CHAPTER I.

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE.

“If we preserve in our histories of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the physical elements—the names of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Empedocles—we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language—the founders of one of the most useful and most successful branches of philosophy—the first grammarians.”—MAX MÜLLER.

“Speech is silvern, silence is golden,” is the well-known saying of a modern prophet, wearied with the idle utterances of a transition age, and forgetful that the _prophet_, or προφητής, is himself but the “spokesman” of another, and that the era which changed the Hebrew seer into the _Nabi_, or “proclaimer,” brought with it also the beginning of culture and civilization, and the consciousness of a high religious destiny. Far truer was the instinct of the old poet of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient monument of our Aryan literature, written, it may be, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ, when he calls “the Word” one of the highest goddesses “which rushes onward like the wind, which bursts through heaven and earth, and, awe-inspiring to each one that it loves, makes him a Brahman, a poet, and a sage.” The haphazard etymology which saw in the μέροπες ἄνθρωποι of Homer “articulate-speaking men,” must indeed be given up, but we may still picture to ourselves the “winged words” which seemed inspired with the life and divinity of Hermês, or the sacred Muses from whom the Greek singer drew all his genius and power. Language is at once the bond and the creation of society, the symbol and token of the boundary between man and brute.

We must be careful to remember that language includes any kind of instrumentality whereby we communicate our thoughts and feelings to others, and therefore that the deaf-mute who can converse only with the fingers or the lips is as truly gifted with the power of speech as the man who can articulate his words. The latter has a more perfect instrument at his command, but that is all. Indeed, it is quite possible to conceive of a community in which all communications were carried on with the hands alone; to this day savage tribes make a large use of gestures, and we are told that the Grebos of Africa ordinarily indicate the persons and tenses of the verb by this means only. Wherever there is the power of making our thoughts intelligible to another, or even simply the possibility of this power, as in the case of the infant, there we have language, although for ordinary purposes the term may be restricted to spoken or articulate speech. It is in this sense that language will be understood in the following pages.

Now one of the earliest subjects of reflection was the language in which that reflection clothed itself. The power of words was clear even to the barbarian, and yet at the same time it was equally clear that he himself exercised a certain power over them. Wonder, it has been said, is the mother of science, and out of the wonder excited by the great mystery of language came speculations on its nature and its origin. What, it was asked, are those modulations of the voice, those emissions of the breath, which inform others of what is passing in our innermost souls, and without which the most rudimentary form of society would be impossible? Perhaps it was in Babylonia that the first attempt was made to answer the question. Here there was a great mixture of races and languages, and here it was accordingly that the scene of the confusion of tongues was laid. The Tower of Babel, the great temple of the Seven Lights of Borsippa, whose remains we may still see in the ruins of the Birs-i-Nimrúd, was, it was believed, the cause and origin of the diversity of human speech. Men endeavoured to make themselves equal to the gods, and to storm heaven like the giants of Greek mythology, but the winds frustrated their attempts, and heaven itself confounded their speech. Such was the native legend, fragments of which have been brought from the Assyrian library of Assur-bani-pal, or Sardanapalus, and which cannot fail to bring to our minds the familiar history of Genesis.

Now the same library that has given us these fragments has also given us the first beginnings of what we may call comparative philology. The science, the art, and the literature of Babylonia had been the work of an early people who spoke an agglutinative language, and from them it had all been borrowed and perhaps improved upon by the later Semitic settlers in the country. Their language, which for the want of a better name we will call Accadian, had ceased to be spoken before the seventeenth century B.C., but not before the civilization and culture it enshrined had been adopted by a new race, who had to study and learn the dead tongue in which they were preserved, as the scholars of the Middle Ages had to study and learn Latin. Hence came the need of dictionaries, grammars, and reading-books; and the clay tablets of Nineveh accordingly present us not only with interlinear and parallel Assyrian translations of Accadian texts, arranged upon the Hamiltonian method, but also with syllabaries and lexicons, with phrase-books and grammars of the two languages. It is the first attempt ever made to draw up a grammar, and the comparative form the attempt has assumed shows how impossible was even the suggestion of such a thing without the comparison of more than one form of speech. The vocabularies are compiled sometimes on a classificatory principle, sometimes on an alphabetic one, sometimes on the principle of grouping a number of derivations around their common root; and the latter principle enunciates at once the primary doctrine and object of comparative philology—the analysis of language into its simplest elements. With the discovery of roots we may date the possibility and the beginning of linguistic science.

Next in order of time to the grammarians of Babylonia and Assyria came the grammarians of India, whose labours again were called forth by the comparison of different forms of speech. The sacred language of the Veda had already become antiquated and obscure, while the rise and spread of Buddhism had raised more than one popular dialect to the rank of a literary language, and obliged the educated Hindu not only to study his own speech in its earlier and later forms, but to compare it with other more or less related idioms as well. Since Indian philology, however, is intimately connected with the history of the modern science of Language, it will be more convenient to consider it further on.

The problems of language were naturally among the first to present themselves to the activity of the Greek mind. Already the instinct of their wonderful speech, itself the fitting creation and reflex of the national character, had found in the word λόγος an expression of the close relationship that exists between reasoned thought and the words in which it clothes itself; and the question which Greek philosophy sought to answer was the nature of this relationship, and of the language wherein it is embodied. Do words exist, it was asked, _by nature_ (φύσει) or _by convention_ (θέσει); do the sounds which we utter exactly and necessarily represent things as they are in themselves, or are they merely the arbitrary marks and symbols conventionally assigned to the objects we observe and the conceptions we form? This was the question that the greatest of the Greek thinkers attempted to solve; and the controversy it called forth divided Greek philosophy into two camps, and lies at the bottom of all its contributions to linguistic science. It is true that the question was really a philosophic one, and that the advocates of free-will on the one side, and of necessity on the other, naturally saw in speech either the creation and plaything of the human will, or else a power over which man has as little control as over the forces of nature. Important as were the results of this controversy, not only to the philosophy of language, but yet more to the formation of grammar, it was impossible for a _science_ of language to arise out of it: its results were logical rather than linguistic, for science requires the patient _à posteriori_ method of induction, not the _à priori_ method of immature philosophizing, however brilliantly handled. The Greeks had, indeed, grasped a truth which has too often been forgotten in modern times, the truth that language is but the outward embodiment and crystallization of thought; but they overlooked the fact that to discover its nature and its laws we must observe and classify its external phænomena, and not until we have ascertained by this means the conditions under which thought externalizes itself in language, can we get back to that thought itself.

Greek researches into language fall into three chief periods, the period of the præ-Sokratic philosophy, when language in general was the subject of inquiry, the period of the Sophists, when the categories of universal grammar were being distinguished and worked out, and the period of Alexandrine criticism, when the rules of Greek grammar in particular were elaborated. Herakleitus and Demokritus are the representatives of the first period: the one the advocate of the innate and necessary connection between words and the objects they denote, the other of the absolute power possessed by man to invent or change his speech. The dispute, however, was soon shifted from words as they are to words as they once were; since on the one hand it was manifest that the union assumed to exist between words and objects could no longer be pointed out in the majority of instances, and on the other hand that numerous words are merely the later corruptions of earlier forms, so that the invention of even a single word must be pushed back to an age far beyond the oldest experience. Hence grew up the so-called science of _etymology_, a science whose name, it must be confessed, fully justified one of its leading principles which resulted in the derivation of _lucus a non lucendo_, “because the sun does _not_ shine therein.” Ἐτυμο-λογία was “the science of the truth,” the ascertainment of the true origin of words; but in Greek hands its truer designation would have been the “science of falsehood” and guess-work. Its follies have been enshrined in ponderous works like the “Etymologicum Magnum” or the “Onomastikon” of Pollux; and its curious illustrations of the absurdities into which a clever and active intellect will fall when deprived of the guidance of the scientific method of comparison, are scattered broadcast through the writings of Greek thinkers. Two of its rules, for instance, both founded on the assumption of the “natural” origin of words, lay down that the word undergoes the same modifications as the thing it denotes, and that objects may be named from their contraries (κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν); and hence it was easy to derive φιλητής, “a thief,” from ὑφέλεσθαι, “to steal,” by “depriving” the latter word of its first syllable, and to see in _cœlum_, “heaven,” _cœlatum_, “covered,” “because it is open,” or in _fœdus_, “covenant,” _fœdus_, “hateful,” “because there is nothing hateful in it.”[2] After this we need not smile at Plato’s derivation of θεοί, “gods,” from θέειν, “to run,” because the stars were first worshipped, or Aristotle’s assumption that objects are easy of digestion when they are “light” in weight. Dr. Jolly has pointed out that the fact that ἐτυμός is Ionic indicates the origin of the pseudo-science in the Ionic schools of philosophy; it is therefore a remarkable illustration of the “self-sufficient” nature of Greek thought and of Greek contempt for the “barbarian,” that the dialects of Asia Minor, though so closely akin to Greek, should have been utterly disregarded, and the investigations into language consequently left to the vagaries of the fancy without the light of comparison to guide them to the truth. Plato in the “Kratylus” is almost the only Greek who has noticed the resemblance of one of these “barbarous” dialects to his own, and he has only noticed it to draw a wrong conclusion from the fact. Many Greek words, he maintains, were borrowed from abroad; and by way of examples he quotes κύων (the Sanskrit _śwan_, the Latin _canis_, and our _hound_), ὑδώρ (the Sanskrit _udam_, the Latin _unda_, and our _water_), and πῦρ (the Latin _pruna_, the Umbrian _pir_, and our _fire_), as being identical with the names of the same objects in Phrygian. The very fact, however, that Plato has noticed this resemblance shows that the stimulating influence of contact with Persia was still felt, even in the domain of language, when the Greeks found themselves in the presence of an allied and similar civilization, with all its contrasts to their own, and when men like Themistokles found it politic to acquire a fluent knowledge of the Persian tongue. It was not until the Empire of Alexander had overthrown that of Cyrus and Darius and impressed upon the Greek a sovereign contempt for the Asiatic, and an equal belief in his own innate superiority, that any regard for the jargons of the “barbarians” became altogether out of the question. It was then that the masterpieces of early Greek literature came to be the sole objects of study and investigation, and philological research took the form of that one-sided, and therefore erroneous, exposition of the grammar of a single language, which has been the bane of classical philology down to our own time.

The linguistic labours of the age of the Sophists were occasioned by the needs of oratory. When rhetoric became a profitable and all-powerful pursuit, and the end of education was held to be the ability to hold one’s own, whether right or wrong, and confute one’s neighbour, words necessarily came to be regarded as more valuable than things, and the main care and attention of the sophist were bestowed upon the form of his sentences and the style of his argument. Just as language had been approached in the preceding period from a purely metaphysical point of view, and was to be approached in the succeeding period from a logical point of view, so now it was looked at from the side of rhetoric. It was not _etymology_, a knowledge of the “truth,” that was wanted, but a knowledge of the composition of sentences and of the way in which they could best be arranged for the purposes of persuasion. The first outlines of European grammar accordingly go back to this Sophistic age. We find Protagoras criticizing the opening verse of the Iliad, because μῆνις, “wrath,” is used as a feminine, contrary to the sense of the word, or distinguishing the three genders and busying himself with the discovery of the verbal moods, while the lectures of Prodikus were occupied with the analysis and definition of synonyms. Some idea may be formed of the grammatical zeal of the Sophists from the “Clouds” of Aristophanes,[3] where he ridicules the pedantry that would force the artificial rules of grammar upon the usage of living speech.

Plato and Aristotle, the products of the impulse given to thought by that greatest of the Sophists, Sokrates, form the connecting link between the Sophistic and the Alexandrine periods, and renew in the shape required by the progress of philosophy the old contest regarding the nature of language between the followers of Herakleitus and those of Demokritus. In philology as elsewhere, the idealism of Plato stands opposed to the practical realism of his pupil Aristotle. Plato paints language as it ought to be; Aristotle reasons upon it as it is. But in both cases it was not language in general, but the Greek language in particular, that was meant; and owing to this short-sightedness of view and disregard of the comparative method, the theories of each, however suggestive and stimulating, are yet devoid of scientific value and mainly interesting to the historian alone. The problem of Plato’s “Kratylus” is the natural fittingness of words, which finally resolves itself into the question how it happens that a word is understood by the bearer in the same sense as it is intended by the speaker. No answer is given to the question; but the dialogue gives occasion for a complete review of the linguistic opinions prevalent at the time, and the conclusion put into the mouth of Sokrates is that while in actual (Greek) speech no natural and innate connection can be traced between words and things, it were much to be wished that an ideal speech could be created in which this natural connection would exist. In this wish, as Dr. Jolly remarks, Plato shows himself the forerunner of Leibnitz and Bishop Wilkins, the one with his “Lingua characteristica universalis,” and the other with his “Essay towards a real Character and a Philosophical Language.”

Aristotle, as might be expected, will have nothing to do with the theory of the natural origin of speech. He declares himself unequivocally on the side of its opponents, and lays down that language originates through the agreement and convention of men (συνθήκῃ). Words, he holds, have no meaning in themselves; this is put into them by those who utter them, and they then become so many symbols of the objects signified (ὅταν γίνεται σύμβολον). “For the sentence (λόγος), when heard, makes one’s meaning intelligible, not necessarily but accidentally, since it consists of words, and each word is a symbol.”[4] At the same time Aristotle makes no clear distinction between thought and language; _concept_ and _word_ are with him interchangeable terms; and his famous ten categories into which all objects can be classed are as much grammatical as logical, or perhaps more rightly a mixture of both. In his hands the rhetorical gives way to the logical treatment of language, and the sentence is analyzed in the interests of formal logic. As Kant and Hegel observed long ago, the logical system of Aristotle is purely empirical; it is based on the grammar of a single language, and is nothing but an analysis of the mode in which the framers of that language unconsciously thought. To understand and criticize it properly we must bear this fact in mind, and remember that the system cannot be corrected or replaced until comparative philology has taught us to distinguish between the universal and the particular in the grammar of Greek and Aryan. Whatever injury, however, logic may have suffered from having been thus built up upon the idiosyncrasies of the Greek Sentence, Greek grammar gained an equivalent advantage. Besides the ὄνομα or “noun,” and the ῥῆμα or “verb,” Aristotle now added to it the σύνδεσμος or “particle,” and introduced the term πτῶσις or “case,” to denote any kind of flection whatsoever. He also divided nouns into simple and compound, invented for the neuter another name (τὸ μεταξύ) than that given by Protagoras, and starting from the termination of the nominative singular endeavoured to ascertain the rules for denoting a difference of gender.

The work begun by Aristotle was continued by the Stoics, who perfected his grammatical system just as they had perfected his logical system. They separated the ἄρθρον or “article” from the particles, and determined a fifth part of speech, the πανδέκτης or “adverb;” they confined the πτῶσις or “case” to the flections of the noun, and distinguished the four principal cases by names, the Latin translations or mistranslations of which are now so familiar to us; they divided the verb into its tenses, moods, and classes, and in the person of Chrysippus, the adherent of the Stoic school (B.C. 280-206), separated nouns into _appellativa_ and _propria_. But, like Aristotle, they assumed the same laws for both thought and language, and were thus led into difficulties and fallacies which the slightest acquaintance with another language might have prevented. Thus the logical copula was confounded with the substantive verb by which it was expressed in Greece, and false arguments were framed and supported on this assumption. Their opponents, the Epicureans, contented themselves with inquiries into the origin of speech, which had to be explained, like everything else, in accordance with the theory of atoms. The large part, however, played by the action of society in their system gave their theorizing upon the subject an accidental aspect of truth which at first sight is somewhat surprising; and even the well-known lines of Horace (Sat. I. 3. 99, _sq._) contain a more correct representation of the primitive condition of man and the evolution of language than the speculations current upon the matter up to the last few years. Language, it was held, existed φύσει, not θέσει; but the nature which originated speech was not external nature, but the nature of man. The different sounds and utterances whereby the same object is denoted in different languages are due to the varying circumstances in which the speakers find themselves, and are as much determined by their climate and social condition, their constitution and physique, as the lowing of the ox or the bleating of the lamb. Men, indeed, create speech, not however deliberately and with intention (ἐπιστημόνως), but instinctively through the impulse of their nature (φυσικῶς κινούμενοι).[5] We may perhaps trace in these expressions the germs of the theory of the onomatopœic origin of language.

While the Epicureans were speculating on the origin of speech, the grammarians of Alexandria were busying themselves with the elaboration of what the French would call a _grammaire raisonnée_. “Alexandria,” says Dr. Jolly, “was the birthplace of classical philology, a study which has directly raised itself upon the ruins of the old Hellenic culture and spiritual originality.” The intense mental activity and productiveness of Athens had made way for the frigid pedantry and artificial mannerisms of commentators and court-poets; the free national life and small rival states of Greece had been replaced by a semi-oriental despotism and a cosmopolitan centralization; and unable themselves to emulate the great creations of the classic age, the literary coterie of the Alexandrine Museum could do no more than admire and edit them. The very dialect in which the Attic tragedians and historians had composed and written had become strange and foreign, while the language of the Homeric Poems, which it must be remembered were to the Greeks what the Bible is to us, seemed as obscure and obsolete to the Alexandrine, as the tongue of Layamon or Piers Plowman does to the ordinary Englishman. If we add to this the existence of numerous and discordant copies of Homer, we have abundant reason for the growth of that large army of commentators, grammarians, and lexicographers which characterized the schools of Alexandria and laid the foundations of literary criticism. A minute investigation of the grammatical facts of the Greek language was rendered necessary, and a comparison of the older and later forms of the language as well as of its dialects grounded this investigation upon a comparatively secure basis. The metaphysical turn, however, given to the first linguistic inquiries still overshadowed the whole study, and the absurd and misleading “science of etymology” remained to the last the evil genius of Greek philology. The old dispute as to the origin of words now assumed a new form, mainly through the influence of the Stoic and Epicurean systems of philosophy, and the schools of Alexandria were divided into the two contending factions of Analogists and Anomalists. The first, among whom was counted the famous Homeric critic Aristarchus, found in language a strict law of analogy between concept and word, which was wholly denied by the others. It was round this question that Greek philology ranged itself from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D., and out of the controversy it occasioned was formed that Greek grammar which created the scholars of the last four hundred years, and is still so widely taught in our own country. Thus Aristarchus, for instance, in his anxiety to smooth away every irregularity and remove all exceptions to the rules he had formulated, determined that the genitive and dative of Ζεύς should no longer be Διός or Ζῆνος, but Ζεός, and Ζεΐ, and the endeavours of his opponents to upset this piece of pedantry led to the discovery of other similar exceptions to the general rule, and to the complete settlement of this portion of the grammar. Krates of Mallos, the head of the Pergamenian school, stands forward as the chief rival of Aristarchus on the opposite side. In his hands “anomaly” was made the leading principle of language, and general rules of any sort flatly denied, except in so far as they were consecrated by custom. The purism of his opponents, who wished to correct everything which contravened the grammatical laws they had laid down, was thus met by an unqualified defence of the rights of usage—“quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi.” Our own schoolmasters who have introduced an _l_ into _could_ (_coud_), the past tense of _can_, because _should_ from _shall_ has one, or have prefixed a _w_ to _whole_, the twin-brother of _hale_ (Greek καλός), because of the analogy of _wheel_ and _which_, are the fitting successors of the Alexandrine Analogists, and it was unfortunate for both that they had no Aristophanes to transfer them to cloudland, and ridicule them in the light of common sense.

Krates, however, has better claims upon our attention than as leader of the Anomalists. To him we owe the first formal Greek grammar and collection of the grammatical facts obtained by the labours of the Alexandrine critics. That a formal grammar, which implies an enunciation of general rules as well as of the exceptions to them, should have been the work of an Anomalist rather than of an Analogist, may at first sight seem surprising; but we must recollect that the Anomalist did not deny the existence of general rules altogether, but only their universal and unqualified applicability; while the Analogist who sought to produce an artificial uniformity in language instead of accepting the facts of speech as they are, was totally unfitted for composing a practical grammar.[6]

The immediate cause, however, of the grammar in question was really the tardy comparison of Greek with a foreign tongue, the Latin, and the need of a Greek grammar felt by the citizens of Rome. Appius Claudius Cæcus (censor in B.C. 312) had already written upon grammar,[7] and Spurius Carvilius, a writing-master (B.C. 234), had regulated the Latin alphabet, substituting the indispensable _g_ for the useless _z_, and when Krates came to Rome in 159 B.C., as the Ambassador of Attalus, the King of Pergamos, he found a ready audience for his ἀκροάσεις, or “lectures” upon the study of Greek. Almost all that the Romans knew of literary culture and civilization came from the Greeks; their native literature was coarse and insignificant, and their language uncultivated and inflexible. Education at Rome, therefore, meant education upon Greek models and in the Greek language. Boys learned Greek before they learned Latin, and the Greek words with which the plays of Plautus are strewn, as well as their Alexandrine origin, show pretty plainly that a familiarity with the language of Greece was not confined to the literary _salon_ of a Scipio, or the houses of a wealthy aristocracy. Livius Andronicus, the father of Latin literature, was a Greek professor (272 B.C.), and his translation of the “Odyssey” into Latin was doubtless for the use of his pupils;[8] the first history of Rome, that of Fabius Pictor (in 200 B.C.), was written in Greek; and even a popular tribune like Tiberius Gracchus published the Greek speech he had made at Rhodes. In fact, a knowledge of Greek was necessary not only for acquiring the barest amount of culture and education, but even for a proper acquaintance with the Latin language itself. Partly through its stiff and cumbrous immobility, partly through the want of originality in its speakers, Latin literature and Latin oratory were alike impossible without the genial and fructifying influence of the Greek. With Greek teachers and Greek models, a native literature came into existence, and the language was artificially trained to become a suitable instrument for communication between the more polished nations of the ancient world and their Roman masters. It is true that classical Latin was really more or less of a hothouse exotic, interesting therefore rather to the student of literature than to the student of linguistic science; but the attempt to rear and nurture it, to keep it unpolluted by the spoken dialects of Rome or the provinces, and to confine it within the rules and metres of a foreign rhythm made it the seedplot of grammatical questions and philological investigations. The study of grammar was of practical importance to the practical Roman; he applied himself to it with all the energy of his nature, and treated the whole subject in a practical rather than a philosophical way. Julius Cæsar, the type and impersonation of the Roman spirit, found time to compose a work, “De Analogiâ,” and invent the term _ablative_, amid the distractions of political life, and even Cato with all his dogged conservatism, learnt Greek in his old age in order that he might be able to teach it to his son. The zeal with which the deepest problems of grammar were discussed seems strange to us of to-day, but upon the settlement of these problems depended the possibility of making Latin the vehicle of law and oratory, and preventing the Roman world from becoming Greek.

The first school grammar ever written in Europe was the Greek grammar of Dionysius Thrax, a pupil of Aristarchus, which he published at Rome in the time of Pompey. The grammar is still in existence,[9] and its opening sentence, in which grammar is defined as “a practical acquaintance” with the language of literary men, and divided into six parts—accentuation and phonology, explanation of figurative expressions, definition, etymology, general rules of flection, and critical canons[10]—has formed the starting-point of the innumerable school-grammars which have since seen the light. It has also been the cause of much of that absurd etymologizing which the Romans received from the Greeks and handed on to the lexicographers of modern Europe. Not content with transcribing the grotesque etymologies of their Greek teachers, the Latin writers strove to emulate them by still more grotesque etymologies of their own. Lucius Ælius Stilo, of Lanuvium, about 100 B.C. first gave a course of lectures on Latin literature and rhetoric, and one of his pupils, Marcus Terentius Varro, wrote five books, “De Linguâ Latinâ,” which he dedicated to his friend Cicero. The “science” of Latin etymology was now founded, and a fruitful field opened to future explorers. Every word had to be provided with a derivation, and on the received principles of etymology this was no difficult task. By the law of _antiphrasis_, _bellum_ is made the neuter of _bellus_, “because there is _nothing_ beautiful in war;” and _parcus_ is so named because the niggard “spares (_parcere_) nobody.” It has been left to the vagaries of a later day to excel the Romans in this part of their labours. The lawyers tell us that _parliament_ is derived from _parler_, “to speak,” _mentem_, “one’s mind;” Junius[11] that the _soul_ is “the well of life” from the Greek ζάω, “to live,” and the Teutonic _wala_, “well,” while _merry_ comes from μυρίζειν, because the ancients anointed themselves at feasts; and a book entitled “Ereuna,” published as late as the year of grace 1875, would raise the envy of a Latin etymologist. When we find Jupiter (Diespiter) gravely derived in it from the “Celtic” _oyo-meir_, “infinite,” and _peitir_, “a thunderbolt;” _Nemesis_ discovered to be the “Celtic” _neam-aire_, “pitiless,” and _manna man-neam_, “food of heaven”—we may trace the last results of that unhappy disease of “popular etymologizing” which it is the work of comparative philology to cure.[12]

The introduction of Greek grammar into Rome, however, was attended by another evil than the propagation of a false system of etymology. The technical terms of Greek grammar were in many cases misunderstood, and, accordingly, mistranslated. Thus, in the province of phonology, the mutes were divided into the ψιλά (_k_, _t_, _p_), and their corresponding “rough” or aspirated sounds (δασέα), the soft _g_, _d_, and _b_ being placed between the ψιλά and δασέα, and consequently named μέσα, or “middle.” The Romans rendered μέσα by _mediæ_, and δασέα by _aspiratæ_, but ψιλά they mistranslated _tenues_, and the mistranslation still causes confusion in modern treatises on pronunciation. Similarly, _genitivus_, the “genitive” or case of “origin,” is a blundering misrepresentation of the Greek γενική, or case of “the genus,” a wholly different conception; and _accusativus_, “the accusative,” or case “of accusing,” perpetuates the mistake which saw in the Greek αἰτιατική a derivative from αἰτιάομαι, to “blame,” instead of αἰτία, “an object;” while the Greek ἀπαρέμφατος signifies “without a secondary meaning” of tense or person, and not “the indefinite” or “indetermining” as the Latin _infinitivus_ would imply. We still suffer from the errors made in transferring to Rome the grammatical terminology of Alexandria.

The Romans continued to take an interest in questions of grammar and of etymology down to the last. It is true that they confined their inquiries to their own and the Greek language; the descent they claimed from Æneas and the Trojans inspired them with no desire to investigate the dialects of Asia, and even the Etruscan language and literature which lingered on almost to the Christian era at their own doors, were left unregarded by the leading philologists of Rome. In language, as in everything else, the provincial had to adapt himself to the prejudices of his conqueror. Never before or since has the principle of centralization been carried out with greater logical precision. Even Cæsar who found time to discuss grammatical questions in the midst of his campaigns in Gaul, never troubled himself to examine the language of his Gallic adversaries, or to compare the grammatical forms they used with those of Latin.

Passing by the Emperor Claudius, who endeavoured to reform the Roman alphabet, and actually introduced three new letters, we come to Apollonius Dyskolus and his son Herodian, two eminent Alexandrine grammarians of the second century. We possess part of the “Syntax” of the former, who specially devoted himself to this branch of the subject, and expressed himself so briefly and technically (like the grammarians of ancient India) as to gain the name of Dyskolos, “the Difficult.” His son Herodian continued the labours of his father, and in the works of these Græco-Roman grammarians we see the long controversy between the Analogists and the Anomalists finally settled. Analogy is recognized as the principle that underlies language; but in actual speech exceptions occur to every rule, and break through the hard-and-fast lines of artificial pedantry. The Greek and Latin school-grammars of our boyhood are the heritage that has come down to us from this old dispute and its final settlement. Dr. Jolly remarks with justice[13] that the radical fault of these grammatical labours was the confusion between thinking and speaking, between logic and grammar—a confusion which intruded the empirical terminology of formal logic into grammar, and was only dissipated when an investigation of the languages of the East introduced the comparative method into the treatment of speech, and showed that to interpret aright the phænomena of Greek and Latin we must study them in the light of other tongues.

The tradition handed down by Herodian was taken up by Ælius Donatus in the fourth century, and Priscian in the sixth; the former the author of the Latin grammar which dominated the schools of the Middle Ages; the latter of eighteen books on grammar, the most extensive work of the kind we have received from classical antiquity. Priscian flourished at Constantinople during the short revival of the Roman Empire and glory that marked the reign of Justinian; and one of the most noticeable things in his writings is his comparison of Latin with Greek, especially the Æolic dialect. In this he followed Tyrannio or Diokles, the manumitted slave of Cicero’s wife and the author of a treatise “On the Derivation of the Latin Language from the Greek.” Donatus and Priscian were the philological lights of Europe for more than a thousand years, and such lights were little better than darkness. Once, and once only, was an attempt made to break down their monopoly and to introduce oriental learning into Western education. Pope Clement V., at the Council of Vienne in 1311, exhorted the four great Universities of Europe—Paris, Bologna, Salamanca, and Oxford—to establish two Chairs of Hebrew, two of Arabic, and two of Chaldee, in order that their students might be able to dispute successfully with Jews and Mohammedans. About the same time Dante, in his treatise “De Vulgari Eloquentiâ,” compared the dialects of Italy, and selected one which he calls “Illustrious, Cardinal and Courtly,” spoken wherever education and refinement were to be found, and sprung from the brilliant Sicilian court of Frederick II.[14]—a dialect destined to become the language of the “Divina Commedia” and the nursing-mother of the languages and literatures of modern Europe. But elsewhere the “Doctrinale puerorum” of the priest Alexander de Villa Dei, or Villedieu, of Paris, written in leonine verses, was the sole grammar taught and learnt; and the Latin dictionary of Giovanni de Balbis, of Genoa, was the only guide to Latin literature. No wonder that Roger Bacon, in his “Opus Majus,”[15] has to lay down that Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are three separate and independent languages, which must be learned and treated separately and independently, and that “those words only which are derived from Greek and Hebrew ought to be interpreted by those tongues, since those which are purely Latin cannot be explained except by Latin words.” “For,” he goes on to say, “Latin pure and simple is quite different from every other language, and therefore cannot be interpreted from any other.” The most approved scholars and etymologists of his day amused themselves by deriving _amen_ from the Latin _a_, “without,” and the Greek _mene_ (? μείων), “defect,” _parascene_ (_parasceve_) from the Latin _parare_ and _cæna_, and _cælum_ from the hybrid _case-helios_, or “house of the sun” (!), much in the same way that Jacobus de Voragine, the genial author of the “Legenda Aurea,”[16] derives Clemens from “cleos, quod est gloria, et mens, quasi gloriosa mens;” and says of the name Cæcilia, “quasi _cæli lilia_, vel _cæcis via_, vel a _cælo_ et _lya_: vel Cæcilia quasi _cæcitate carens_; vel dicitur a _cælo_ et _leos_ quod est populus.”

But even the older Humanists were not much better. They knelt before the spirit of classical antiquity with a worship at once child-like and unreasoning. Their object was to write and speak Latin correctly—that is to say, in accordance with the usage of certain literary men of Rome, not to discover the grounds on which this usage rested. Switheim declares that it matters as little to know why this or that verb governs a case, as it does to know why _bin_, the Latin _sum_, “governs the nominative, _ich_, _ego_.” “We can say that the verb governs the nominative, because it was once so agreed among the grammarians of antiquity that the verb should govern the nominative _ante se_. If it had been agreed among the ancients that the object of the verb should be in the accusative, the verb would govern the accusative.” The grammatical term “to govern” was, by the way, a legacy bequeathed by the schoolmen; and a very mischievous legacy it was. Priscian does not yet know it, though it is found in Consentius. Unreasoning and unreasonable, however, as the Humanists were in their treatment of grammar, they were outdone by the orthodox who found in the “errors” of the Vulgate—such as _Da mihi bibere_—direct proofs of Divine inspiration, and the power of the Holy Spirit to override the usual rules of grammar. Johannes de Gallandia, for instance, states boldly:—“Pagina divina non vult se subdere legi Grammatices, nec vult illius arte regi.” So, again, Smaragdus writes in reference to the rule laid down by Donatus, that _scalæ_, _scopæ_, _quadrigæ_ must be used in the plural: “We shall not follow him because we know that the Holy Spirit has always (namely, in the Vulgate) employed these words in the singular.”[17]

We have seen that a knowledge of more than one language is an indispensable preliminary to the formation of a grammar of either; we have seen also that it was among the Semites of Babylonia and Assyria that the earliest grammatical essays were first made. The impulse given to grammatical studies by these attempts did not survive the fall of Babylon; and though the Jewish schools in Babylonia and elsewhere were forced to accompany the extinct Hebrew of their sacred books with glosses and commentaries in Aramaic, they produced nothing that can be called with any truth a grammatical work. It was not until the foundation of the School of Edessa, in the sixth century, that the traditions of the scribes of Assur-bani-pal were taken up by their successors in Mesopotamia. The study of Greek for ecclesiastical purposes among the Syrian Christians led to the compilation of a Syrian grammar; and Jacob of Edessa (A.D. 650-700) succeeded in elaborating one which served as a model for all succeeding works. His whole grammar, however, was based on that of the Greeks, and his terminology was either borrowed directly from the Greek, or formed after the analogy of his Greek originals. Jacob, to whom the systematization of the Syriac vowel-points is to be ascribed, was followed by Elias of Nisibis (eleventh century), and John Barzugbi (thirteenth century), who, says M. Renan, “may be regarded as the author of the first complete grammar of the Syriac language.”[18] The Arabs were not slow to imitate the example of their Syrian neighbours. The preservation of the text of the Korân turned their attention to philological studies at an early period; and we may assign the real foundation of Arabic grammar to the end of the seventh century, when Abul-Aswed (who died 688 A.D.) introduced the diacritical points and vowel-signs, and wrote some treatises on several questions of grammar. His labours were continued in the schools of Basra and Kufa, and Sibawaih (770), the oldest grammarian whose works have come down to us, shows us Arabic grammar almost complete. His successors, as M. Renan remarks, did little more than fill out the details of his teaching; and in the fifteenth century, Suyuthi knows of no less than 2,500 grammarians who had made a name in Arabic literature.

With Syriac and Arabic grammars thus formed, and the doctrine of triliteral roots enunciated, all that was wanting was to work out a comparative grammar of the Semitic dialects. Just as the grammarians of Greece and Rome had perceived the connection that existed between the two languages, and in their haphazard and arbitrary fashion had endeavoured to trace the origin of Latin words to Greek sources, so the relationship between the Semitic idioms could not but be detected as soon as serious labours were commenced upon them; and the closeness of this relationship prevented the errors and absurdities into which the classical grammarians were betrayed by their ignorance of other tongues. To the Jews belongs the merit of first formulating what we may term a comparative grammar. The Saboreans and Masoretes in the sixth century did for the Old Testament what the Alexandrine Greeks had done for Homer, the Arabs for the Korân, and the Hindus for the Veda; and in the tenth century a Hebrew grammar was founded under Arabic influence, and with it a comparative grammar of the Semitic languages. The Jews, who had warmly received Mohammedan culture, and even become intermediaries between their Arabic masters and the “infidel” philosophy of Greece, were necessarily bilingual; and the first fruits of this necessity were the grammatical works of the Gaon, Saadia-el-Fayyumi (who died 942). After Saadia came Menahem-ben-Seruk of Tortosa (960), and Dunash-ben-Librât of Fez (970), who composed the first works on Hebrew lexicography, and of whom the latter declares that he “compares the relation of Arabic and Hebrew, counts all the genuine words of Arabic which are found in Hebrew, and points out that Hebrew is pure Arabic.” About the same time Judah Khayyug of Fez gave an exhaustive account of defective roots and the permutation of servile letters, while Jonah ben Gannach of Cordova (in Arabic Abul Walid Mervan-ibn-Janah), in the eleventh century, completed the grammatical labours of his predecessors.

With the decline of Arabic supremacy and the introduction of Neo-Hebrew arose a new school of Hebrew philology, of which the Kimchi of Narbonne (A.D. 1200) are the leading representatives. This school was less comparative than the foregoing, and the rabbinical spirit that prevailed in it, though conducing to minute accuracy, was not favourable to philological progress. It was, however, the instructor of the Christian scholars of the Renaissance, whose zeal for knowledge and learning brought the study of Hebrew and its cognate languages within the circle of European thought. The Reformation, breaking as it did with the mediæval Church, and making its appeal to the Scriptures themselves, made a knowledge of the original language of the Old Testament indispensable. Christian scholars like Reuchlin, the two Buxtorfs, Richard Simon, Ludolf, Schultens, or our own Castell and Pococke, devoted themselves to a study of Semitic philology with the same energy and success as men like the Stephenses, the Scaligers, and the Vosses to a study of classical philology. Lexicons and grammars were compiled, texts were critically examined and edited, and a comparative dictionary of the Semitic languages was brought out. It was inevitable that men who were at once masters of Hebrew and Greek should discover resemblances and coincidences between the two languages. Hebrew grammar was cast into a classical mould, and Latin and Greek words were derived from Hebrew roots. Hebrew, it was argued, was the sacred language which had been spoken by Adam and the patriarchs, since the names of our first parents and their offspring are of Hebrew origin; and it was therefore clear that Hebrew must have been the primæval speech used before the confusion of tongues at Babel, the primitive source from which the manifold dialects of the world have been derived. A new etymological system accordingly sprang up, quite as grotesque in its rules and its results as the old etymological system of Greece and Rome; and dictionaries of Latin and English appeared in which every word was provided with its Hebrew original.[19] Since Hebrew is written from right to left, it was assumed that a Hebrew root could be read the reverse way if a satisfactory etymology was not otherwise forthcoming; and as the profane languages might be expected to retain some reminiscences of their sacred mother, a similar procedure was adopted to connect words in English and the classical tongues with one another, and so _stum_ was proved to come from the Latin _mustum_, and the Latin _forma_ from the Greek μορφή. It was not the only instance in which theological prepossessions have injured the cause of philology.

With Herder and Lessing, however, a new era of thought and philosophy began. The mechanical explanation of the world was superseded by a psychological one; the idea of development took the place of the idea of contract and convention. Herder devoted a special treatise to the “Ideal of Speech,”[20] and a prize offered by the Berlin Academy for the best essay on “the Ideal of a Perfect Language,” was won by Jenisch in 1796. The work of Jenisch bore the ambitious title, “A philosophico-critical Comparison and Estimate of Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe, viz., Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian.” But Jenisch was still under the dominion of the assumption which made the Roman jurist discover his _jus gentium_ in those points in which the laws of different nations agreed; he finds the ideal of a perfect language in the fourteen languages of his title, all deviations from their grammar being characterized as “less perfect formations.” Richness in the vocabulary, expressiveness, clearness, and euphony are the four marks of superiority. The value of Jenisch’s lucubrations, however, may be judged from his statement that the Greek case-endings were probably modelled after those of Hebrew. It needed the genius of Herder to recognize that the language of a people is but the expression of its spiritual life, and to lay down in his “Ideen” (1785) that “in each language the understanding and character of its speakers reflects itself.” A step forward was made by Mahn in his “Representation of Lexicography from every Point of View,” published in 1817. In this (p. 264) he divides the history of speech into three periods corresponding with the periods in the life of the individual—childhood, youth, and age—severally distinguished by memory, imagination, and intellect. The first period is that in which language was formed, the second that in which it was perfected, the third that in which it was made logical.

If language is logical it is evident that the categories of grammar ought to correspond with the categories of logic, and attempts were accordingly made to sketch the outlines of a universal grammar. In 1801 Vater brought out his “Versuch einer allgemeinen Sprachlehre,” with an introduction on the nature and origin of speech, and an appendix on the adaptation of the rules of universal grammar to those of the grammars of individual tongues. But Vater chose “the high _priori_ road;” he assumed that the first men spoke in accordance with the forms of logic, and instead of tracing the history of grammar in the records of living speech, made that alone normal and correct which seemed to himself to be so. This work of Vater’s was followed, three years later, by a translation of De Sacy’s “Axioms of Universal Philology,” and in 1805 by a “Lehrbuch allgemeiner Grammatik.” Comparative grammar is defined as a setting side by side of the forms of different languages for the sake of reaching that which is “common” to them; but this definition is only scientific in appearance; what is “common” turns out to be not the original forms of a parent-speech, but the forms which a philosopher of the eighteenth century believed to lie at the bottom of “universal grammar.”

This idea of a universal grammar was due partly to the influence of an age which believed the ultimate analyses of logic to represent the thoughts of primitive man, partly to the unmethodical comparison of a variety of languages, some ancient, some modern, and some as unrelated to one another as Greek and Hebrew. But it was also in some measure the result of a revived study of the old Greek theories about language. Our countryman James Harris led the way with his “Hermes, or a Philosophical Enquiry concerning Universal Grammar” (1765). The work was an important one, for it not only stimulated an interest in linguistic studies, but also recalled attention to the labours of those who had built up the framework of our school grammars. Harris was succeeded by Horne Tooke, whose “Diversions of Purley,” however imperfect and erroneous from the point of view of modern scientific philology, threw a charm over what had hitherto seemed repulsive inquiries into the words and forms of speech, and laid down the axiom that we must first investigate the older forms of a language before we can determine the origin and nature of their later equivalents. But Horne Tooke’s work was composed in the interests of a philosophical theory, and its keynote is struck in the assertion that _truth_ is that which a man _troweth_. Things are but the reflection of words, and words are what men deliberately make them. Grammar is no organic growth, but the mechanical invention of mankind. And just as the first men framed it in ignorance and imperfection, so the philosophers of the eighteenth century could reframe it according to the requirements of formal logic. It was the old mistake of the Greek Analogists over again, only with the difference that they thought of the grammar of a single language alone, whereas the more ambitious philologists of the “Aufklärung” aimed at producing a grammar which would be applicable to all tongues.

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.

Steinthal is the modern representative of the school of W. von Humboldt. Language, he holds, is an activity, an ἐνέργεια, everlastingly “becoming.” It has “broken forth” necessarily from the human mind when the conditions for its production were present, and in order, therefore, to discover the origin and nature of language, we must know the mental condition which preceded its creation. It originated through the unconscious action of psychological laws, without being willed into existence. The same instinctive laws still operate when a child is learning to speak: the learning is not a conscious effort, and in the very act of learning speech is being created anew. But these laws will only operate in a community, the first condition for the “birth” of language being that men should be united together in a common society. Hence the need of a psychological ethnology which should deal with the psychological phænomena, not of the individual, but of the race. This alone will enable us to penetrate to that “inner form of language” which Humboldt failed to recognize, but which constitutes language in a far more real sense than phonology can ever do. This inner form of language is neither more nor less than “apperception,” or a perception of the relations between allied apprehensions, and is also described by Lazarus as a “condensation of thought.”

Steinthal’s writings have proved as suggestive to other scholars as those of Humboldt, but their effect is marred by a want of clearness, as well as by an exaggerated use of the _à priori_ method. In opposing the tendency to make phonology synonymous with the science of language, Steinthal goes much too far on the opposite side. Instead of using psychology to control the conclusions of comparative philology, he deduces philological conclusions from assumed psychological facts. Not psychology, but comparative philology, can lead us to the first beginnings of language, and raise the veil that covers its origin. The error, however, which lies at the bottom of Steinthal’s reasonings is, as in the case of Heyse, the ambiguous use of the term language. Speaking, but not language, may be described as an activity. So, too, the faculty of speech may be said to be instinctive, which language certainly cannot be. To assert that a child learns to speak without conscious effort depends again upon an ambiguous use of the word conscious: as a matter of fact the child learns to speak in much the same way as the adult learns a foreign language. Nor is it more than a questionable metaphor to speak of language as “breaking forth” or being “born.” Primitive man framed his earliest speech with labour and difficulty; no doubt certain mental and physical conditions were pre-supposed by the process, but no amount of psychological, even when conjoined with physiological, study will tell us what these were: in order to discover them we must question the records of speech itself. Steinthal has been misled, like his predecessors, by a false conception of the roots of language: he has pictured them to himself as so many mental germs thrown off spontaneously by the mind, and forthwith forming a language; and since these germs have a verbal signification in the Aryan family of speech, he has further identified them with the concepts of the mind. But roots are not words, and words are not concepts.

Opposed to Steinthal is the school which groups the science of language with the physical sciences, and of which Schleicher, with his modern follower, Hovelacque, may be considered the representative. It may be traced back to Bopp and Grimm, the one with his microscopic analysis of the suffixes and belief in the mechanical origin of inflection out of a previous composition of independent words, and the other with his engrossing regard for phonology and adherence to Bopp’s theory of a primitive language of roots. Jacob Grimm’s views may be best gathered from his treatise “Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache” (1851).[36] In this he begins by comparing the science of language with the investigation of natural history, the attempt to discover the origin of speech being analogous to that of discovering the laws of the production of animals or the growth of plants. Like Goethe, Grimm inclines to believe that mankind started from several separate pairs: at all events, the distinction of gender in the noun implies the influence of the female sex. Language has passed through three different stages, the last being the analytic, the middle the inflectional, and the earliest that of the determination and composition of monosyllabic roots. It is a purely human work, “emanating immediately from human thought,” and, as such, the key to all human history. The first words, which are identified with Aryan roots, were invented by a sort of “wonderful instinct.” The several vowels and consonants have each a particular force and significancy, _l_, for instance, expressing softness, _r_ roughness, and in settling what vowel or consonant should be taken to denote some special verbal idea, the “inventor” of speech had for the most part to consult his own “arbitrary choice.” Language, in short, is a human invention, determined by the natural significance of different articulate sounds; its growth means the composition and decay of these various sounds. In order to discover what it is, we have only to investigate the history of this composition and decay—that is, the nature and history of phonology. It is no wonder, therefore, that Grimm started by comparing the comparative philologist to the student of natural history, and imagined that the phænomena of all human speech could be learned from the examination of the Aryan family. It is needless to point out the unverified assumption which underlies the notion that each articulate sound has a particular significancy, or the inconsistency of this view with the admission of human volition in the first invention of verbs. Grimm’s attempt to discover the origin of language was a failure; it amounted to stating that roots have a particular meaning because that meaning is “natural” to them, and where this tautological explanation seemed insufficient, to introducing human caprice. But human caprice in the case of the origin of language stands on the same footing as the old theory of a social contract. It was all very well for one primæval man to determine that a particular sound should represent a particular verbal notion, but how was he to communicate the fact to his neighbours?

Grimm, however, merely prepared the way for Schleicher. In the three works in which he most clearly sets forth his views on the nature and origin of language,[37] Schleicher affirms that language is a natural organism possessed of a separate existence, and as little subject to the will of the individual as the power of changing its song to the will of the nightingale. The growth and decay of language is in accordance with fixed immutable laws. Its existence as an organism is due to its being the audible manifestation or symptom of certain material relations in the constitution of the brain and vocal organs, and is consequently determined solely by those external conditions of climate, food, inherited instincts, and the like, which influence our nervous and muscular system. History and the science of language have nothing to do with one another. Like the phænomena of chemistry or physiology, the phænomena of language must be regarded as so many material facts which can only be the subject-matter of a physical science. The science of language, in short, is neither more nor less than phonology; the signification of words is either incapable of scientific treatment, or else, like their pronunciation, a mere result of determinable nervous action. The language we speak is conditioned by our bodily organization and antecedents. An European can only become a real master of Chinese by ceasing to be an European and becoming, mentally and physically, a Chinaman. Language, being in no way subject to human volition, follows its own necessary laws of growth and development. The inflectional tongues have grown out of the agglutinative, the agglutinative out of the isolating, and the isolating are to be identified with that primæval language of roots which is reached by analysis in the Aryan group. The acquisition of this root-language created man; the primates, who were less favoured by circumstances than their brethren, and consequently did not develop speech, fell back into the condition of anthropoid apes. Hence the importance of the science of language for the Darwinian theory. Not only do we see language developing by slow degrees from the simple to the complex by the aid of natural selection, but it is through language alone that man is separated from the brute; so that before the beginning of language—a beginning which linguistic science can demonstrate with certainty—man was in no way distinguishable from the other primates. Language thus becomes the most important, it may be said the sole, test of race and lineage. The Ethiopian can change his skin sooner than his mother-tongue. The languages of the world cannot be carried back to a single source. There are at least as many original languages as existing families of speech. The resemblances detected between them are due to geographical position; the nearer they were to one another at the outset, the more the speakers were subjected to the same external influences, the greater will be their similarity. A time comes when the creation of languages ceases, and is replaced by the entrance of a race into history. It is before this period, therefore, that the external influences, the geographical conditions, will have to act.

Schleicher’s views, it will be seen, are based on the false assumption that language is an actual entity existing apart from the minds and the mouths of its speakers. In the course of his argument he found himself forced to adopt a position somewhat inconsistent with this assumption. If language is a symptom of the brain and vocal organs, it can hardly be described as an independent organism. In so far as phonology is concerned,—that part of language, namely, which depends on the vocal organs,—the physiological laws which determine it can be ascertained in the same way and with the same certainty as the other laws of physiology; but mere phonetic sounds do not become language until they embody a signification; and though it may be quite true that every act of thought is preceded by a change in the molecules of the brain, yet this change is altogether unknown to us, and our only way of discovering the laws and principles of language is by questioning language itself, not by investigating the alterations undergone by the material of the brain. The morphologic facts of language must be studied in the same way as the facts of sociology, of psychology, or of any other science that has to do with the mind. The science of language, taken as a whole, cannot be counted among the physical sciences. To identify it with phonology is to identify the whole with its part. Unless we treat language historically, its study becomes little more than a dry enumeration of the several languages of the globe and their distinctive peculiarities. Not being an independent entity, it cannot follow necessary laws of its own. The laws of its life and growth are really the laws which govern the action of society in a particular direction. To speak of the impossibility of thoroughly mastering a foreign language is absurd. The same difficulty a member of one community finds in transforming himself into a member of another community recurs in the case of language, but the fact that an English child born in India will speak Hindustani as his native tongue, is sufficient to show that the power of speaking a special language does not depend on a special organization and ancestry. Language is the creation of society. An individual speaks a certain language because he belongs to a certain society. As we shall see hereafter, language is no test of race; only of social contact. As for the primæval root-language, we have no proof that it ever existed, and to confound it with a modern isolating language is simply erroneous. Equally unproved is the belief that isolating dialects develop into agglutinative, and agglutinative into inflectional. At all events, the continued existence of isolating tongues like the Chinese, or of agglutinative tongues like the Magyár and Turkish, shows that the development is not a _necessary_ one. Not less difficult to prove is the fancy that there are two periods in the life of speech—one in which men are giving themselves up to the production of language, the other when they are creating history. There is merely an analogy between the action of natural selection in language and natural selection in the organic world. The science of language can tell us nothing of the descent of man. Man, it is true, is man in virtue of language; but, on the other hand, he must have been man to create language.

Bréal, the leading French philologist, gave at one time a qualified approval to the essential part of Schleicher’s theories, and their chief advocate at present is another French scholar, Abel Hovelacque. He has availed himself of Broca’s investigations, according to which the organ of language must be placed in the left (more rarely the right) cerebral hemisphere in the posterior half of the third frontal convolution. Hovelacque’s work on the science of language[38] exhibits the defects of Schleicher’s theory of language, as it contains little more than a catalogue of the various families of speech with their distinguishing characteristics. The physical theory of language allows for little more than what may be called a natural history treatment of it; the action of emphasis and analogy, of phonetic decay and dialectic growth, and all the other questions involved in a morphologic and historical treatment of speech are necessarily ignored. Faidherbe, another French follower of Schleicher, endeavours to bridge over the gulf between man and the ape by pointing on the one side to the inarticulate clicks of the Bushman, and on the other to the six different sounds uttered by the _cebus azaræ_ of Paraguay when excited, which arouse corresponding emotions in other members of the same species.[39] Bleek[40] with Häckel’s help had already traced the utterances of speech to the cries of the anthropoid apes, and laid down that articulate language is distinguished from inarticulate by being broken up and mobilized. The germ of the suggestion was given by Steinthal, who first pointed out that language approaches its ideal the more analytic it is; sounds, like ideas, become articulate when they cease to be indefinite and indistinct. Bleek holds that the imitation of instinctive sounds made by others to express certain emotions first reminded the earliest men of the same feelings in themselves which had prompted them to the same kinds of utterance, and so led them to compare and distinguish the feeling and its vocal sign, the outward utterance and the inward signification. Language is thus of interjectional origin, helped by the imitative instinct, and language in the course of its development created and moulded thought.

Like Bréal, Max Müller inclines to regard the science of language as a physical rather than as a historical one, and would compare it with geology so far as its method is concerned. He, too, holds that language is the creator of conceptual thought; without the word, without the bond or memorandum which is to keep our individual impressions together, a general idea, and consequently reasoned thought, would have been impossible. Apart from inherited instincts, the deaf-mute, like the infant, has only the capability for thought so long as he is unprovided with a language of some sort. No theory, whether onomatopœic or interjectional or otherwise, which has attempted to explain the origin of language has succeeded in its task; for language is environed on all sides by the barrier of roots, and in roots alone we must seek its origin. How these roots may themselves have originated we do not know; probably onomatopœia and the reflex action of sounds excited by a common action had much to do with it; but the science of human speech is concerned only with the question of the origin of language, not with that of the origin of roots. The roots, however, once constituted a real language which may be compared with the Chinese of to-day, and which in certain instances passed through an agglutinative into an inflectional stage of development. The roots were, for the most part, not monosyllabic; whether there was one common stock of roots at the beginning, or an indefinite number of stocks, we have no means of determining. What we know is that dialects precede languages, that out of the many comes the one, and that in the drifting desert of human speech, only three or four families, like the Aryan, the Semitic, or the Ugro-Altaic, have been able to establish themselves. At the bottom of Max Müller’s theory of language seems to lie the philosophic postulate that the universal precedes the particular; the roots of language are so many “phonetic types,” so many universals, out of which the manifold forms and words of living speech have been developed. They constitute the background of those concepts whereon the structure of thought has been reared. With the mythopœic epoch of speech all was changed. Then the particular came to precede and create the universal, and out of individual words which had lost their original meaning were built up the myths of Greece and Rome. In each case the process was an unconscious one; the will of the single man can no more change the tendencies and growth of language than it can change the force of the winds. Max Müller thus stands midway between Schleicher and Steinthal.

Side by side with the school of Schleicher there has sprung from the doctrines of Bopp what may be termed the common-sense school of philologists. As perhaps is natural, it is mainly in practical America and England that the school has found its adherents, among whom Whitney may be considered its most prominent representative. He states the theories (as opposed to the method and philological facts) of Bopp in their clearest and most extreme form, and does not shrink from carrying them out to their logical conclusions. Thus it is affirmed that the first men spoke in monosyllabic roots, which by means of composition passed into an agglutinative form of speech, and that again, in a similar way, into inflection. All flection may be analyzed into a preceding agglutination, and all agglutination into a preceding juxtaposition of roots, the latter being both predicative and pronominal. Whitney holds that language is an institution like government, and that it is absolutely dependent on the human will, determined only by the necessities of society. The phonetic forms and meanings of words are assigned to them by the conscious or unconscious action of a community. Language is, in all strictness, a human invention, in which onomatopœia probably played a large part. Its science consequently will be a historical one. Thought is prior to language; language therefore did not create thought, nor can it be treated as a separate organism existing apart from its speakers. The origin of language is explained very simply by the need of intercommunication between those who first used it, and since it is always the expression and sign of thought, we may call them, with perfect accuracy, its inventors. Just as thought which is universal precedes language, so a single parent-speech precedes dialects.

Whitney’s views, however, require too many still unproved assumptions to be received as ascertained truths; the existence of a parent-speech, for instance, being as hypothetical as the transition of one form of speech into another. Too little regard also is paid to the physiological side of language, that side which connects it with the physical sciences; while too much influence is assigned to the human will in its formation. It cannot with any real strictness be termed an institution, because an institution has often been founded or changed by an individual, and over language the individual has no such power. Whitney attributes too much design, too much volition, to the formation of speech; the need of intercommunication alone will not explain its origin, since we may ask, How did this need arise, and how were the means of supplying it communicated? However much language may now be defined as the expression of thought, it was not so at first, when conceptual thought was made possible only by the help of language; and even now language is rather the embodiment, however imperfect, than the sign of thought. The stress, moreover, laid upon the element of volition in the production of speech is inconsistent with the idea that mere juxtaposition and phonetic decay could have effected that change in the way of viewing things and their relations which is involved in the transition from one form of speech to the other.

The problem of the origin of language was taken up from a wholly different point of view by Lazarus Geiger.[41] He traced it to the instinct of imitation so deeply implanted in the nature of man. The expression of feeling, of pain and pleasure, of anger and love was indicated partly by corresponding cries, partly by the muscular movements of the face, which might or might not accompany them. The imitation of these movements on the part of a second person caused a particular gesture and the cry that accompanied it to be associated with the idea of passion, pleasure, or pain that had given rise to it. Gradually the gesture was merged in the cry, and the cry was changed into a root or word. Each root was, therefore, at the outset, an embodiment and symbol of an action. Hence it is that the roots to which language can be traced back are all verbal, all expressive of movement and action. Since the publication of Geiger’s book, the whole subject of the “Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals” has been elaborately worked out by Mr. Darwin in a special work, while Benfey has independently pointed out how large an influence the physical accessories of speech must have originally had in putting sense and significancy into the sounds associated with them.[42] Looks, gestures, and the modulation of the voice are common to man and the lower animals, but whereas the import of looks and the modulation of the voice agrees all over the world, that of gestures does so only in part. How, then, could gestures have the same unambiguous meaning for others which Geiger’s theory would demand? The answer is given by Ludwig Noiré, who takes up and completes the theory of his master. The weak point in the latter is that it makes language, which is essentially a social product, the creation of the individual. Noiré, in a volume at once singularly lucid and suggestive,[43] successfully meets the difficulty. He recalls the rhythmical cries or sounds which a body of men will make when engaged in a common work, and which seem the product of a common impulse. We are all familiar with the cries of sailors when hauling a rope or pulling the oar; with the shout of the Eastern vintagers as they beat time in the wine-press; or with the yell of savages when they attack a foe. In such cries and shouts as these Noiré would discover the beginnings of speech. They seemed called forth by the work in which men were engaged for a common purpose, and so became to them the expression and symbol of it. Once established as intelligible symbols, they constituted those roots which are at once the earliest form of language and the germs out of which all future language has grown. Hence it is that roots denote actions and not objects; hence, too, the fact that the sense of sight must be regarded as the first stepping-stone to speech. Like Geiger, Noiré is a philosopher rather than a philologist, and his explanation of Aryan roots and their connection with one another frequently contravenes the laws of scientific etymology. Nor can his identification of roots and words be admitted, or the actual existence at any time of the hypothetical roots of the Aryan tongues. But his theory doubtless explains the origin of much that is in speech, though it does not explain everything. Onomatopœia is not excluded from sharing in the creation of language, nor can we refuse to recognize the interjectional source of certain roots and words. But even if it will not solve the whole problem, Noiré’s theory clears up the origin of that part of speech which has hitherto appeared hardest to explain. Like the song of the birds, the language of man, too, is instinctive and necessary, called forth by a sense of life and energy, by a common participation in a common work.

Outside the school of Bopp stands a group of scholars of whom the best known are Scherer, Westphal, and Ludwig. They agree in rejecting Bopp’s analysis of Aryan grammar and his derivation of flection from a previous agglutination. Grammatical analysis has doubtless been pushed much too far both by Bopp and by his pupils, and the protest raised against it, although needlessly indiscriminating, has done considerable good. Westphal has recourse to the old trappings of pre-scientific philology, pleonastic letters, apocope, and so forth, and lays down common “logical categories” of flection for both the Aryan and the Semitic families.[44] He defines language as “the embodiment of the content of the human consciousness,” and holds that its object is to reduce the individualism of nature to a unity of conception. What is given as separate and individual is unified by thought and language, and the development of language is in accordance with this process of unification. The process, or “movement,” of consciousness finds its expression in the corresponding movement of speech; just as thought sums up the individual parts of any perception under a single concept, so language sums up the individual parts of phonetic utterance under the sentence. The result of this movement is the evolution of the verb and the completion of organized speech. Sound and concept are brought together by the common element of “movement,” a curious return to the κίνησις of Aristotle. It is evident, however, that Westphal rather restates the phænomena of language in metaphysical language than really explains them, while his entire rejection of Bopp’s method and results makes criticism difficult.

Ludwig, like Westphal, rejects the current theory of flection, but substitutes for it another which can not only be supported by facts, but is also not inconsistent with the method founded by Bopp. Flection, he believes, is the result not of agglutination, but of adaptation, certain unmeaning terminations of existing words being selected to express new grammatical relations when they first dawned upon the mind.[45] Ludwig’s view seems to have met with partial acceptation among some of the younger French philologists, and it is supported by Bergaigne’s researches into the nature of the case-suffixes.[46] The analysis of the latter has always been a stumbling-block in the way of the current theory; Bergaigne has made it clear that they were either the terminations of abstract nouns or else suffixes which have been adapted in different words to the expression of very different meanings. On the other hand, Ludwig’s theory fails when applied to the verb, and we still need an explanation of the manner in which the same select number of meaningless terminations came to be attached to so large a variety of words. But the advocates of the agglutination hypothesis have the same difficulty to contend against when they deal with the stem-suffixes.

In pursuance of Bopp’s method, but independently of the distinctive theories of his school, Waitz, the anthropologist, has propounded a new theory of language.[47] As we do not think in words, but in sentences, and as language is the expression and embodiment of thought, it is clear that the unit of language must be the sentence and not the word. The words which compose a sentence are related to one another in the same way as the several elements of an idea, or of an action as reproduced in thought, and can only be decomposed and separated by conscious analysis. Consequently the incorporating languages of America, in which an individual action is represented by a single sentence pronounced as one word, are a survival of the primitive condition of language everywhere. It is only gradually that the different parts of speech are distinguished in the sentence, and words formed by breaking up its co-ordinated elements into separate and independent wholes. Originally words could as little be used alone and without relation as our own suffixes _ly_ or _ness_. The agglutinative tongues in which the subordinate parts of a sentence are brought into duly dependent relation to the principal concept are more highly advanced than the inflectional, the “fundamental idea of which is that the principal and the subordinate elements of thought (_Vorstellung_) remain independent and separate, and never coalesce into a single word.” This principle of flection, however, can never be logically carried out, since the relations of the central idea expressed by the suffixes are themselves a kind of subordinate conception; if _amatis_ is right where the personal pronoun is treated as a suffix, then _amator bonus_, where the attribute _bonus_ is regarded as a subordinate, and therefore separate, conception, must be wrong. An isolating language like the Chinese stands on the highest level of development, since here the sentence has been thoroughly analyzed and each member of it rendered clear and distinct, their relations to one another being determined by position alone. Chinese therefore has given concrete expression in language to the philosophic analysis of ideas. Waitz’s view would harmonize with the antiquity and civilization of Chinese much better than the ordinary one, as well as with its resemblance to English and other modern analytical languages; and it is to be noticed that Steinthal, when speaking of Chinese, describes it as a language in which the real words are the sentences or groups of subordinated vocables. Waitz’s theory of speech is the theory of an anthropologist who, as the student of the master-science, is better able to decide upon the origin of language than the comparative philologist with whom the existence of language has to be assumed. No science can of itself discover the genesis of its subject-matter. Friedrich Müller attaches himself to Waitz when he says:[48] “We disagree with Schleicher and his school in this one point, that the individual independent word is not the unity for us that it is for him, but rather the sentence—the shortest expression of thought.” As he goes on to observe, only the context—that is, the whole sentence—can determine whether _musas_, for example, is to be taken as the accusative plural of a noun or, like _amas_, the second person singular of a verb.

Philological opinion is therefore seen to be still divided upon certain points. But such division of opinion is a healthy sign of life and progress in the new science. It is only by the conflict and discussion of theories that truth can finally be reached, and the many controversies excited by the science of language show how broadly and deeply the foundations of the science are being laid. On the phonological side the progress has been greatest and most certain; morphology and the investigation of roots still lag behind; comparative syntax is but beginning to be handled; and sematology, the science of meanings, has hardly been touched. But the method inaugurated by Bopp remains unshaken, the main conclusions he arrived at hold their ground, and the existence of the Aryan family of speech, with all its consequences, is one of the facts permanently acquired for science. True, there are many questions still to be settled. It is still disputed whether the science of language is a historical or a physical one; whether language is an independent organism obeying fixed and necessary laws of its own or an “institution” controllable by the will of man; whether phonology is to exclude all other departments of the science when the nature of the latter is discussed; whether roots ever constituted a real language or are merely the ultimate elements into which words may be decomposed; whether the flectional stage of language springs from the agglutinative, and this again from the isolating; whether the languages of the world are the selected residuum of infinite attempts at speech or have flowed from one or two common sources; whether dialects precede languages or languages dialects; whether conceptual thought has created language or language has created conceptual thought; whether, finally, the word or the sentence is the true unit of speech. But with all this diversity of opinion there is a yet greater unanimity. There is no scientific philologist who doubts the indispensable value of phonology and the absolute strictness of its laws; who questions the axiom that roots are the ultimate elements of articulate speech, the barrier between man and brute, and that no etymology is worth anything which does not repose upon them; who would compare the words of one family of speech with the words of another in the easy-going fashion of a præ-scientific age; or who would shut his eyes to the light already shed on the history of the human mind and the riddle of mythology by the study of the records of speech. Language is the reflexion of the thoughts and beliefs of communities from their earliest days; and by tracing its changes and its fortunes, by discovering the origin and history of words and their meanings, we can read those thoughts and beliefs with greater certainty and minuteness than had they been traced by the pen of the historian, or even if

“Supera bellum Thebanum et funera Troiæ ... alias alii quoque res cecinere poetæ.”