia, who once shut herself up for nearly a year in order to work at her “Comparative Dictionary of Languages,” and the “Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinitá e diversitá” (1784) of the Spanish Jesuit missionary, Don Lorenzo Hervas and the “Mithridates” of Adelung and Vater are, as Professor Max Müller has observed, plainly due to his influence. The efforts of Leibniz were seconded in another direction by those of Herder, to whom we may trace the conception of a comparative treatment of literature and a recognition of the merits of literary remains beyond those of Greece and Rome. Herder, as has already been remarked, made the rise of an historical science possible by substituting the idea of development for that of uniform sequence in history, and his treatise on the “Origin of Speech,” crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1772, dissipated for ever the theory that language was a miraculous gift and not the slowly evolved creation of the human mind. The German mind was already prepared to seize and unfold the consequences which resulted from the discovery of Sanskrit. It was a poet, Friedrich Schlegel, however, and not a philologist, who first laid down the great fact that the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Slavonia form but one family, daughters of the same mother, and heirs of the same wealth of words and flections. Schlegel learnt Sanskrit while in England during the peace of Amiens (1801-1802), and to his work on “The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” published in 1808, may be traced the foundation of the science of language. All that was now required was some master-scholar who should continue the work begun by Schlegel, and establish on a deep and firm basis the edifice that he had reared. This master-scholar was found in Francis Bopp.

Bopp, the true founder of comparative philology, made himself acquainted with Sanskrit during a visit to England and the India House library, and in 1816 appeared his famous work, “Das Conjugationssystem,” published at Frankfurt, in which a minute and scientific comparison was instituted between the grammatical systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German. It was not until 1833, however, that the first volume of his “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonic, Gothic, and German” came out, though several minor productions on Comparative Philology had appeared meanwhile, and not until 1852 was the final volume of the Grammar completed. Bopp was the author of the method which must be followed by every student who pretends to a scientific treatment of language; and though there is naturally much in his work that has since needed revision, the main results at which he arrived will always remain among the fundamental truths of linguistic science. His Sanskrit grammars were published in 1827, 1832, and 1834, and his “Vergleichendes Accentuations-System,” published in 1854, not only pointed out the striking analogy between the accentuation of Greek and Sanskrit, but also laid the basis of all future inquiries into the subject. But even Homer nods at times; and as if to warn us against following too implicitly any leader, however illustrious, Bopp sought to include the Polynesian dialects in his Indo-European family, and thereby violated the very method that he had himself inaugurated.[28] His attempt to connect the language of Georgia with the same family was not more fortunate;[29] and though Georgian is undoubtedly inflectional in character, its flections are now known not to be those of the Aryan group, nor its structure and roots those which distinguish an Aryan tongue. Even the errors of a great mind are instructive, and serve to illustrate the soundness of the method which they violate.

Bopp’s work was confined to the more strictly scientific and inductive side of comparative philology, to the comparison of words and forms, and the conclusions we may infer therefrom: the metaphysical side of the science of language found an able expositor in Wilhelm von Humboldt. Starting with the new method of Bopp, Humboldt revised the old endeavours to found a philosophy of speech, and extended the results obtained by Bopp to all the manifold languages of the world. In a number of publications, more especially the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, which came out after his death in 1836,[30] he dealt with the various problems raised by the science and philosophy of language, and not only sketched the general outlines of a true philosophy of speech, but also threw out suggestions which have since borne abundant fruit in the hands of other scholars. Humboldt’s work was followed up by Steinthal, whose journal, the “Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,”[31] conducted with the help of Lazarus, has proved a treasury of suggestive thought to a whole generation of linguistic scholars. Bopp, on the other hand, was followed by Pott, whose vast knowledge and genial insight are probably unequalled among the students of language. His “Etymologische Forschungen,” in spite of its size and want of an adequate index, is a mine of philological wealth, and his works on the “Language of the Gipsies” (1846), on “Proper Names” (1856), and on the “Quinary and Vigesimal Systems of Numeration” (1847), have largely helped the progress of linguistic science. In the “Anti-Kaulen,” or “Mythical Representations of the Origin of Peoples and Languages” (1865), and “The Inequality of the Races of Men” (1856), where a great display of anthropological knowledge is made, Pott did good service in checking the unifying haste of a young science.

While Humboldt and Pott were laying broad and deep the foundations of the new science of language, Jacob Grimm was applying the method of Bopp in another and more special direction. Instead of endeavouring to grasp the whole vast range of languages, or even those of the Aryan group alone, he devoted himself to the minute and scientific study of one branch of them only, and his “Deutsche Grammatik” (1819-1837) ushered in a new epoch in the history of comparative philology. Benfey, indeed, still carried on with a master’s power the labours begun by Bopp and Pott, but he too had by degrees to adapt himself to the spirit of the time, and the fame he has acquired as a Sanskrit scholar far outshines that acquired by his brilliant but ineffectual attempt to reduce the Aryan and Semitic families of speech to a single stem, or by his “History of the study of Language and of Oriental Philology in Germany, since the beginning of the sixteenth century” (1869). The time was come for a microscopic rather than a telescopic view of language and languages; the broad outlines of linguistic science had been sketched by its first founders, and what was now wanted was to fill up the details, to apply the general principles of the science to special cases, and, by a close and accurate study of particular languages and dialects, either to confirm or to overthrow the conclusions at which they had arrived. No single man can know thoroughly more than a few languages at the most; for the rest he must be content to trust to the report of others; and however great may be his genius, however wide-reaching his vision, unless the materials he uses have already been sifted and arranged in the light of the comparative method, his most important inferences are likely to be vitiated. Hence the value of the work begun by Grimm, and of the direction in which he turned the course of scientific philology. Erasmus Rask, the Dane, followed up the example thus set with an investigation of the northern languages of Europe, and his researches into the language of the Zend-Avesta, the first ever undertaken by an European scholar, formed the scaffold upon which Eugène Burnouf erected the colossal structure of Zend philology. Burnouf did for Zend and Achæmenian Persian what Grimm had done for the Teutonic languages; his work has been continued by Lassen, Haug, Spiegel, Justi, and others. Meanwhile the Romance languages were taken in hand by Diez, whose “Comparative Grammar” (1836), and “Comparative Dictionary” (1853),[32] are masterpieces of method and insight. Indeed, they may be said to have created Romance philology altogether. The philology of the Keltic dialects was set on a scientific footing by our own countryman, Prichard, and above all by Zeuss and Stokes, while Miklosich and Schleicher did the same for the Slavonic tongues. Along with his special labours in Slavonic, Schleicher carried on the tradition of a wider and more general treatment of the whole Indo-European family itself, and his “Compendium of Comparative Grammar” (1861-2), in which he endeavoured to restore the grammar of the parent Aryan speech, will ever remain a monument of learning and genius. Schleicher also came forward as the representative of the view which includes the science of language among the physical sciences, and his works, whatever may be thought of the theory that underlies them, have done much to further the progress of linguistic study.

Grimm and his school acted wisely and scientifically in beginning with the modern languages whose phonology and pronunciation, the skeleton of all real linguistic science, can be fully known, and whose idioms, the life-blood, as it were, of language, are still living and familiar. But language, like all things else connected with man and his mind, is a self-developing organism, and as such must be studied historically. Consequently, though the student of language must start with the modern and living languages of the world, the older languages which lie behind them are of infinite importance, and to neglect them would be as fatal as for the geologist to neglect the older strata of the earth. The relics of ancient speech, preserved in the monuments of Egypt or Assyria, or in the records of Greece and Rome, are as precious as the fossils which enable the palæontologist to trace the history of life upon the globe, and the geologist to explain the origin and structure of the existing rocks. The same method and minute investigation, accordingly, which had effected so much for the Romance and Teutonic dialects, were applied to the study of the classical languages, and, in the hands of G. Curtius and his school, Greek and Latin philology has been revivified and illuminated, and made to yield stores of precious facts to the comparative philologist. The old-fashioned scholarship has become a thing of the past; the various dialects of Italy and Greece have been restored to their true place, and the death-blow given to the system which derived Latin from Greek, or attempted to explain the grammars of the two classical languages by confounding the laws and phænomena peculiar to each. The labours of Lobeck, of Gottfried Hermann, of Passow, of Döderlein, and above all of Philipp Buttmann, whose intuition frequently made him anticipate the conclusions of later discovery, had furnished Curtius with the basis on which the new superstructure might be built, while Corssen, his fellow-labourer in the field of Latin research, found that here also his predecessors had gathered in an almost equal harvest of materials. Comparative philology has made it possible for the scientific method to be learnt as well from the study of the classical tongues as from the study of chemistry or geology.

The results acquired in the realm of the Aryan or Indo-European languages served as a starting-point for the investigation of other families of speech. For a long time comparative philology remained practically synonymous with the comparative treatment of the Aryan languages only. But its method was equally applicable to the examination of all other languages throughout the world, and the general laws of language discovered by men like Bopp and Grimm might be expected to hold good of all languages and dialects whatsoever. Furnished with the new scientific method and the principles upon which it was based, scholars next attacked those Semitic languages whose inflectional structure seemed to bring them into such close contact with the languages of the Aryan group. A new era was inaugurated in their study by the labours of Gesenius, Ewald, and Olshausen; and Renan even attempted a “Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques.” But Renan’s work remains a splendid fragment; the first part, the “Histoire Générale,” has passed through several editions; but the “Système comparé” has never appeared. It was soon found that the comparative study of the Aryan languages would not give the key to all the problems of speech; that in fact the Aryan group was an exceptional one, and the laws determined from it, so far from being of universal validity, did not apply even to the dialects of the Semitic family. The endeavour to reduce the Semitic radicals to monosyllabic biliterals, under the belief that Aryan philology necessitated the existence of monosyllabic roots in all languages, introduced nothing but confusion into the study of the Semitic tongues; and the theory of pronominal suffixes, which seemed to be supported by the phænomena of Aryan speech, has been equally a loss rather than a gain for them. It is at last becoming recognized, however, that each group of languages, as well as each language in the several groups, has its own linguistic laws peculiar to itself, and to apply these to other groups and languages in which they have not been proved to exist, is to do violence to the comparative method itself. The Aryan languages are the languages of a civilized race; the parent-speech to which we may inductively trace them back was spoken by men who stood on a relatively high level of culture, and was as fully developed, as inflectional, in short, as Sanskrit or Latin themselves. Such a speech can tell us far less of the early condition of language than the Bushman dialects of our own day, and to make the conclusions derived from the examination of it of universal validity, or so many revelations of the primitive state of speech, would be a serious error.

The exceptional character of the Aryan group of languages has been made apparent by the application of the method learnt from its investigation to other groups of tongues. The four most important groups which have yet been examined, are the Malay-Polynesian, as explored by W. von Humboldt, Buschmann, Von der Gabelentz, and Friedrich Müller; the Bâ-ntu of Southern Africa, the scientific investigation of which is due to Bleek; the Athapasian and Sonorian of North America, of which Buschmann has been the Bopp; and, above all, the Ural-Altaic, otherwise called the Ugro-Altaic, or Turanian, which is now, owing to a variety of circumstances, receiving a special attention. The work begun by Castrèn, Schott, Böhtlingk, and Max Müller, has been continued by Boller, Budenz, Donner, Hunfálvy, Ahlqvist, Thomsen, Ujfalvy, Schiefner, and others; and so far, at all events, as the Finnic group is concerned, “Turanian” philology is almost as far advanced as Aryan philology itself. But the limits of the Ural-Altaic family as a whole are still not quite settled; while Dr. Edkins would connect Chinese with Mongol roots, others question the affinity of Mongol itself to the Tatar-Finnic languages, and Weske has even gone so far as to class the Finnic dialects among the inflectional tongues, and to hint at their connection with the languages of the Aryan family. But this is to follow in Bopp’s footsteps only when he endeavoured to trace the dialects of Polynesia and Europe to a common source.

The creation of a science of language has brought with it the creation of a science of comparative mythology and a science of comparative religion. Language is at once the expression and the creator of thought, and the history of language is consequently the history of human thought. Now mythology is a record of the way in which primitive man endeavoured to explain the phænomena of nature and his relation to the world, just as religion—that is, religion as crystallized in dogmas and systems—is a record of man’s attempt to represent his feelings and belief in relation to a higher power. The record can only be interpreted by the science of language; it is only when we come to understand the meaning of the language of mythology that we understand the meaning of mythology itself. Just as it was Sanskrit which laid the foundation of comparative philology, so, too, it was the hymns of the Rig-Veda, the oldest monument of Sanskrit literature, which laid the foundation of comparative mythology. The familiar forms and names of Greek myth met the scholar again in the Vedic poems; but their faces were no longer concealed by the veil of forgetfulness. The poets of the Rig-Veda were still conscious of the true nature and origin of Zeus (_Dyaus_) the “bright” sky, or Erinnys (_Saraṇyu_) “the dawn,” and the old stories of the sun-god and the powers of day are lighted up with renewed life and significancy when we track them back to their ancient home in the East. Not less important for the comparative study of religion have been the inquiries into the development of Brahmanism and its struggles with the teaching of Buddha, necessitated by the examination of the classical language and literature of India—inquiries which could be carried on in the dispassionate spirit of the scholar and without reference to the religious convictions of the Western world. The settlement of the exact meaning of a single word like _nirvâna_ opens a fresh chapter in the comparative history of religion. It is not the least of Professor Max Müller’s services that he has made both these new sciences household words and invested them with a charm which has secured to them the attention they deserve.

In England the scientific study of language has taken a special direction in accordance with the practical character of the nation. Men like A. J. Ellis, Bell, and Sweet, have followed up the path first indicated by Grimm and Lepsius, and devoted themselves to an exhaustive investigation and analysis of articulate sounds. Aided by Helmholz in Germany, and Prince Lucien Bonaparte in London, they have determined the physical laws of utterance, have classified the most minute varieties of sounds, and pointed out the supreme importance, for phonological purposes, of living dialects. Etymology has to a great extent become a purely physical science: the connection and derivation of words must be traced out in obedience to the physiological laws of speech, and were it not that a sound or group of sounds cannot become a word until a meaning has been put into it, etymology might be described as merely a branch of physiology. But phonology, the science of sounds, is not synonymous with the science of language; it is but a department, a subdivision, of the master science, and deals only with the external, the mechanical, the physical side of speech. The relations of grammar and the inner signification of words and sentences are what constitute the real essence of language, and in so far as these belong to thought and not to the mere vocal organs of the body, the science of language, like the other sciences which have to do with the mind, must be described as a historical and not as a physical science. There has been a tendency among some philologists to push phonology beyond its proper sphere and make it co-extensive with comparative philology: it is this inclination which has lain at the root of the attempt to include the science of language among the physical sciences; but phonology is concerned only with the outward framework of speech, not with its inward essence. This framework, however, it is, by means of which we are able to investigate language, and the very fact of its being subject to physical laws which admit of no contravention, gives the modern science of language its scientific certainty, and constitutes the difference between it and the old punning etymology in which, as Voltaire said, the consonants counted for nothing and the vowels for very little. Before a single derivation can be admitted it must be shown to be in accordance with the ascertained phonological laws of the languages we are studying; before it can be justified it must satisfy the requirements of sense and history. The outward form is the key to the inward fact which it embodies; we can get at the original force and meaning of grammatical relations and derivative words only by interrogating the phonetic utterances by which they are expressed. The science of phonology is the entrance to the science of language, but we must not forget that it is but the outer vestibule, not the inner shrine itself.

It has been necessary to state thus in detail the distinction between phonology and the science of language as a whole, because a good many of the theories that have been propounded in the name of the science rest upon an unconscious confusion of the two. The outward and the inward have not always been kept apart, and nothing has been commoner than to argue that a change in the pronunciation of a word or suffix has been the _cause_ of a change in its meaning. It has even been thought that the phænomena of inflection might all be accounted for by the action of phonetic decay in stripping off the final parts of compound words, and so disguising their primitive form (but not sense), and that when the comparative philologist has traced a word back to its source in accordance with phonological laws he has done all that is required of him. Even Plato and Aristotle had a higher conception of the study of language than this. No doubt the fact that a scientific treatment of language rests primarily upon phonology has had much to do with this one-sided view of speech, but the resemblance of the method of comparative philology to the method employed by the physical sciences has also been a cause of it. Comparative philology has been regarded as a physical science, language held to be a concrete organism, independent of human volition and with a growth analogous to that of the plant or the animal, and the laws of language explained without reference to the facts of psychology. The two Schlegels are the first who may be accounted responsible for this mode of dealing with language. Friedrich Schlegel divided languages into the flectionless, the agglutinative, and the inflectional, and treated the roots of languages as so many seeds, which grew up and developed like the acorn into the oak. A. W. Schlegel[33] calls the flectional languages “organic, because they contain a living principle of growth and development, and alone have, if I may so express myself, an abundant and luxurious vegetation.” In fact, speech was regarded by them as something that exists separately and independently, and the flections of the verb and noun believed to have sprouted out of the root like so many leaves and branches.

Schlegel’s mysticism, as Steinthal terms it, was exposed by Bopp, who threw the languages of the world into three groups: (1) those which, like the Chinese, are “without a grammar;” (2) those which, like the agglutinative and Aryan tongues, start with monosyllabic roots, and, by the help of composition, end with a grammar; and (3), lastly, the Semitic group, which expresses the relations of grammar by internal change. Bopp here commits at least three errors: (1) Chinese is as fully organized, as much possesses a grammar, as English or Latin; (2) the roots neither of the Aryan nor of the agglutinative languages can be proved to be monosyllabic, while the Aryan languages, at all events, sometimes use internal vowel-change to denote grammatical differences; and (3) to imply that the relations of grammar have been called into existence in the Aryan family by the passage of composition (or agglutination) into flection is to ascribe the origin of the relations conceived to exist between the several parts of our thought to the outward accidents of phonetic decay. Bopp naturally looked upon the laws of Aryan philology as holding good for all other branches of human speech; for him the parent Aryan language was the primitive language of mankind, and the verbal and pronominal roots discovered by the Sanskrit grammarians were assumed to have constituted a language, and, in fact, to have been the original language of the human race. Agglutination was but an earlier stage of inflection, and, in fact, was merely the form in which the unorganized primitive speech came to possess a grammar by compounding its roots together. No wonder, therefore, that roots were confounded with words; that Chinese should be described as consisting of “bare roots;” and that the possibility should be admitted of deriving all languages from a single source. Hence the endeavour to find a place for the Polynesian and Caucasian dialects in the Aryan family, and the stress laid upon the external rather than the internal side of speech. Structure, morphology, comparative syntax—these are ideas which have been left to Bopp’s successors to work out. With him language is still an organism, flowing from one source and passing through a series of necessary changes; it is, therefore, not so much a social product as a subject of physical inquiry. This view of language was assailed by Pott. He justly urges that we can only speak of language as an organism metaphorically, and that there is no inner necessity in language to develop like the seed into the tree, or the chrysalis into the butterfly, than there is in thought itself. The roots of language have no existence apart from the mind; before they can become words they must be clothed, now with this form, now with that, according to their relation with other words. Language, in fact, is the expression of thought; it cannot be examined except in connection with thought and the history of the human mind. The science of language, accordingly, is one of the historical or social sciences, and phonology is but the key whereby we read the enigmas of the thought within. Languages will differ according to the different ways in which men have conceived the world and their relation to it. Pott, therefore, is an advocate of the original diversity of languages, and, as might be expected, endeavours to found a science of sematology, or of the signification of words, by the side of the science of phonology.

Pott had been preceded in his general conception of speech by Wilhelm von Humboldt; indeed, his advance upon Bopp was due in some measure to Humboldt’s previous labours. For Pott, it must be remembered, was pre-eminently a phonologist, and to him we owe the extension of the results obtained by Grimm in the Teutonic languages to the whole body of Indo-European tongues. Humboldt, like all other great masters, rather suggested than worked out; and recent researches have shown that the facts to which he attached his philosophical system, such as the nature of the Kawi language of Java, are not always to be trusted. He laid down that each single language is the individual expression of the character of a nation, though language, taken generally, “is an organic whole,” from which the individual languages of the world radiate as from a centre. The nearer each language approaches the ideal of language, the more, that is to say, it is free from peculiarities of thought and expression, the less is it imperfect and, in the bad sense of the term, individual. And since a language is the outward expression of the mind and history of a nation, the nation whose language is the most perfect has approached the most nearly to a perfect culture and civilization. Language is at once the most exquisite work of art and the most marvellous creation of science that the spirit and intellect of a people can produce, and its character, as tested by the standard which linguistic science has to establish, is a sure and certain clue to the stage of art and science attained by its speakers. At the same time, Humboldt emphatically declares that language is not a product (ἔργον), but an activity (ἐνέργεια); in other words, that language and speaking are the same. But while maintaining that language is the creative organ of thought, Humboldt also maintained that it constitutes an independent world of thought, thus confusing the two senses of the word language—the one in which language is made identical with the act of speaking, the other in which it represents the whole body of significant sounds we utter. Humboldt had been educated under the influences of the Kantian philosophy, and in his theory of language we may discover a reflection of Kant’s dualism in the opposition he finds in speech between the general and the individual, between language as an organic whole, and individual languages which refuse to answer to the ideal definition of speech.

Steinthal[34] has subjected Humboldt’s statements to a very thorough-going criticism, and has exposed their manifold inconsistencies as well as the dualism which underlies them all. Humboldt’s philosophy of language erred by following the _à priori_ rather than the _à posteriori_ method; the facts discovered by comparative philology were used by him as illustrations of his conclusions rather than as the premisses upon which those conclusions were built. Nevertheless, in spite of his _à priori_ metaphysical method—in spite of his laying down what language ought to be instead of what it is, Humboldt’s genius scattered ideas and suggestions through his work which have proved abundantly fruitful in the hands of later scholars. But the value of these ideas was due to the far-sightedness of his genius, not to his collection of facts, and he was accordingly unable to harmonize and classify them, or to erect upon them a sound theory of speech. Humboldt’s great work consisted in teaching that language is the expression of national thought, that it must be treated as an organic whole; that, in short, its science is a historical and not a physical one.

The work thus begun by Humboldt was taken up by Heyse in his “System der Sprachwissenschaft.”[35] Heyse approached language from the point of view of the Hegelian philosophy, but he strives to prevent the _à priori_ method from overriding the _à posteriori_. His view of language professes to base itself on the results of comparative philology, although the endeavour to force them into an Hegelian mould is clearly traceable. It really rests, however, upon an _à priori_ conception of the origin of speech, which is neither borne out by linguistic facts nor easily realizable. Language, he holds, is spiritualized sound: the world is a great vibratory organ, in which all objects when touched emit a note, and so, too, the human spirit, when affected by feeling or reason, emitted certain sounds peculiar to itself, which we call roots. Speech was as much a necessity to man as ringing is to a piece of brass when struck. It is, in fact, the music of the soul, and its development gauges the spiritual development of its speakers. This development of speech is, therefore, a wholly internal one, dependent not upon the outward phonology, but upon the common spirit of man that has created it. The outward sound is but the garment created by thought wherein to clothe itself, but the garment is always suitable to the thought it clothes. Since thought “must” develop, language also “must” do the same, and language, like thought, can develop only in a particular way. This evolution necessarily depends upon the existence of minds in which thought has become self-conscious, reflective: “the speaking of children and of the great mass of mankind is a lifelong, unconscious activity—a mere natural activity of conscious thought.” Such a theory of language is plainly mystical. On the one hand, the natural sounds uttered by a man under strong excitement do not constitute language, but rather a barren list of interjections; on the other hand, to speak of the soul, or mind, being affected like ordinary objects of the sense, and accordingly emitting sounds, is sheer mythology. Moreover, the evolution of speech, of which Heyse speaks, is not a _necessary_ one: there is no necessity “in the very essence of human speech” that the various forms of language—isolating, agglutinative, inflectional—should have come into existence. Language originated in the very prosaic and unphilosophical need of intercommunication, without which no community was possible, and so long as this need could be supplied, the nature and perfecting of the means was not even considered. The linguistic garment of thought, it is true, generally (though by no means always) fits the thought it clothes fairly well, but only because the garment itself is to a great extent identical with the thought which it envelopes. To deny that language properly so called exists for children and uneducated persons, as Heyse finds himself forced to do, is to deny that it was framed by primitive man, which is, indeed, a _reductio ad absurdum_. Heyse’s chief merit lies in emphasizing the fact that language is not the work of the individual, but of the whole community, and of a community, too, which consists of reasonable, thinking beings.