The principles of reciprocal interchange of sounds, which are actively
at work whenever new languages are coming into being, or old ones are
splitting, or falling into decay, can only be adequately apprehended by
obtaining a general but clear view of the entire scheme of philology.
The annals of H would, however, be glaringly in default if no mention
were made of its relations to foreign letters.
PHILOLOGY is a modern science. Leibnitz rescued it from the domain of
pure fancy; Sir William Jones supplied it with ground to work upon; Bopp
(a great authority on ancient Aspirates), Pott, and a host of others,
began to build. The Greeks had been impressed with the idea that their
language came from their gods; this made the study of alien tongues
appear unimportant; hence, Greek philological research ended where it
began. Analogous convictions shut the gates of progress on the most
civilized of the Shemitic races. The Romans, again, when seeking to
discover the origin of tongues, looked eastward for inspiration; but
they did not look far enough. Long generations of their successors
burrowed, like moles, in the Plains of Shinar. Grimm came, and there was
light. The name of this great German philosopher has become so
inseparably associated with the sudden strides made by modern linguistic
science, as to have raised him from the ranks of philological pioneers,
and placed him—in popular estimation—at the head and front of the whole
enterprise. Whatever be the exact degree of his merit as a discoverer or
thinker, as a successful propagator of rational views he stands a
colossus and a marvel. Labeled fragile by the sceptic, and dangerous by
the orthodox, his theories out-lived both grimaces and frowns, and
within a few years of their birth aroused Europe to the fact that a
“Babel” had been, and still was, both within and around her; and,
seemingly by miracle, they even succeeded in carrying conviction and
recognition of a truth that confuted tradition, to the very centres of
some of the ecclesiastical circles of the day. Grimm’s discoveries,
while pointing out the slow but constant changes that languages undergo,
showed also that all the languages of Europe and half those of Asia had
sprung from a common origin—and that, not the Hebrew one dogmatically
assigned to them by the Early Fathers. Fortunately for Grimm, he
published in the beginning of the nineteenth century; had he been a
contemporary of poor Galileo he might have been subjected to some
inconvenience and censure.
Grimm—who, by-the-bye, was a bigoted patriot—devoted himself chiefly to
an investigation of the Teutonic tongues, and to a study of the German
language; but the result of his labours has shown the changes that
sounds undergo when a word is being distributed among different peoples.
The LAW bearing his name is tabulated below:—
───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┬───────────────────────
Old Indo-European and │ Introduced into Low │
Classic. │ German tongues │ In High German.
│ (English, &c.) │
───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────────────────
Aspirate sounds │become soft │ hard
Soft „ │ „ hard │ Aspirate
Hard „ │ „ Aspirate │ soft
───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────────────
These rules are not without exceptions, but, especially in the case of
sounds that begin words, the exceptions are not numerous enough to
nullify the rule.