Chapter II: The Nature and Science of Language (3)

The laws of phonology must be established by as large a number of instances as possible. In no other way can the chances of accident or mistake be avoided. A law, in fact, must hold good of all the phænomena that are summed up under it, and the more numerous the phænomena, the wider and more firmly established will the law be. Grimm’s laws of the interchanges of sound in the Aryan family of speech depend on the observation and comparison of a very large number of words. As soon as it was found that English words which contained a _th_ answered in signification and general form to Latin and Greek words which had a _t_ in the same place, it was possible to formulate the law: English _th_ = Latin and Greek _t_; all that remained was to verify the law by fresh instances, and in this way to strengthen the proof of the connection of the two languages. If it could be shown that real exceptions to the law occur which are not due to the interference of other laws, the law would have to be given up, however numerous might be the apparent instances on which it rested. The progress of comparative philology is continually strengthening its phonological laws and adding to their number.

The intimate connection of sound and sense must never be lost sight of in etymological research. They are as it were the outer and inner sides of the same object. Where the significations are unrelated, we cannot connect two words which agree in phonetic sound any more than we can connect two words of the same signification but different sound. In our own group of tongues the two separate roots _dhā_ “to suck,” and _dhā_ “to place,” for example, are identical in sound; and if we turn to languages like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian, we shall find numberless cases in which the same word, so far as pronunciation is concerned, has a variety of unallied meanings like our English _box_ or _scale_. Of course, it is not necessary that the signification of the words we compare should be exactly the same; the signification of words changes as much as their outward phonetic form; but we must be able to show that one meaning is derived from the other, or from a common parentage, just as we show that one sound is derived from another or from a common source.

For the purposes of phonology more especially, the study of living spoken dialects is indispensable. No doubt the historical character of glottology requires us to investigate the records of extinct languages with as much care as the facts of living ones, and it is only by learning what a language once was that we can properly know what it is now. Nevertheless, it is only in the modern languages that we can discover the nature and laws of pronunciation; it is only here, moreover, that we are brought face to face with the problems and realities of speech. The biologist, it is true, cannot dispense with the aid of comparative anatomy, but his primary object is the study of the living organism. What has been termed “antiquarian philology” has sometimes stood in the way of scientific progress; sounds have been confounded with letters, and words instead of sentences have been made the units of speech. Antiquarian philology, furthermore, still has the shadow of classical scholasticism hanging over it; it will need a long education before the world is disabused of the idea that superiority in literature means superiority in language, and that a scientific study of language is identical with the old-fashioned “philology” of the classical scholar. Before the forms of an extinct speech can be made available for scientific investigation, they must be revivified by the translation of their written symbols into phonetic sounds, and how hard such a task is need not be pointed out. If we wish to work back to the former pronunciation of a language we must start from its modern and actual pronunciation, and in spite of all that we can do, in spite of slow and patient induction and a careful weighing of the facts, our conclusions will be at the best imperfect and approximative. The older and more scanty the remains of a language, the more defective and uncertain will be our restoration of its pronunciation. In the larger number of cases we have to be content with merely approximative results. What Mr. Ellis and Mr. Sweet have done for the pronunciation of early English, is due to the abundance of the data and the unbroken tradition which they embody; to restore the pronunciation of Latin is a work of greater difficulty, to restore that of ancient Greek of greater difficulty still. In short, the records of dead speech must be interpreted by the facts of living language, just as the conditions which brought about the deposition of the rocks can only be explained by the forces still at work upon the surface of the globe. Here as elsewhere in science, we must proceed from the known to the unknown. The laws of consonantal change laid down for Latin and Greek, for Sanskrit and Zend, for Keltic and Old High German, receive their verification and explanation from the Romance dialects of modern Europe; while it is in the study of savage idioms, in the languages of Bushmen and of Kafirs, of North American Indians and of Papuans, that some of the most precious facts of linguistic science have been obtained. An extinct literary language, indeed, is by its very nature less serviceable to the comparative philologist than the artless jargons of barbarous tribes. It is artificial rather than natural, and the product of individual idiosyncrasies rather than of the whole community. The further removed it is from the fresh current of living speech, the less capable it becomes of strictly scientific treatment. The individual element, with all its arbitrary capriciousness, has entered too largely into it. The grammatical forms invented and enforced by ignorant grammarians, the words coined after false analogy by the Homeric rhapsodists and their successors, or the stilted phrases and inverted expressions employed by a particular writer and his imitators, all belong to the domain of the “philologist” rather than to that of the scientific student of language. He has nothing to do with textual criticism or the study of style, much less with the successful reproduction of the idiosyncrasies of classical authors.

Philology in the narrower sense of the term has to prepare materials for comparative philology in so far as the latter is concerned with literary languages or dialects. In its turn it is guided in its researches and kept within the limits of scientific accuracy by comparative philology which tests and rectifies its conclusions, and prevents for the future attempts like that of Buttmann to derive ἄφνος from ἄφθονος or that of K. O. Müller to extract πελασγός from πελαργός. The particular can only be understood in the light of the universal, and as long as we are dealing with one language only our comparisons must be limited to that language alone at different stages of its growth, and will consequently sometimes lead us astray. Error can only be avoided by making our field of comparison as wide as possible, and so bringing our theory to the test of the greatest possible number of facts. It is evident from this, however, that the comparative philologist will have a special and minute acquaintance with but a few out of the many facts which come before his view. The memory even of a Mezzofanti is limited, and the ordinary student of language must be content to derive from others a large proportion of the materials on which he works. Caution in the choice and use of his authorities is here absolutely requisite, and it ought to be the business of the specialists in each language to see that the facts presented to him are thoroughly accurate and exact. Their work is the foundation upon which the structure of comparative philology has to be built.

But the comparative philologist cannot dispense with a specialist’s knowledge of at least two languages. In no other way can he have that intimate acquaintance with the inner life of speech requisite for his studies, or possess the necessary instinct for selecting the right authorities to whom to trust when dealing with tongues with which he is unacquainted. The more languages he knows thus thoroughly the better, especially if these belong to different classes of speech. Unless the Aryan scholar is acquainted with a Semitic language, his theory of flection is likely to be one-sided and faulty, and unless he have a further knowledge of some agglutinative dialect, his views on the relation between flection and agglutination must be received with a certain amount of distrust. Grammars and dictionaries will not give us that grasp upon the inner structure and spirit of a dialect which is all-important in determining some of the chief problems of speech. They present us only with the external facts of a language: before we can _think_ in it, before we can place ourselves in the mental attitude of its framers and speakers, we must be saturated with it, as it were, and have that knowledge of it which can only come from daily and constant use.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the comparative philologist should not introduce the frame of mind of the specialist into his comparative inquiries. The specialist who takes up comparative philology as a subsidiary pursuit is likely to spoil it in the taking. The minor details of his special subject, whether it be Greek or Sanskrit or Hebrew, will assume an unreal importance in his eyes, and the main phænomena to which his attention ought to be directed will be correspondingly dwarfed. Bopp was the father of comparative philology simply because he was not a specialist in any one of the Aryan languages; had he been a Sanskritist, and nothing else, he would doubtless have produced an excellent Sanskrit grammar, but not the famous text-book of scientific philology. The errors into which he fell have since been corrected by the special students of the various languages he handled so freely: the knowledge he acquired of them was sufficient for the great purpose he had in view, and an exhaustive study of any one of them would merely have consumed the time and energy which were needed for his other work.

We can now see clearly what is the object and scope of the science of language. It has to do with language in all its forms as the significant utterance of society. Where utterance ceases to be significant, the science of language also ceases to investigate it. Beyond the barrier of roots it is unable to pass; other sciences—ethnology, psychology, physiology—must be called in if we wish to know what lies beyond that barrier, what, in short, were the inarticulate utterances and gestures which gave rise to articulate speech. Glottology has to investigate the origin of language so far as it is really language, but no further. By the use of the comparative method, words, forms, sentences, dialects, and languages are classified and traced back to their most primitive form, and the laws which govern their development and relationships determined and explained. In this work of comparison, phonology and sematology ought to go hand in hand, since language consists in the intimate union of sound and thought; but inasmuch as the facts and laws of phonology can be more readily discovered and tested than those of sematology, it is necessary that our linguistic researches should have their starting-point on the phonological side. Inasmuch as language is the reflection of the thought of a community, the history of words and forms, as determined by the application of the laws of glottology, will be also the mental and spiritual history of the community that used them. Like the geologist, therefore, who can reconstruct the material history of the earth and restore the various forms of life that have successively peopled it, the scientific student of language can read the past history of human society in the fossil-records of speech. By tracing the Greek δῆμος to the root δα, “to divide,” he can show that private property in Attica originated in that allotment of land by the commune which still prevails among the Slavs, while not only the existence but even the mode of life and intellectual horizon of the primitive Aryans has been revealed by comparative philology with more certainty and minuteness than could have been done by any chronicle, however perfect. But perhaps the most important of the results obtained by the application of the comparative method to language, has been the light thrown upon the origin and nature of mythology and the history of religion. Two new sciences, those of comparative mythology and comparative religion, have grown up under the shelter of glottology, and form subordinate sciences dependent upon it. In the more immediately practical sphere of education, again, the science of language has lightened the labours of the learner by explaining the reason of the rule while it insists upon the reversal of the old unscientific mode of teaching languages by beginning with the dead ones, and points out that the method of science and of nature alike is to proceed from the known to the unknown. By breaking down the prejudices that have so long maintained our present cumbrous and inaccurate spelling, it is preparing the way for a reform in that direction, with its consequent saving of time and labour, while the construction of an universal language is the aim towards which its students ultimately look.

But meanwhile, though much has been accomplished, much more still remains to be done. Comparative philology and the science of language are not yet a century old, and the problems of speech that still await solution are many and important. The previous chapter will have shown how various are the opinions still held as to the nature of language and its science, while the belief that the exceptional—we might almost say abnormal—Aryan family of speech is the type and rule of all others still unconsciously influences a large amount of philological reasoning. Is the science of language a physical or a historical one? Did roots constitute a spoken language or are they phonetic types which never entered into actual speech? Have isolating languages become agglutinative and agglutinative languages inflectional? Do dialects precede the common language or does the common language precede dialects? Have the languages of the world been all derived from one or two primitive centres or do they point to an infinite diversity of origin? Such are some of the questions which still await an answer, and the answer requires more investigation, more patient observation and induction, and, above all, more labourers in the field of research.