Lectures on the Science of Language

Dedication Preface. Lecture I. The Science Of Language One Of The Physical Sciences. Lecture II. The Growth Of Language In Contradistinction To The History Of Language. Lecture...

If, therefore, the science of language gives us an insight into that which, by common consent, distinguishes man from all other living beings; if it establishes a frontier betwe...

The first objection which was sure to be raised on the part of such sciences as botany, geology, or physiology is this:—Language is the work of man; it was invented by man as a...

Now consider the immense difference—I do not mean in sound, but in character—between two such words as the Chinese _eúl-shĭ_, two-ten, or twenty, and those mere cripples of word...

Let us now look again at what is commonly called the history, but what ought to be called, the natural growth, of language, and we shall easily see that it consists chiefly in t...

Nay, it might be shown, that, if strictly defined, the science of language can declare itself completely independent of history. If we speak of the language of England, we ought...

As far as we can tell, the barbarians seem to have possessed a greater facility for acquiring languages than either Greeks or Romans. Soon after the Macedonian conquest, we find...

I have dwelt at some length on the changes in the intellectual atmosphere of Rome at the end of the Punic wars, and I have endeavored to show how completely it was impregnated w...

Plato, indeed, in his Cratylus (c. 36), throws out a hint that the Greeks might have received their own words from the barbarians, the barbarians being older than the Greeks. Bu...

If an empress rides a hobby, there are many ready to help her. Not only were all Russian ambassadors instructed to collect materials; not only did German professors(133) supply...

A few years later (1795) he had arrived at more definite views on the relation of Sanskrit to Greek; and he writes,(163) “Mr. Wilkins has proved to my conviction such a resembla...

It might be supposed, however, that such languages, though differing in their grammatical articulation, would yet evince their common origin by the identity of their radicals or...

The earliest fragments of Scandinavian speech are preserved in the two _Eddas_, the elder or poetical Edda, containing old mythic poems, the younger or Snorri’s Edda giving an a...

This name of Oromazes is important; for Oromazes is clearly meant for _Ormuzd_, the god of the Zoroastrians. The name of this god, as read in the inscriptions of Darius and Xerx...

If the explanation just given of some of the cases in Greek and Latin should seem too artificial or too forced, we have only to think of French in order to see exactly the same...

Now, in this manner, the whole, or nearly the whole, grammatical framework of the Aryan or Indo-European languages has been traced back to original independent words, and even t...

Horne Tooke, however, though he saw rightly what road should be followed to track the origin of grammatical terminations, was himself without the means to reach his journey’s en...

It is clear, however, that in addition to these predicative roots, we want another class of radical elements to enable us to account for the full growth of language. With the 40...

Other languages which are supposed to belong to the Semitic family are the _Berber_ dialects of Northern Africa, spoken on the coast from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean before the...

The name of Tatar soon became the terror of Asia and Europe, and it was applied promiscuously to all the nomadic warriors whom Asia then poured forth over Europe. Originally Tat...

We need not inquire as yet into the origin of the _di_, added to form the imperfect; but it should be stated that in the first person plural of the imperfect a various reading o...

If you consider the character of our morphological classification, you will see that this classification, differing thereby from the genealogical, must be applicable to all lang...

The real object of my Essay was therefore a defensive one. It was to show how rash it was to speak of different independent beginnings in the history of human speech, before a s...

For this purpose it will be best to examine the opinions of those who approached our problem from another point; who, instead of looking for outward and palpable signs of differ...

Some philosophers, among whom I may mention Locke, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dr. Brown, and with some qualification Dugald Stewart, maintain that all terms, as at first employed, a...

With the process of elimination, or natural selection, the historical element enters into the science of language. However primitive the Chinese may be as compared with terminat...

Changes, historical, affecting every variety of language. 44. rapid changes in the languages of savage tribes, 44. words or senses obsolete in English since 1611, 45. smaller ch...

Latin, what is meant by, 67. changes in, according to Polybius, 67. the old Salian poems, 67. provincialisms of Cicero, 67. stagnation of Latin when it became the language of ci...

13 Dr. Whewell classes the science of language as one of the palaitiological sciences; but he makes a distinction between palaitiological sciences treating of material things, f...

106 Herodotus (vii. 94, 509) gives Pelasgi as the old name of the Æolians and of the Ionians in the Peloponnesus and the islands. Nevertheless he argues (i. 57), from the dialec...

157 Sidharubam seu Grammatica Samscrdamica, cui accedit dissertatio historico-critica in linguam Samscrdamicam, vulgo Samscret dictam, in qua hujus linguæ existentia, origo, præ...

248 Though I state these views on the authority of M. Pictet, I think it right to add the following note which an eminent Irish scholar has had the kindness to send me:—“The ord...

The cock crows kiao kiao in Chinese, dchor dchor in Mandshu. The wild goose cries kao kao in Chinese, kôr kor in Mandshu. The wind and rain sound siao siao in Chinese, chor chor...