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.”