BEGINNING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY
§ 1. Introduction. Sanskrit. § 2. Friedrich von Schlegel. § 3. Rasmus
Rask. § 4. Jacob Grimm. § 5. The Sound Shift. § 6. Franz Bopp. § 7.
Bopp continued. § 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt. § 9. Grimm once more.
II.--§ 1. Introduction. Sanskrit.
The nineteenth century witnessed an enormous growth and development
of the science of language, which in some respects came to present
features totally unknown to previous centuries. The horizon was
widened; more and more languages were described, studied and examined,
many of them for their own sake, as they had no important literature.
Everywhere a deeper insight was gained into the structures even of
such languages as had been for centuries objects of study; a more
comprehensive and more incisive classification of languages was
obtained with a deeper understanding of their mutual relationships,
and at the same time linguistic forms were not only described and
analysed, but also explained, their genesis being traced as far back
as historical evidence allowed, if not sometimes further. Instead of
contenting itself with stating when and where a form existed and how
it looked and was employed, linguistic science now also began to ask
why it had taken that definite shape, and thus passed from a purely
descriptive to an explanatory science.
The chief innovation of the beginning of the nineteenth century was
the historical point of view. On the whole, it must be said that
it was reserved for that century to apply the notion of history to
other things than wars and the vicissitudes of dynasties, and thus to
discover the idea of development or evolution as pervading the whole
universe. This brought about a vast change in the science of language,
as in other sciences. Instead of looking at such a language as Latin
as one fixed point, and instead of aiming at fixing another language,
such as French, in one classical form, the new science viewed both as
being in constant flux, as growing, as moving, as continually changing.
It cried aloud like Heraclitus “Pánta reî,” and like Galileo “Eppur si
muove.” And lo! the better this historical point of view was applied,
the more secrets languages seemed to unveil, and the more light seemed
also to be thrown on objects outside the proper sphere of language,
such as ethnology and the early history of mankind at large and of
particular countries.
It is often said that it was the discovery of Sanskrit that was the
real turning-point in the history of linguistics, and there is some
truth in this assertion, though we shall see on the one hand that
Sanskrit was not in itself enough to give to those who studied it the
true insight into the essence of language and linguistic science, and
on the other hand that real genius enabled at least one man to grasp
essential truths about the relationships and development of languages
even without a knowledge of Sanskrit. Still, it must be said that
the first acquaintance with this language gave a mighty impulse to
linguistic studies and exerted a lasting influence on the way in which
most European languages were viewed by scholars, and it will therefore
be necessary here briefly to sketch the history of these studies. India
was very little known in Europe till the mighty struggle between the
French and the English for the mastery of its wealth excited a wide
interest also in its ancient culture. It was but natural that on this
intellectual domain, too, the French and the English should at first be
rivals and that we should find both nations represented in the pioneers
of Sanskrit scholarship. The French Jesuit missionary Cœurdoux as
early as 1767 sent to the French Institut a memoir in which he called
attention to the similarity of many Sanskrit words with Latin, and
even compared the flexion of the present indicative and subjunctive
of Sanskrit _asmi_, ‘I am,’ with the corresponding forms of Latin
grammar. Unfortunately, however, his work was not printed till forty
years later, when the same discovery had been announced independently
by others. The next scholar to be mentioned in this connexion is Sir
William Jones, who in 1796 uttered the following memorable words,
which have often been quoted in books on the history of linguistics:
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin
and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them
a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms
of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so
strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,
no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so
forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic ... had the
same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to
the same family.” Sir W. Jones, however, did nothing to carry out in
detail the comparison thus inaugurated, and it was reserved for younger
men to follow up the clue he had given.
II.--§ 2. Friedrich von Schlegel.
One of the books that exercised a great influence on the development
of linguistic science in the beginning of the nineteenth century was
Friedrich von Schlegel’s _Ueber die sprache und weisheit der Indier_
(1808). Schlegel had studied Sanskrit for some years in Paris, and
in his romantic enthusiasm he hoped that the study of the old Indian
books would bring about a revolution in European thought similar to
that produced in the Renaissance through the revival of the study
of Greek. We are here concerned exclusively with his linguistic
theories, but to his mind they were inseparable from Indian religion
and philosophy, or rather religious and philosophic poetry. He is
struck by the similarity between Sanskrit and the best-known European
languages, and gives quite a number of words from Sanskrit found with
scarcely any change in German, Greek and Latin. He repudiates the idea
that these similarities might be accidental or due to borrowings on
the side of the Indians, saying expressly that the proof of original
relationship between these languages, as well as of the greater age
of Sanskrit, lies in the far-reaching correspondences in the whole
grammatical structure of these as opposed to many other languages.
In this connexion it is noticeable that he is the first to speak
of ‘comparative grammar’ (p. 28), but, like Moses, he only looks
into this promised land without entering it. Indeed, his method of
comparison precludes him from being the founder of the new science,
for he says himself (p. 6) that he will refrain from stating any rules
for change or substitution of letters (sounds), and require complete
identity of the words used as proofs of the descent of languages. He
adds that in other cases, “where intermediate stages are historically
demonstrable, we may derive _giorno_ from _dies_, and when Spanish so
often has _h_ for Latin _f_, or Latin _p_ very often becomes _f_ in
the German form of the same word, and _c_ not rarely becomes _h_ [by
the way, an interesting foreshadowing of one part of the discovery
of the Germanic sound-shifting], then this may be the foundation of
analogical conclusions with regard to other less evident instances.” If
he had followed up this idea by establishing similar ‘sound-laws,’ as
we now say, between Sanskrit and other languages, he would have been
many years ahead of his time; as it is, his comparisons are those of
a dilettante, and he sometimes falls into the pitfalls of accidental
similarities while overlooking the real correspondences. He is also
led astray by the idea of a particularly close relationship between
Persian and German, an idea which at that time was widely spread[2]--we
find it in Jenisch and even in Bopp’s first book.
Schlegel is not afraid of surveying the whole world of human languages;
he divides them into two classes, one comprising Sanskrit and its
congeners, and the second all other languages. In the former he finds
organic growth of the roots as shown by their capability of inner
change or, as he terms it, ‘flexion,’ while in the latter class
everything is effected by the addition of affixes (prefixes and
suffixes). In Greek he admits that it would be possible to believe in
the possibility of the grammatical endings (bildungssylben) having
arisen from particles and auxiliary words amalgamated into the word
itself, but in Sanskrit even the last semblance of this possibility
disappears, and it becomes necessary to confess that the structure of
the language is formed in a thoroughly organic way through flexion,
i.e. inner changes and modifications of the radical sound, and not
composed merely mechanically by the addition of words and particles.
He admits, however, that affixes in some other languages have brought
about something that resembles real flexion. On the whole he finds that
the movement of grammatical art and perfection (der gang der bloss
grammatischen kunst und ausbildung, p. 56) goes in opposite directions
in the two species of languages. In the organic languages, which
represent the highest state, the beauty and art of their structure is
apt to be lost through indolence; and German as well as Romanic and
modern Indian languages show this degeneracy when compared with the
earlier forms of the same languages. In the affix languages, on the
other hand, we see that the beginnings are completely artless, but the
‘art’ in them grows more and more perfect the more the affixes are
fused with the main word.
As to the question of the ultimate origin of language, Schlegel
thinks that the diversity of linguistic structure points to different
beginnings. While some languages, such as Manchu, are so interwoven
with onomatopœia that imitation of natural sounds must have played
the greatest rôle in their formation, this is by no means the case in
other languages, and the perfection of the oldest organic or flexional
languages, such as Sanskrit, shows that they cannot be derived from
merely animal sounds; indeed, they form an additional proof, if any
such were needed, that men did not everywhere start from a brutish
state, but that the clearest and intensest reason existed from the
very first beginning. On all these points Schlegel’s ideas foreshadow
views that are found in later works; and it is probable that his fame
as a writer outside the philological field gave to his linguistic
speculations a notoriety which his often loose and superficial
reasonings would not otherwise have acquired for them.
Schlegel’s bipartition of the languages of the world carries in it
the germ of a tripartition. On the lowest stage of his second class
he places Chinese, in which, as he acknowledges, the particles
denoting secondary sense modifications consist in monosyllables that
are completely independent of the actual word. It is clear that
from Schlegel’s own point of view we cannot here properly speak of
‘affixes,’ and thus Chinese really, though Schlegel himself does not
say so, falls outside his affix languages and forms a class by itself.
On the other hand, his arguments for reckoning Semitic languages among
affix languages are very weak, and he seems also somewhat inclined
to say that much in their structure resembles real flexion. If we
introduce these two changes into his system, we arrive at the threefold
division found in slightly different shapes in most subsequent works
on general linguistics, the first to give it being perhaps Schlegel’s
brother, A. W. Schlegel, who speaks of (1) les langues sans aucune
structure grammaticale--under which misleading term he understands
Chinese with its unchangeable monosyllabic words; (2) les langues qui
emploient des affixes; (3) les langues à inflexions.
Like his brother, A. W. Schlegel places the flexional languages highest
and thinks them alone ‘organic.’ On the other hand, he subdivides
flexional languages into two classes, synthetic and analytic, the
latter using personal pronouns and auxiliaries in the conjugation of
verbs, prepositions to supply the want of cases, and adverbs to express
the degrees of comparison. While the origin of the synthetic languages
loses itself in the darkness of ages, the analytic languages have
been created in modern times; all those that we know are due to the
decomposition of synthetic languages. These remarks on the division of
languages are found in the Introduction to the book _Observations sur
la langue et la littérature provençale_ (1818) and are thus primarily
meant to account for the contrast between synthetic Latin and analytic
Romanic.
II.--§ 3. Rasmus Rask.
We now come to the three greatest names among the initiators of
linguistic science in the beginning of the nineteenth century. If we
give them in their alphabetical order, Bopp, Grimm and Rask, we also
give them in the order of merit in which most subsequent historians
have placed them. The works that constitute their first claims to the
title of founder of the new science came in close succession, Bopp’s
_Conjugationssystem_ in 1816, Rask’s _Undersøgelse_ in 1818, and the
first volume of Grimm’s _Grammatik_ in 1819. While Bopp is entirely
independent of the two others, we shall see that Grimm was deeply
influenced by Rask, and as the latter’s contributions to our science
began some years before his chief work just mentioned (which had also
been finished in manuscript in 1814, thus two years before Bopp’s
_Conjugationssystem_), the best order in which to deal with the three
men will perhaps be to take Rask first, then to mention Grimm, who in
some ways was his pupil, and finally to treat of Bopp: in this way we
shall also be enabled to see Bopp in close relation with the subsequent
development of Comparative Grammar, on which he, and not Rask, exerted
the strongest influence.
Born in a peasant’s hut in the heart of Denmark in 1787, Rasmus Rask
was a grammarian from his boyhood. When a copy of the _Heimskringla_
was given him as a school prize, he at once, without any grammar or
dictionary, set about establishing paradigms, and so, before he left
school, acquired proficiency in Icelandic, as well as in many other
languages. At the University of Copenhagen he continued in the same
course, constantly widened his linguistic horizon and penetrated into
the grammatical structure of the most diverse languages. Icelandic
(Old Norse), however, remained his favourite study, and it filled him
with enthusiasm and national pride that “our ancestors had such an
excellent language,” the excellency being measured chiefly by the full
flexional system which Icelandic shared with the classical tongues,
partly also by the pure, unmixed state of the Icelandic vocabulary. His
first book (1811) was an Icelandic grammar, an admirable production
when we consider the meagre work done previously in this field. With
great lucidity he reduces the intricate forms of the language into
a consistent system, and his penetrating insight into the essence
of language is seen when he explains the vowel changes, which we
now comprise under the name of mutation or umlaut, as due to the
approximation of the vowel of the stem to that of the ending, at that
time a totally new point of view. This we gather from Grimm’s review,
in which Rask’s explanation is said to be “more astute than true”
(“mehr scharfsinnig als wahr,” _Kleinere schriften_, 7. 515). Rask
even sees the reason of the change in the plural _blöð_ as against the
singular _blað_ in the former having once ended in _-u_, which has
since disappeared. This is, so far as I know, the first inference ever
drawn to a prehistoric state of language.
In 1814, during a prolonged stay in Iceland, Rask sent down to
Copenhagen his most important work, the prize essay on the origin of
the Old Norse language (_Undersøgelse om det gamle nordiske eller
islandske sprogs oprindelse_) which for various reasons was not
printed till 1818. If it had been published when it was finished, and
especially if it had been printed in a language better known than
Danish, Rask might well have been styled the founder of the modern
science of language, for his work contains the best exposition of the
true method of linguistic research written in the first half of the
nineteenth century and applies this method to the solution of a long
series of important questions. Only one part of it was ever translated
into another language, and this was unfortunately buried in an appendix
to Vater’s _Vergleichungstafeln_, 1822. Yet Rask’s work even now repays
careful perusal, and I shall therefore give a brief résumé of its
principal contents.
Language according to Rask is our principal means of finding out
anything about the history of nations before the existence of written
documents, for though everything may change in religion, customs,
laws and institutions, language generally remains, if not unchanged,
yet recognizable even after thousands of years. But in order to find
out anything about the relationship of a language we must proceed
methodically and examine its whole structure instead of comparing mere
details; what is here of prime importance is the grammatical system,
because words are very often taken over from one language to another,
but very rarely grammatical forms. The capital error in most of what
has been written on this subject is that this important point has been
overlooked. That language which has the most complicated grammar is
nearest to the source; however mixed a language may be, it belongs to
the same family as another if it has the most essential, most material
and indispensable words in common with it; pronouns and numerals are in
this respect most decisive. If in such words there are so many points
of agreement between two languages that it is possible to frame rules
for the transitions of letters (in other passages Rask more correctly
says sounds) from the one language to the other, there is a fundamental
kinship between the two languages, more particularly if there are
corresponding similarities in their structure and constitution. This
is a most important thesis, and Rask supplements it by saying that
transitions of sounds are naturally dependent on their organ and manner
of production.
Next Rask proceeds to apply these principles to his task of finding out
the origin of the Old Icelandic language. He describes its position
in the ‘Gothic’ (Gothonic, Germanic) group and then looks round to
find congeners elsewhere. He rapidly discards Greenlandic and Basque
as being too remote in grammar and vocabulary; with regard to Keltic
languages he hesitates, but finally decides in favour of denying
relationship. (He was soon to see his error in this; see below.)
Next he deals at some length with Finnic and Lapp, and comes to the
conclusion that the similarities are due to loans rather than to
original kinship. But when he comes to the Slavonic languages his
utterances have a different ring, for he is here able to disclose
so many similarities in fundamentals that he ranges these languages
within the same great family as Icelandic. The same is true with
regard to Lithuanian and Lettic, which are here for the first time
correctly placed as an independent sub-family, though closely akin
to Slavonic. The comparisons with Latin, and especially with Greek,
are even more detailed; and Rask in these chapters really presents us
with a succinct, but on the whole marvellously correct, comparative
grammar of Gothonic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Latin and Greek, besides
examining numerous lexical correspondences. He does not yet know any
of the related Asiatic languages, but throws out the hint that Persian
and Indian may be the remote source of Icelandic through Greek. Greek
he considers to be the ‘source’ or ‘root’ of the Gothonic languages,
though he expresses himself with a degree of uncertainty which
forestalls the correct notion that these languages have all of them
sprung from the same extinct and unknown language. This view is very
clearly expressed in a letter he wrote from St. Petersburg in the same
year in which his _Undersøgelse_ was published; he here says: “I divide
our family of languages in this way: the Indian (Dekanic, Hindostanic),
Iranic (Persian, Armenian, Ossetic), Thracian (Greek and Latin),
Sarmatian (Lettic and Slavonic), Gothic (Germanic and Skandinavian) and
Keltic (Britannic and Gaelic) tribes” (SA 2. 281, dated June 11, 1818).
This is the fullest and clearest account of the relationships of our
family of languages found for many years, and Rask showed true genius
in the way in which he saw what languages belonged together and how
they were related. About the same time he gave a classification of the
Finno-Ugrian family of languages which is pronounced by such living
authorities on these languages as Vilhelm Thomsen and Emil Setälä to be
superior to most later attempts. When travelling in India he recognized
the true position of Zend, about which previous scholars had held the
most erroneous views, and his survey of the languages of India and
Persia was thought valuable enough in 1863 to be printed from his
manuscript, forty years after it was written. He was also the first
to see that the Dravidian (by him called Malabaric) languages were
totally different from Sanskrit. In his short essay on Zend (1826) he
also incidentally gave the correct value of two letters in the first
cuneiform writing, and thus made an important contribution towards the
final deciphering of these inscriptions.
His long tour (1816-23) through Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Caucasus,
Persia and India was spent in the most intense study of a great
variety of languages, but unfortunately brought on the illness and
disappointments which, together with economic anxieties, marred the
rest of his short life.
When Rask died in 1832 he had written a great number of grammars of
single languages, all of them remarkable for their accuracy in details
and clear systematic treatment, more particularly of morphology,
and some of them breaking new ground; besides his Icelandic grammar
already mentioned, his Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Lapp grammars should
be specially named. Historical grammar in the strict sense is perhaps
not his forte, though in a remarkable essay of the year 1815 he
explains historically a great many features of Danish grammar, and in
his Spanish and Italian grammars he in some respects forestalls Diez’s
historical explanations. But in some points he stuck to erroneous
views, a notable instance being his system of old Gothonic ‘long
vowels,’ which was reared on the assumption that modern Icelandic
pronunciation reflects the pronunciation of primitive times, while
it is really a recent development, as Grimm saw from a comparison of
all the old languages. With regard to consonants, however, Rask was
the clearer-sighted of the two, and throughout he had this immense
advantage over most of the comparative linguists of his age, that he
had studied a great many languages at first hand with native speakers,
while the others knew languages chiefly or exclusively through the
medium of books and manuscripts. In no work of that period, or even of
a much later time, are found so many first-hand observations of living
speech as in Rask’s _Retskrivningslære_. Handicapped though he was in
many ways, by poverty and illness and by the fact that he wrote in
a language so little known as Danish, Rasmus Rask, through his wide
outlook, his critical sagacity and aversion to all fanciful theorizing,
stands out as one of the foremost leaders of linguistic science.[3]
II.--§ 4. Jacob Grimm.
Jacob Grimm’s career was totally different from Rask’s. Born in 1785
as the son of a lawyer, he himself studied law and came under the
influence of Savigny, whose view of legal institutions as the outcome
of gradual development in intimate connexion with popular tradition and
the whole intellectual and moral life of the people appealed strongly
to the young man’s imagination. But he was drawn even more to that
study of old German popular poetry which then began to be the fashion,
thanks to Tieck and other Romanticists; and when he was in Paris to
assist Savigny with his historico-legal research, the old German
manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale nourished his enthusiasm for
the poetical treasures of the Middle Ages. He became a librarian and
brought out his first book, _Ueber den altdeutschen meistergesang_
(1811). At the same time, with his brother Wilhelm as constant
companion and fellow-worker, he began collecting popular traditions,
of which he published a first instalment in his famous _Kinder- und
hausmärchen_ (1812 ff.), a work whose learned notes and comparisons
may be said to have laid the foundation of the science of folklore.
Language at first had only a subordinate interest to him, and when
he tried his hand at etymology, he indulged in the wildest guesses,
according to the method (or want of method) of previous centuries.
A. W. Schlegel’s criticism of his early attempts in this field, and
still more Rask’s example, opened Grimm’s eyes to the necessity of a
stricter method, and he soon threw himself with great energy into a
painstaking and exact study of the oldest stages of the German language
and its congeners. In his review (1812) of Rask’s Icelandic grammar he
writes: “Each individuality, even in the world of languages, should be
respected as sacred; it is desirable that even the smallest and most
despised dialect should be left only to itself and to its own nature
and in nowise subjected to violence, because it is sure to have some
secret advantages over the greatest and most highly valued language.”
Here we meet with that valuation of the hitherto overlooked popular
dialects which sprang from the Romanticists’ interest in the ‘people’
and everything it had produced. Much valuable linguistic work was
directly inspired by this feeling and by conscious opposition to the
old philology, that occupied itself exclusively with the two classical
languages and the upper-class literature embodied in them. As Scherer
expresses it (_Jacob Grimm_, 2te ausg., Berlin, 1885, p. 152): “The
brothers Grimm applied to the old national literature and to popular
traditions the old philological virtue of exactitude, which had up to
then been bestowed solely on Greek and Roman classics and on the Bible.
They extended the field of strict philology, as they extended the field
of recognized poetry. They discarded the aristocratic narrowmindedness
with which philologists looked down on unwritten tradition, on popular
ballads, legends, fairy tales, superstition, nursery rimes.... In the
hands of the two Grimms philology became national and popular; and at
the same time a pattern was created for the scientific study of all the
peoples of the earth and for a comparative investigation of the entire
mental life of mankind, of which written literature is nothing but a
small epitome.”
But though Grimm thus broke loose from the traditions of classical
philology, he still carried with him one relic of it, namely the
standard by which the merits of different languages were measured.
“In reading carefully the old Gothonic (altdeutschen) sources, I was
every day discovering forms and perfections which we generally envy
the Greeks and Romans when we consider the present condition of our
language.”... “Six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say
practised daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of
which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream; in the poetry of
Wolfram von Eschenbach and of Hartmann von Aue, who had never heard of
declension and conjugation, nay who perhaps did not even know how to
read and write, many differences in the flexion and use of nouns and
verbs are still nicely and unerringly observed, which we have gradually
to rediscover in learned guise, but dare not reintroduce, for language
ever follows its inalterable course.”
Grimm then sets about writing his great historical and comparative
_Deutsche Grammatik_, taking the term ‘deutsch’ in its widest and
hardly justifiable sense of what is now ordinarily called Germanic
and which is in this work called Gothonic. The first volume appeared
in 1819, and in the preface we see that he was quite clear that he
was breaking new ground and introducing a new method of looking at
grammar. He speaks of previous German grammars and says expressly that
he does not want his to be ranged with them. He charges them with
unspeakable pedantry; they wanted to dogmatize magisterially, while to
Grimm language, like everything natural and moral, is an unconscious
and unnoticed secret which is implanted in us in youth. Every German
therefore who speaks his language naturally, i.e. untaught, may call
himself his own living grammar and leave all schoolmasters’ rules
alone. Grimm accordingly has no wish to prescribe anything, but to
observe what has grown naturally, and very appropriately he dedicates
his work to Savigny, who has taught him how institutions grow in the
life of a nation. In the new preface to the second edition there are
also some noteworthy indications of the changed attitude. “I am hostile
to general logical notions in grammar; they conduce apparently to
strictness and solidity of definition, but hamper observation, which I
take to be the soul of linguistic science.... As my starting-point was
to trace the never-resting (unstillstehende) element of our language
which changes with time and place, it became necessary for me to admit
one dialect after the other, and I could not even forbear to glance at
those foreign languages that are ultimately related with ours.”
Here we have the first clear programme of that historical school
which has since then been the dominating one in linguistics. But as
language according to this new point of view was constantly changing
and developing, so also, during these years, were Grimm’s own ideas.
And the man who then exercised the greatest influence on him was Rasmus
Rask. When Grimm wrote the first edition of his _Grammatik_ (1819),
he knew nothing of Rask but the Icelandic grammar, but just before
finishing his own volume Rask’s prize essay reached him, and in the
preface he at once speaks of it in the highest terms of praise, as he
does also in several letters of this period; he is equally enthusiastic
about Rask’s Anglo-Saxon grammar and the Swedish edition of his
Icelandic grammar, neither of which reached him till after his own
first volume had been printed off. The consequence was that instead of
going on to the second volume, Grimm entirely recast the first volume
and brought it out in a new shape in 1822. The chief innovation was the
phonology or, as he calls it, “Erstes buch. Von den buchstaben,” which
was entirely absent in 1819, but now ran to 595 pages.
II.--§ 5. The Sound Shift.
This first book in the 1822 volume contains much, perhaps most, of
what constitutes Grimm’s fame as a grammarian, notably his exposition
of the ‘sound shift’ (lautverschiebung), which it has been customary
in England since Max Müller to term ‘Grimm’s Law.’ If any one man is
to give his name to this law, a better name would be ‘Rask’s Law,’ for
all these transitions, Lat. Gr. _p_ = _f_, _t_ = _þ_ (_th_), _k_ = _h_,
etc., are enumerated in Rask’s _Undersøgelse_, p. 168, which Grimm knew
before he wrote a single word about the sound shift.
Now, it is interesting to compare the two scholars’ treatment of these
transitions. The sober-minded, matter-of-fact Rask contents himself
with a bare statement of the facts, with just enough well-chosen
examples to establish the correspondence; the way in which he arranges
the sounds shows that he saw their parallelism clearly enough, though
he did not attempt to bring everything under one single formula, any
more than he tried to explain why these sounds had changed.[4] Grimm
multiplies the examples and then systematizes the whole process in one
formula so as to comprise also the ‘second shift’ found in High German
alone--a shift well known to Rask, though treated by him in a different
place (p. 68 f.). Grimm’s formula looks thus:
Greek p b f | t d th | k g ch
Gothic f p b | th t d | h k g
High G. b(v) f p | d z t | g ch k,
which may be expressed generally thus, that tenuis (T) becomes aspirate
(A) and then media (M), etc., or, tabulated:
Greek T M A
Gothic A T M
High G. M A T.
For this Grimm would of course have deserved great credit, because a
comprehensive formula is more scientific than a rough statement of
facts--_if_ the formula had been correct; but unfortunately it is not
so. In the first place, it breaks down in the very first instance, for
there is no media in High German corresponding to Gr. _p_ and Gothic
_f_ (cf. _poûs_, _fotus_, _fuss_, etc.); secondly, High German has _h_
just as Gothic has, corresponding to Greek _k_ (cf. _kardía_, _hairto_,
_herz_, etc.), and where it has _g_, Gothic has also _g_ in accordance
with rules unknown to Grimm and not explained till long afterwards (by
Verner). But the worst thing is that the whole specious generalization
produces the impression of regularity and uniformity only through the
highly unscientific use of the word ‘aspirate,’ which is made to cover
such phonetically disparate things as (1) combination of stop with
following _h_, (2) combination of stop with following fricative, _pf_,
_ts_ written _z_, (3) voiceless fricative, _f_, _s_ in G. _das_, (4)
voiced fricative, _v_, _ð_ written _th_, and (5) _h_. Grimm rejoiced in
his formula, giving as it does three chronological stages in each of
the three subdivisions (tenuis, media, aspirate) of each of the three
classes of consonants (labial, dental, ‘guttural’). This evidently
took hold of his fancy through the mystic power of the number three,
which he elsewhere (Gesch 1. 191, cf. 241) finds pervading language
generally: three original vowels, _a_, _i_, _u_, three genders, three
numbers (singular, dual, plural), three persons, three ‘voices’
(genera: active, middle, passive), three tenses (present, preterit,
future), three declensions through _a_, _i_, _u_. As there is here
an element of mysticism, so is there also in Grimm’s highflown
explanation of the whole process from pretended popular psychology,
which is full of the cloudiest romanticism. “When once the language
had made the first step and had rid itself of the organic basis of its
sounds, it was hardly possible for it to escape the second step and
not to arrive at the third stage,[5] through which this development
was perfected.... It is impossible not to admire the instinct by which
the linguistic spirit (sprachgeist) carried this out to the end. A
great many sounds got out of joint, but they always knew how to arrange
themselves in a different place and to find the new application of the
old law. I am not saying that the shift happened without any detriment,
nay from one point of view the sound shift appears to me as a barbarous
aberration, from which other more quiet nations abstained, but which
is connected with the violent progress and craving for freedom which
was found in Germany in the beginning of the Middle Ages and which
initiated the transformation of Europe. The Germans pressed forward
even in the matter of the innermost sounds of their language,” etc.,
with remarks on intellectual progress and on victorious and ruling
races. Grimm further says that “die dritte stufe des verschobnen lauts
den kreislauf abschliesse und nach ihr ein neuer ansatz zur abweichung
wieder von vorn anheben müsse. Doch eben weil der sprachgeist seinen
lauf vollbracht hat, scheint er nicht wieder neu beginnen zu wollen”
(GDS 1. 292 f., 299). It would be difficult to attach any clear ideas
to these words.
Grimm’s idea of a ‘kreislauf’ is caused by the notion that the two
shifts, separated by several centuries, represent one continued
movement, while the High German shift of the eighth century has really
no more to do with the primitive Gothonic shift, which took place
probably some time before Christ, than has, for instance, the Danish
shift in words like _gribe_, _bide_, _bage_, from _gripæ_, _bitæ_,
_bakæ_ (about 1400), or the still more recent transition in Danish
through which stressed _t_ in _tid_, _tyve_, etc., sounds nearly like
[ts], as in HG. _zeit_. There cannot possibly be any causal nexus
between such transitions, separated chronologically by long periods,
with just as little change in the pronunciation of these consonants as
there has been in English.[6]
Grimm was anything but a phonetician, and sometimes says things which
nowadays cannot but produce a smile, as when he says (Gr 1. 3) “in our
word _schrift_, for instance, we express eight sounds through seven
signs, for _f_ stands for _ph_”; thus he earnestly believes that _sch_
contains three sounds, _s_ and the ‘aspirate’ _ch_ = _c_ + _h_! Yet
through the irony of fate it was on the history of sounds that Grimm
exercised the strongest influence. As in other parts of his grammar, so
also in the “theory of letters” he gave fuller word lists than people
had been accustomed to, and this opened the eyes of scholars to the
great regularity reigning in this department of linguistic development.
Though in his own etymological practice he was far from the strict idea
of ‘phonetic law’ that played such a prominent rôle in later times, he
thus paved the way for it. He speaks of law at any rate in connexion
with the consonant shift, and there recognizes that it serves to curb
wild etymologies and becomes a test for them (Gesch 291). The consonant
shift thus became _the_ law in linguistics, and because it affected a
great many words known to everybody, and in a new and surprising way
associated well-known Latin or Greek words with words of one’s own
mother-tongue, it became popularly the keystone of a new wonderful
science.
Grimm coined several of the terms now generally used in linguistics;
thus _umlaut_ and _ablaut_, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ declensions and
conjugations. As to the first, we have seen that it was Rask who first
understood and who taught Grimm the cause of this phenomenon, which
in English has often been designated by the German term, while Sweet
calls it ‘mutation’ and others better ‘infection.’ With regard to
‘ablaut’ (Sweet: gradation, best perhaps in English apophony), Rask
termed it ‘omlyd,’ a word which he never applied to Grimm’s ‘umlaut,’
thus keeping the two kinds of vowel change as strictly apart as Grimm
does. Apophony was first discovered in that class of verbs which
Grimm called ‘strong’; he was fascinated by the commutation of the
vowels in _springe_, _sprang_, _gesprungen_, and sees in it, as in
_bimbambum_, something mystic and admirable, characteristic of the old
German spirit. He was thus blind to the correspondences found in other
languages, and his theory led him astray in the second volume, in which
he constructed imaginary verbal roots to explain apophony wherever it
was found outside the verbs.
Though Grimm, as we have seen, was by his principles and whole tendency
averse to prescribing laws for a language, he is sometimes carried
away by his love for mediæval German, as when he gives as the correct
nominative form _der boge_, though everybody for centuries had said
_der bogen_. In the same way many of his followers would apply the
historical method to questions of correctness of speech, and would
discard the forms evolved in later times in favour of previously
existing forms which were looked upon as more ‘organic.’
It will not be necessary here to speak of the imposing work done by
Grimm in the rest of his long life, chiefly spent as a professor in
Berlin. But in contrast to the ordinary view I must say that what
appears to me as most likely to endure is his work on syntax, contained
in the fourth volume of his grammar and in monographs. Here his
enormous learning, his close power of observation, and his historical
method stand him in good stead, and there is much good sense and
freedom from that kind of metaphysical systematism which was triumphant
in contemporaneous work on classical syntax. His services in this field
are the more interesting because he did not himself seem to set much
store by these studies and even said that syntax was half outside the
scope of grammar. This utterance belongs to a later period than that of
the birth of historical and comparative linguistics, and we shall have
to revert to it after sketching the work of the third great founder of
this science, to whom we shall now turn.
II.--§ 6. Franz Bopp.
The third, by some accounted the greatest, among the founders of modern
linguistic science was Franz Bopp. His life was uneventful. At the age
of twenty-one (he was born in 1791) he went to Paris to study Oriental
languages, and soon concentrated his attention on Sanskrit. His first
book, from which it is customary in Germany to date the birth of
Comparative Philology, appeared in 1816, while he was still in Paris,
under the title _Ueber des conjugationssystem der sanskritsprache in
vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und
germanischen sprache_, but the latter part of the small volume was
taken up with translations from Sanskrit, and for a long time he was
just as much a Sanskrit scholar, editing and translating Sanskrit
texts, as a comparative grammarian. He showed himself in the latter
character in several papers read before the Berlin Academy, after he
had been made a professor there in 1822, and especially in his famous
_Vergleichende grammatik des sanskrit, ṣend, armenischen, griechischen,
lateinischen, litauischen, altslawischen, gotischen und deutschen_, the
first edition of which was published between 1833 and 1849, the second
in 1857, and the third in 1868. Bopp died in 1867.
Of Bopp’s _Conjugationssystem_ a revised, rearranged and greatly
improved English translation came out in 1820 under the title
_Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic
Languages_. This was reprinted with a good introduction by F. Techmer
in his _Internationale zeitschrift für allgem. sprachwissenschaft IV_
(1888), and in the following remarks I shall quote this (abbreviated
AC) instead of, or alongside of, the German original (abbreviated C).
Bopp’s chief aim (and in this he was characteristically different
from Rask) was to find out the ultimate origin of grammatical forms.
He follows his quest by the aid of Sanskrit forms, though he does not
consider these as the ultimate forms themselves: “I do not believe that
the Greek, Latin, and other European languages are to be considered as
derived from the Sanskrit in the state in which we find it in Indian
books; I feel rather inclined to consider them altogether as subsequent
variations of one original tongue, which, however, the Sanskrit has
preserved more perfect than its kindred dialects. But whilst therefore
the language of the Brahmans more frequently enables us to conjecture
the primitive form of the Greek and Latin languages than what we
discover in the oldest authors and monuments, the latter on their side
also may not unfrequently elucidate the Sanskrit grammar” (AC 3).
Herein subsequent research has certainly borne out Bopp’s view.
After finding out by a comparison of the grammatical forms of
Sanskrit, Greek, etc., which of these forms were identical and what
were their oldest shapes, he tries to investigate the ultimate origin
of these forms. This he takes to be a comparatively easy consequence
of the first task, but he was here too much under the influence of
the philosophical grammar then in vogue. Gottfried Hermann (_De
emendanda ratione Græcæ grammaticæ_, 1801), on purely logical grounds,
distinguishes three things as necessary elements of each sentence, the
subject, the predicate, and the copula joining the first two elements
together; as the power of the verb is to attribute the predicate to
the subject, there is really only one verb, namely the verb _to be_.
Bopp’s teacher in Paris, Silvestre de Sacy, says the same thing, and
Bopp repeats: “A verb, in the most restricted meaning of the term, is
that part of speech by which a subject is connected with its attribute.
According to this definition it would appear that there can exist only
one verb, namely, the substantive verb, in Latin _esse_; in English,
_to be_.... Languages of a structure similar to that of the Greek,
Latin, etc., can express by one verb of this kind a whole logical
proposition, in which, however, that part of speech which expresses
the connexion of the subject with its attribute, which is the
characteristic function of the verb, is generally entirely omitted or
understood. The Latin verb _dat_ expresses the proposition ‘he gives,’
or ‘he is giving’: the letter _t_, indicating the third person, is the
subject, _da_ expresses the attribute of giving, and the grammatical
_copula_ is understood. In the verb _potest_, the latter is expressed,
and _potest_ unites in itself the three essential parts of speech, _t_
being the subject, _es_ the copula, and _pot_ the attribute.”
Starting from this logical conception of grammar, Bopp is inclined to
find everywhere the ‘substantive verb’ _to be_ in its two Sanskrit
forms _as_ and _bhu_ as an integral part of verbal forms. He is not
the first to think that terminations, which are now inseparable parts
of a verb, were originally independent words; thus Horne Tooke (in
_Epea pteroenta_, 1786, ii. 429) expressly says that “All those common
terminations in any language ... are themselves separate words with
distinct meanings,” and explains, for instance, Latin _ibo_ from _i_,
‘_go_’ + _b_, ‘_will_,’ from Greek _boúl(omai)_ + _o_ ‘_I_,’ from
_ego_. Bopp’s explanations are similar to this, though they do not
imply such violent shortenings as that of _boúl(omai)_ to _b_.
He finds the root Sanskrit _as_, ‘to be,’ in Latin perfects like
_scrip-s-i_, in Greek aorists like _e-tup-s-a_ and in futures like
_tup-s-o_. That the same addition thus indicates different tenses does
not trouble Bopp greatly; he explains Lat. _fueram_ from _fu_ + _es_ +
_am_, etc., and says that the root _fu_ “contains, properly, nothing
to indicate past time, but the usage of language having supplied the
want of an adequate inflexion, _fui_ received the sense of a perfect,
and _fu-eram_, which would be nothing more than an imperfect, that of
a pluperfect, and after the same manner _fu-ero_ signifies ‘I shall
have been,’ instead of ‘I shall be’” (AC 57). All Latin verbal endings
containing _r_ are thus explained as being ultimately formed with the
substantive verb (_ama-rem_, etc.); thus among others the infinitives
_fac-ere_, _ed-ere_, as well as _esse_, _posse_: “_E_ is properly, in
Latin, the termination of a simple infinitive active; and the root _Es_
produced anciently _ese_, by adding _e_; the _s_ having afterwards been
doubled, we have _esse_. This termination _e_ answers to the Greek
infinitive in _ai_, _eînai_ ...” (AC 58).
If Bopp found a master-key to many of the verbal endings in the
Sanskrit root _es_, he found a key to many others in the other root of
the verb ‘to be,’ Sanskrit _bhu_. He finds it in the Latin imperfect
_da-bam_, as well as in the future _da-bo_, the relation between which
is the same as that between _er-am_ and _er-o_. “_Bo_, _bis_, _bit_
has a striking similarity with the Anglo-Saxon _beo_, _bys_, _byth_,
the future tense of the verb substantive, a similarity which cannot
be considered as merely accidental.” [Here neither the form nor the
function of the Anglo-Saxon is stated quite correctly.] But the ending
in Latin _ama-vi_ is also referred to the same root; for the change
of the _b_ into _v_ we are referred to Italian _amava_, from Lat.
_amabam_; thus also _fui_ is for _fuvi_ and _potui_ is for _pot-vi_:
“languages manifest a constant effort to combine heterogeneous
materials in such a manner as to offer to the ear or eye one perfect
whole, like a statue executed by a skilful artist, that wears the
appearance of a figure hewn out of one piece of marble” (AC 60).
The following may be taken as a fair specimen of the method followed
in these first attempts to account for the origin of flexional forms:
“The Latin passive forms _amat-ur_, _amant-ur_, would, in some measure,
conform to this mode of joining the verb substantive, if the _r_ was
also the result of a permutation of an original _s_; and this appears
not quite incredible, if we compare the second person _ama-ris_ with
the third _amat-ur_. Either in one or the other there must be a
transposition of letters, to which the Latin language is particularly
addicted. If _ama-ris_, which might have been produced from _ama-sis_,
has preserved the original order of letters, then _ama-tur_ must be
the transposition of _ama-rut_ or _ama-sut_, and _ama-ntur_ that of
_ama-runt_ or _ama-sunt_. If this be the case, the origin of the
Latin passive can be accounted for, and although differing from that
of the Sanskrit, Greek, and Gothic languages, it is not produced by
the invention of a new grammatical form. It becomes clear, also, why
many verbs, with a passive form, have an active signification; because
there is no reason why the addition of the verb substantive should
necessarily produce a passive sense. There is another way of explaining
_ama-ris_, if it really stands for _ama-sis_; the _s_ may be the
radical consonant of the reflex pronoun _se_. The introduction of this
pronoun would be particularly adapted to form the middle voice, which
expresses the reflexion of the action upon the actor; but the Greek
language exemplifies the facility with which the peculiar signification
of the middle voice passes into that of the passive.” The reasoning in
the beginning of this passage (the only one contained in C) carries
us back to a pre-scientific atmosphere, of which there are few or
no traces in Rask’s writings; the latter explanation (added in AC)
was preferred by Bopp himself in later works, and was for many years
accepted as the correct one, until scholars found a passive in _r_ in
Keltic, where the transition from _s_ to _r_ is not found as it is in
Latin; and as the closely corresponding forms in Keltic and Italic must
obviously be explained in the same way, the hypothesis of a composition
with _se_ was generally abandoned. Bopp’s partiality for the abstract
verb is seen clearly when he explains the Icelandic passive in _-st_
from _s_ = _es_ (C 132); here Rask and Grimm saw the correct and
obvious explanation.
Among the other explanations given first by Bopp must be mentioned the
Latin second person of the passive voice _-mini_, as in _ama-mini_,
which he takes to be the nominative masculine plural of a participle
corresponding to Greek _-menos_ and found in a different form in Lat.
_alumnus_ (AC 51). This explanation is still widely accepted, though
not by everybody.
With regard to the preterit of what Grimm was later to term the ‘weak’
verbs, Bopp vacillates between different explanations. In C 118 he
thinks the _t_ or _d_ is identical with the ending of the participle,
in which the case endings were omitted and supplanted by personal
endings; the syllable _ed_ after _d_ [in Gothic _sok-id-edum_; ‘Greek,’
p. 119, must be a misprint for Gothic] is nothing but an accidental
addition. But on p. 151 he sees in _sokidedun_, _sokidedi_, a connexion
of _sok_ with the preterit of the verb _Tun_, as if the Germans were
to say _suchetaten_, _suchetäte_; he compares the English use of _did_
(_did seek_), and thinks the verb used is G. _tun_, Goth. _tanjan_.
The theory of composition is here restricted to those forms that
contain two _d’s_, i.e. the plural indicative and the subjunctive. In
the English edition this twofold explanation is repeated with some
additions: _d_ or _t_ as in Gothic _sok-i-da_ and _oh-ta_ originates
from a participle found in Sanskr. _tyak-ta_, _likh-i-ta_, Lat.
_-tus_, Gr. _-tós_; this suffix generally has a passive sense, but in
neuter verbs an active sense, and therefore would naturally serve to
form a preterit tense with an active signification. He finds a proof
of the connexion between this preterit and the participle in the
fact that only such verbs as have this ending in the participle form
their preterit by means of a dental, while the others (the ‘strong’
verbs, as Grimm afterwards termed them) have a participle in _an_ and
reduplication or a change of vowel in the preterit; and Bopp compares
the Greek aorist passive _etúphth-ēn_, _edóth-ēn_, which he conceives
may proceed from the participle _tuphth-eís_, _doth-eís_ (AC 37 ff.).
This suggestion seems to have been commonly overlooked or abandoned,
while the other explanation, from _dedi_ as in English _did seek_,
which Bopp gives p. 49 for the subjunctive and the indicative plural,
was accepted by Grimm as the explanation of all the forms, even of
those containing only one dental; in later works Bopp agreed with
Grimm and thus gave up the first part of his original explanation. The
_did_ explanation had been given already by D. von Stade (d. 1718, see
Collitz, _Das schwache präteritum_, p. 1); Rask (P 270, not mentioned
by Collitz) says: “Whence this _d_ or _t_ has come is not easy to tell,
as it is not found in Latin and Greek, but as it is evident from the
Icelandic grammar that it is closely connected with the past participle
and is also found in the preterit subjunctive, it seems clear that it
must have been an old characteristic of the past tense in every mood,
but was lost in Greek when the above-mentioned participles in _tos_
disappeared from the verbs” (cf. Ch. XIX § 12).
With regard to the vowels, Bopp in AC has the interesting theory that
it is only through a defect in the alphabet that Sanskrit appears to
have _a_ in so many places; he believes that the spoken language had
often “the short Italian _e_ and _o_,” where _a_ was written. “If this
was the case, we can give a reason why, in words common to the Sanskrit
and Greek, the Indian _akāra_ [that is, short _a_] so often corresponds
to ε and ο, as, for instance, _asti_, he is, ἐστί; _patis_, husband,
πόσις; _ambaras_, sky, ὄμβρος, rain, etc.” Later, unfortunately, Bopp
came under the influence of Grimm, who, as we saw, on speculative
grounds admitted in the primitive language only the three vowels
_a_, _i_, _u_, and Bopp and his followers went on believing that
the Sanskrit _a_ represented the original state of language, until
the discovery of the ‘palatal law’ (about 1880) showed (what Bopp’s
occasional remark might otherwise easily have led up to, if he had not
himself discarded it) that the Greek tripartition into _a_, _e_, _o_
represented really a more original state of things.
II.--§ 7. Bopp continued.
In a chapter on the roots in AC (not found in C), Bopp contrasts
the structure of Semitic roots and of our own; in Semitic languages
roots must consist of three letters, neither more nor less, and thus
generally contain two syllables, while in Sanskrit, Greek, etc.,
the character of the root “is not to be determined by the number of
letters, but by that of the syllables, of which they contain only one”;
thus a root like _i_, ‘to go,’ would be unthinkable in Arabic. The
consequence of this structure of the roots is that the inner changes
which play such a large part in expressing grammatical modifications
in Semitic languages must be much more restricted in our family of
languages. These changes were what F. Schlegel termed flexions and
what Bopp himself, two years before (C 7), had named “the truly
organic way” of expressing relation and mentioned as a wonderful
flexibility found in an extraordinary degree in Sanskrit, by the side
of which composition with the verb ‘to be’ is found only occasionally.
Now, however, in 1820, Bopp repudiates Schlegel’s and his own
previous assumption that ‘flexion’ was characteristic of Sanskrit in
contradistinction to other languages in which grammatical modifications
were expressed by the addition of suffixes. On the contrary, while
holding that both methods are employed in all languages, Chinese
perhaps alone excepted, he now thinks that it is the suffix method
which is prevalent in Sanskrit, and that “the only real inflexions
... possible in a language, whose elements are monosyllables, are
the change of their vowels and the repetition of their radical
consonants, otherwise called reduplication.” It will be seen that Bopp
here avoids both the onesidedness found in Schlegel’s division of
languages and the other onesidedness which we shall encounter in later
theories, according to which _all_ grammatical elements are originally
independent subordinate roots added to the main root.
In his _Vocalismus_ (1827, reprinted 1836) Bopp opposes Grimm’s theory
that the changes for which Grimm had introduced the term _ablaut_ were
due to psychological causes; in other words, possessed an inner meaning
from the very outset. Bopp inclined to a mechanical explanation[7]
and thought them dependent on the weight of the endings, as shown by
the contrast between Sanskr. _vēda_, Goth. _vait_, Gr. _oîda_ and the
plural, respectively _vidima_, _vitum_, _ídmen_. In this instance
Bopp is in closer agreement than Grimm with the majority of younger
scholars, who see in apophony (ablaut) an originally non-significant
change brought about mechanically by phonetic conditions, though they
do not find these in the ‘weight’ of the ending, but in the primeval
accent: the accentuation of Sanskrit was not known to Bopp when he
wrote his essay.
The personal endings of the verbs had already been identified with
the corresponding pronouns by Scheidius (1790) and Rask (P 258);
Bopp adopts the same view, only reproaching Scheidius for thinking
exclusively of the nominative forms of the pronouns.
It thus appears that in his early work Bopp deals with a great
many general problems, but his treatment is suggestive rather than
exhaustive or decisive, for there are too many errors in details
and his whole method is open to serious criticism. A modern reader
is astonished to see the facility with which violent changes of
sounds, omissions and transpositions of consonants, etc., are
gratuitously accepted. Bopp never reflected as deeply as Rask did
on what constitutes linguistic kinship, hence in C he accepts the
common belief that Persian was related more closely to German than
to Sanskrit, and in later life he tried to establish a relationship
between the Malayo-Polynesian and the Indo-European languages. But in
spite of all this it must be recognized that in his long laborious
life he accomplished an enormous amount of highly meritorious work,
not only in Sanskrit philology, but also in comparative grammar, in
which he gradually freed himself of his worst methodical errors. He was
constantly widening his range of vision, taking into consideration more
and more cognate languages. The ingenious way in which he explained the
curious Keltic shiftings in initial consonants (which had so puzzled
Rask as to make him doubt of a connexion of these languages with our
family, but which Bopp showed to be dependent on a lost final sound of
the preceding word) definitely and irrefutably established the position
of those languages. Among other things that might be credited to his
genius, I shall select his explanation of the various declensional
classes as determined by the final sound of the stem. But it is not
part of my plan to go into many details; suffice it to say that Bopp’s
great _Vergleichende grammatik_ served for long years as the best, or
really the only, exposition of the new science, and vastly contributed
not only to elucidate obscure points, but also to make comparative
grammar as popular as it is possible for such a necessarily abstruse
science to be.
In Bopp’s _Vergleichende grammatik_ (1. § 108) he gives his
classification of languages in general. He rejects Fr. Schlegel’s
bipartition, but his growing tendency to explain everything in Aryan
grammar, even the inner changes of Sanskrit roots, by mechanical
causes makes him modify A. W. Schlegel’s tripartition and place our
family of languages with the second instead of the third class. His
three classes are therefore as follows: I. Languages without roots
proper and without the power of composition, and thus without organism
or grammar; to this class belongs Chinese, in which most grammatical
relations are only to be recognized by the position of the words. II.
Languages with monosyllabic roots, capable of composition and acquiring
their organism, their grammar, nearly exclusively in this way; the main
principle of word formation is the connexion of verbal and pronominal
roots. To this class belong the Indo-European languages, but also
all languages not comprised under the first or the third class. III.
Languages with disyllabic roots and three necessary consonants as sole
bearers of the signification of the word. This class includes only the
Semitic languages. Grammatical forms are here created not only by means
of composition, as in the second class, but also by inner modification
of the roots.
It will be seen that Bopp here expressly avoids both expressions
‘agglutination’ and ‘flexion,’ the former because it had been used
of languages contrasted with Aryan, while Bopp wanted to show the
essential identity of the two classes; the latter because it had been
invested with much obscurity on account of Fr. Schlegel’s use of it
to signify inner modification only. According to Schlegel, only such
instances as English _drink_ / _drank_ / _drunk_ are pure flexion,
while German _trink-e_ / _trank_ / _ge-trunk-en_, and still more Greek
_leip-ō_ / _e-lip-on_ / _le-loip-a_, besides an element of ‘flexion’
contain also affixed elements. It is clear that no language can use
‘flexion’ (in Schlegel’s sense) exclusively, and consequently this
cannot be made a principle on which to erect a classification of
languages generally. Schlegel’s use of the term ‘flexion’ seems to have
been dropped by all subsequent writers, who use it so as to include
what is actually found in the grammar of such languages as Sanskrit and
Greek, comprising under it inner and outer modifications, but of course
not requiring both in the same form.
In view of the later development of our science, it is worthy of notice
that neither in the brothers Schlegel nor in Bopp do we yet meet
with the idea that the classes set up are not only a distribution of
the languages found side by side in the world at this time, but also
represent so many stages in historical development; indeed, Bopp’s
definitions are framed so as positively to exclude any development from
his Class II to Class III, as the character of the underlying roots
is quite heterogeneous. On the other hand, Bopp’s tendency to explain
Aryan endings from originally independent roots paved the way for the
theory of isolation, agglutination and flexion as three successive
stages of the same language.
In his first work (C 56) Bopp had already hinted that in the earliest
period known to us languages had already outlived their most perfect
state and were in a process of decay; and in his review of Grimm (1827)
he repeats this: “We perceive them in a condition in which they may
indeed be progressive syntactically, but have, as far as grammar is
concerned, lost more or less of what belonged to the perfect structure,
in which the separate members stand in exact relation to each other
and in which everything derived has still a visible and unimpaired
connexion with its source” (Voc. 2). We shall see kindred ideas in
Humboldt and Schleicher.
To sum up: Bopp set about discovering the ultimate origin of flexional
elements, but instead of that he discovered Comparative Grammar--“à peu
près comme Christophe Colomb a découvert l’Amérique en cherchant la
route des Indes,” as A. Meillet puts it (LI 413). A countryman of Rask
may be forgiven for pushing the French scholar’s brilliant comparison
still further: in the same way as Norsemen from Iceland had discovered
America before Columbus, without imagining that they were finding the
way to India, just so Rasmus Rask through his Icelandic studies had
discovered Comparative Grammar before Bopp, without needing to take the
circuitous route through Sanskrit.
II.--§ 8. Wilhelm von Humboldt.
This will be the proper place to mention one of the profoundest
thinkers in the domain of linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767-1835), who, while playing an important part in the political
world, found time to study a great many languages and to think deeply
on many problems connected with philology and ethnography.[8]
In numerous works, the most important of which, _Ueber die Kawisprache
auf der Insel Jawa_, with the famous introduction “Ueber die
Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf
die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts,” was published
posthumously in 1836-40, Humboldt developed his linguistic philosophy,
of which it is not easy to give a succinct idea, as it is largely
couched in a most abstruse style; it is not surprising that his admirer
and follower, Heymann Steinthal, in a series of books, gave as many
different interpretations of Humboldt’s thoughts, each purporting to be
more correct than its predecessors. Still, I believe the following may
be found to be a tolerably fair rendering of some of Humboldt’s ideas.
He rightly insists on the importance of seeing in language a continued
activity. Language is not a substance or a finished work, but
action (Sie selbst ist kein werk, _ergon_, sondern eine tätigkeit,
_energeia_). Language therefore cannot be defined except genetically.
It is the ever-repeated labour of the mind to utilize articulated
sounds to express thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is a definition of
each separate act of speech; but truly and essentially a language must
be looked upon as the totality of such acts. For the words and rules,
which according to our ordinary notions make up a language, exist
really only in the act of connected speech. The breaking up of language
into words and rules is nothing but a dead product of our bungling
scientific analysis (Versch 41). Nothing in language is static,
everything is dynamic. Language has nowhere any abiding place, not even
in writing; its dead part must continually be re-created in the mind;
in order to exist it must be spoken or understood, and so pass in its
entirety into the subject (ib. 63).
Humboldt speaks continually of languages as more perfect or less
perfect. Yet “no language should be condemned or depreciated, not
even that of the most savage tribe, for each language is a picture of
the original aptitude for language” (Versch 304). In another place he
speaks about special excellencies even of languages that cannot in
themselves be recognized as superlatively good instruments of thought.
Undoubtedly Chinese of the old style carries with it an impressive
dignity through the immediate succession of nothing but momentous
notions; it acquires a simple greatness because it throws away all
unnecessary accessory elements and thus, as it were, takes flight to
pure thinking. Malay is rightly praised for its ease and the great
simplicity of its constructions. The Semitic languages retain an
admirable art in the nice discrimination of sense assigned to many
shades of vowels. Basque possesses a particular vigour, dependent on
the briefness and boldness of expression imparted by the structure
of its words and by their combination. Delaware and other American
languages express in one word a number of ideas for which we should
require many words. The human mind is always capable of producing
something admirable, however one-sided it may be; such special points
decide nothing with regard to the rank of languages (Versch 189 f.). We
have here, as indeed continually in Humboldt, a valuation of languages
with many brilliant remarks, but on the whole we miss the concrete
details abounding in Jenisch’s work. Humboldt, as it were, lifts us
to a higher plane, where the air may be purer, but where it is also
thinner and not seldom cloudier as well.
According to Humboldt, each separate language, even the most despised
dialect, should be looked upon as an organic whole, different from all
the rest and expressing the individuality of the people speaking it; it
is characteristic of one nation’s psyche, and indicates the peculiar
way in which that nation attempts to realize the ideal of speech. As
a language is thus symbolic of the national character of those who
speak it, very much in each language had its origin in a symbolic
representation of the notion it stands for; there is a natural nexus
between certain sounds and certain general ideas, and consequently we
often find similar sounds used for the same, or nearly the same, idea
in languages not otherwise related to one another.
Humboldt is opposed to the idea of ‘general’ or ‘universal’ grammar as
understood in his time; instead of this purely deductive grammar he
would found an inductive general grammar, based upon the comparison of
the different ways in which the same grammatical notion was actually
expressed in a variety of languages. He set the example in his paper
on the Dual. His own studies covered a variety of languages; but his
works do not give us many actual concrete facts from the languages he
had studied; he was more interested in abstract reasonings on language
in general than in details.
In an important paper, _Ueber das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen
und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwickelung_ (1822), he says that
language at first denotes only objects, leaving it to the hearer to
understand or guess at (hinzudenken) their connexion. By and by the
word-order becomes fixed, and some words lose their independent use and
sound, so that in the second stage we see grammatical relations denoted
through word-order and through words vacillating between material
and formal significations. Gradually these become affixes, but the
connexion is not yet firm, the joints are still visible, the result
being an aggregate, not yet a unit. Thus in the third stage we have
something analogous to form, but not real form. This is achieved in the
fourth stage, where the word is _one_, only modified in its grammatical
relations through the flexional sound; each word belongs to one
definite part of speech, and form-words have no longer any disturbing
material signification, but are pure expressions of relation. Such
words as Lat. _amavit_ and Greek _epoíēsas_ are truly grammatical forms
in contradistinction to such combinations of words and syllables as
are found in cruder languages, because we have here a fusion into one
whole, which causes the signification of the parts to be forgotten and
joins them firmly under one accent. Though Humboldt thus thinks flexion
developed out of agglutination, he distinctly repudiates the idea of
a gradual development and rather inclines to something like a sudden
crystallization (see especially Steinthal’s ed., p. 585).
Humboldt’s position with regard to the classification of languages
is interesting. In his works we continually meet with the
terms agglutination[9] and flexion by the side of a new term,
‘incorporation.’ This he finds in full bloom in many American
languages, such as Mexican, where the object may be inserted into
the verbal form between the element indicating person and the root.
Now, Humboldt says that besides Chinese, which has no grammatical
form, there are three possible forms of languages, the flexional, the
agglutinative and the incorporating, but he adds that all languages
contain one or more of these forms (Versch 301). He tends to deny the
existence of any exclusively agglutinative or exclusively flexional
language, as the two principles are generally commingled (132). Flexion
is the only method that gives to the word the true inner firmness and
at the same time distributes the parts of the sentence according to
the necessary interlacing of thoughts, and thus undoubtedly represents
the pure principle of linguistic structure. Now, the question is,
what language carries out this method in the most consistent way?
True perfection may not be found in any one language: in the Semitic
languages we find flexion in its most genuine shape, united with the
most refined symbolism, only it is not pursued consistently in all
parts of the language, but restricted by more or less accidental laws.
On the other hand, in the Sanskritic languages the compact unity of
every word saves flexion from any suspicion of agglutination; it
pervades all parts of the language and rules it in the highest freedom
(Versch 188). Compared with incorporation and with the method of
loose juxtaposition without any real word-unity, flexion appears as
an intuitive principle born of true linguistic genius (ib.). Between
Sanskrit and Chinese, as the two opposed poles of linguistic structure,
each of them perfect in the consistent following one principle, we
may place all the remaining languages (ib. 326). But the languages
called agglutinative have nothing in common except just the negative
trait that they are neither isolating nor flexional. The structural
diversities of human languages are so great that they make one despair
of a fully comprehensive classification (ib. 330).
According to Humboldt, language is in continued development under
the influence of the changing mental power of its speakers. In this
development there are naturally two definite periods, one in which the
creative instinct of speech is still growing and active, and another
in which a seeming stagnation begins and then an appreciable decline
of that creative instinct. Still, the period of decline may initiate
new principles of life and new successful changes in a language (Versch
184). In the form-creating period nations are occupied more with the
language than with its purpose, i.e. with what it is meant to signify.
They struggle to express thought, and this craving in connexion with
the inspiring feeling of success produces and sustains the creative
power of language (ib. 191). In the second period we witness a
wearing-off of the flexional forms. This is found less in languages
reputed crude or rough than in refined ones. Language is exposed to
the most violent changes when the human mind is most active, for
then it considers too careful an observation of the modifications of
sound as superfluous. To this may be added a want of perception of the
poetic charm inherent in the sound. Thus it is the transition from
a more sensuous to a more intellectual mood that works changes in a
language. In other cases less noble causes are at work. Rougher organs
and less sensitive ears are productive of indifference to the principle
of harmony, and finally a prevalent practical trend may bring about
abbreviations and omissions of all kinds in its contempt for everything
that is not strictly necessary for the purpose of being understood.
While in the first period the elements still recall their origin to
man’s consciousness, there is an æsthetic pleasure in developing the
instrument of mental activity; but in the second period language
serves only the practical needs of life. In this way such a language
as English may reduce its forms so as to resemble the structure of
Chinese; but there will always remain traces of the old flexions; and
English is no more incapable of high excellences than German (Versch
282-6). What these are Humboldt, however, does not tell us.
II.--§ 9. Grimm Once More.
Humboldt here foreshadowed and probably influenced ideas to which Jacob
Grimm gave expression in two essays written in his old age and which it
will be necessary here to touch upon. In the essay on the pedantry of
the German language (_Ueber das pedantische in der deutschen sprache_,
1847), Grimm says that he has so often praised his mother-tongue that
he has acquired the right once in a while to blame it. If pedantry had
not existed already, Germans would have invented it; it is the shadowy
side of one of their virtues, painstaking accuracy and loyalty. Grimm’s
essay is an attempt at estimating a language, but on the whole it is
less comprehensive and less deep than that of Jenisch. Grimm finds
fault with such things as the ceremoniousness with which princes are
spoken to and spoken of (_Durchlauchtigster_, _allerhöchstderselbe_),
and the use of the pronoun _Sie_ in the third person plural in
addressing a single person; he speaks of the clumsiness of the
auxiliaries for the passive, the past and the future, and of the
word-order which makes the Frenchman cry impatiently “J’attends le
verbe.” He blames the use of capitals for substantives and other
peculiarities of German spelling, but gives no general statement of the
principles on which the comparative valuation of different languages
should be based, though in many passages we see that he places the old
stages of the language very much higher than the language of his own
day.
The essay on the origin of language (1851) is much more important, and
may be said to contain the mature expression of all Grimm’s thoughts
on the philosophy of language. Unfortunately, much of it is couched
in that high-flown poetical style which may be partly a consequence
of Grimm’s having approached the exact study of language through the
less exact studies of popular poetry and folklore; this style is
not conducive to clear ideas, and therefore renders the task of the
reporter very difficult indeed. Grimm at some length argues against
the possibility of language having been either created by God when he
created man or having been revealed by God to man after his creation.
The very imperfections and changeability of language speak against its
divine origin. Language as gradually developed must be the work of man
himself, and therein is different from the immutable cries and songs of
the lower creation. Nature and natural instinct have no history, but
mankind has. Man and woman were created as grown-up and marriageable
beings, and there must have been created at once more than one couple,
for if there had been only one couple, there would have been the
possibility that the one mother had borne only sons or only daughters,
further procreation being thus rendered impossible (!), not to mention
the moral objections to marriages between brother and sister. How these
once created beings, human in every respect except in language, were
able to begin talking and to find themselves understood, Grimm does not
really tell us; he uses such expressions as ‘inventors’ of words, but
apart from the symbolical value of some sounds, such as _l_ and _r_,
he thinks that the connexion of word and sense was quite arbitrary. On
the other hand, he can tell us a great deal about the first stage of
human speech: it contained only the three vowels _a_, _i_, _u_, and
only few consonant groups; every word was a monosyllable, and abstract
notions were at first absent. The existence in all (?) old languages
of masculine and feminine flexions must be due to the influence of
women on the formation of language. Through the distinction of genders
Grimm says that regularity and clearness were suddenly brought about in
everything concerning the noun as by a most happy stroke of fortune.
Endings to indicate person, number, tense and mood originated in added
pronouns and auxiliary words, which at first were loosely joined to
the root, but later coalesced with it. Besides, reduplication was used
to indicate the past; and after the absorption of the reduplicational
syllable the same effect was obtained in German through apophony.
All nouns presuppose verbs, whose material sense was applied to the
designation of things, as when G. _hahn_ (‘cock’) was thus called from
an extinct verb _hanan_, corresponding to Lat. _canere_, ‘to sing.’
In what Grimm says about the development of language it is easy to
trace the influence of Humboldt’s ideas, though they are worked out
with great originality. He discerns three stages, the last two alone
being accessible to us through historical documents. In the first
period we have the creation and growing of roots and words, in the
second the flourishing of a perfect flexion, and in the third a
tendency to thoughts, which leads to the giving up of flexion as not
yet (?) satisfactory. They may be compared to leaf, blossom and fruit,
“the beauty of human speech did not bloom in its beginning, but in its
middle period; its ripest fruits will not be gathered till some time in
the future.” He thus sums up his theory of the three stages: “Language
in its earliest form was melodious, but diffuse and straggling; in its
middle form it was full of intense poetical vigour; in our own days it
seeks to remedy the diminution of beauty by the harmony of the whole,
and is more effective though it has inferior means.” In most places
Grimm still speaks of the downward course of linguistic development;
all the oldest languages of our family “show a rich, pleasant and
admirable perfection of form, in which all material and spiritual
elements have vividly interpenetrated each other,” while in the later
developments of the same languages the inner power and subtlety of
flexion has generally been given up and destroyed, though partly
replaced by external means and auxiliary words. On the whole, then, the
history of language discloses a descent from a period of perfection to
a less perfect condition. This is the point of view that we meet with
in nearly all linguists; but there is a new note when Grimm begins
vaguely and dimly to see that the loss of flexional forms is sometimes
compensated by other things that may be equally valuable or even more
valuable; and he even, without elaborate arguments, contradicts his
own main contention when he says that “human language is retrogressive
only apparently and in particular points, but looked upon as a whole
it is progressive, and its intrinsic force is continually increasing.”
He instances the English language, which by sheer making havoc of all
old phonetic laws and by the loss of all flexions has acquired a great
force and power, such as is found perhaps in no other human language.
Its wonderfully happy structure resulted from the marriage of the two
noblest languages of Europe; therefore it was a fit vehicle for the
greatest poet of modern times, and may justly claim the right to be
called a world’s language; like the English people, it seems destined
to reign in future even more than now in all parts of the earth. This
enthusiastic panegyric forms a striking contrast to what the next great
German scholar with whom we have to deal, Schleicher, says about the
same language, which to him shows only “how rapidly the language of a
nation important both in history and literature can decline” (II. 231).
FOOTNOTES:
[2] It dates back to Vulcanius, 1597; see Streitberg, IF 35. 182.
[3] I have given a life of Rask and an appraisement of his work in the
small volume _Rasmus Rask_ (Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 1918). See also
Vilh. Thomsen, _Samlede afhandlinger_, 1. 47 ff. and 125 ff. A good
and full account of Rask’s work is found in Raumer, _Gesch._; cf. also
Paul, _Gr._ Recent short appreciations of his genius may be read in
Trombetti, _Come si fa la critica_, 1907, p. 41, Meillet, LI, p. 415,
Hirt, Idg, pp. 74 and 578.
[4] Only in one subordinate point did Rask make a mistake (_b_ = _b_),
which is all the more venial as there are extremely few examples of
this sound. Bredsdorff (_Aarsagerne_, 1821, p. 21) evidently had
the law from Rask, and gives it in the comprehensive formula which
Paul (Gr. 1. 86) misses in Rask and gives as Grimm’s meritorious
improvement on Rask. “The Germanic family has most often aspirates
where Greek has tenues, tenues where it has mediæ, and again mediæ
where it has aspirates, e.g. _fod_, Gr. _pous_; _horn_, Gr. _keras_;
_þrír_, Gr. _treis_; _padde_, Gr. _batrakhos_; _kone_, Gr. _gunē_;
_ti_, Gr. _deka_; _bærer_, Gr. _pherō_; _galde_, Gr. _kholē_; _dør_,
Gr. _thura_.” To the word ‘horn’ was appended a foot-note to the effect
that _h_ without doubt here originally was the German _ch_-sound. This
was one year before Grimm stated his law!
[5] The muddling of the negatives is Grimm’s, not the translator’s.
[6] I am therefore surprised to find that in a recent article (_Am.
Journ. of Philol._ 39. 415, 1918) Collitz praises Grimm’s view in
preference to Rask’s because he saw “an inherent connexion between
the various processes of the shifting,” which were “subdivisions of
one great law in which the formula T:A:M may be used to illustrate
the shifting (in a single language) of three different groups of
consonants and the result of a double or threefold shifting (in three
different languages) of a single group of consonants. This great law
was unknown to Rask.” Collitz recognizes that “Grimm’s law will hold
good only if we accept the term ‘aspirate’ in the broad sense in
which it is employed by J. Grimm”--but ‘broad’ here means ‘wrong’ or
‘unscientific.’ There is no _kreislauf_ in the case of initial _k_ =
_h_; only in a few of the nine series do we find three distinct stages
(as in _tres_, _three_, _drei_); here we have in Danish three stages,
of which the third is a reversal to the first (_tre_); in E. _mother_
we have five stages: _t_, _þ_, _ð_, _d_, (OE. _modor_) and again _ð_.
Is there an “inherent connexion between the various processes of this
shifting” too?
[7] Probably under the influence of Humboldt, who wrote to him
(September 1826): “Absichtlich grammatisch ist gewiss kein
vokalwechsel.”
[8] Humboldt’s relation to Bopp’s general ideas is worth studying; see
his letters to Bopp, printed as Nachtrag to S. Lefman’s _Franz Bopp,
sein leben und seine wissenschaft_ (Berlin, 1897). He is (p. 5) on the
whole of Bopp’s opinion that flexions have arisen through agglutination
of syllables, the independent meaning of which was lost; still, he
is not certain that all flexion can be explained in that way, and
especially doubts it in the case of ‘umlaut,’ under which term he here
certainly includes ‘ablaut,’ as seen by his reference (p. 12) to Greek
future _stalô_ from _stéllō_; he adds that “some flexions are at the
same time so insignificant and so widely spread in languages that I
should be inclined to call them original; for example, our _i_ of the
dative and _m_ of the same case, both of which by their sharper sound
seem intended to call attention to the peculiar nature of this case,
which does not, like the other cases, denote a simple, but a double
relation” (repeated p. 10). Humboldt doubts Bopp’s identification of
the temporal augment with the _a_ privativum. He says (p. 14) that
cases often originate from prepositions, as in American languages and
in Basque, and that he has always explained our genitive, as in G.
_manne-s_, as a remnant of _aus_. This is evidently wrong, as the _s_
of _aus_ is a special High German development from _t_, while the _s_
of the genitive is also found in languages which do not share in this
development of _t_. But the remark is interesting because, apart from
the historical proof to the contrary which we happen to possess in this
case, the derivation is no whit worse than many of the explanations
resorted to by adherents of the agglutinative theory. But Humboldt goes
on to say that in Greek and Latin he is not prepared to maintain that
one single case is to be explained in this way. Humboldt probably had
some influence on Bopp’s view of the weak preterit, for he is skeptical
with regard to the _did_ explanation and inclines to connect the ending
with the participle in _t_.
[9] Humboldt seems to be the inventor of this term (1821; see
Streitberg, IF 35. 191).