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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 He discerns three stages, the last two alone being accessible to us through historical documents.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" .

FOOTNOTES:

It dates back to Vulcanius, 1597; see Streitberg, IF 35. 182.

The muddling of the negatives is Grimm's, not the translator's.

Probably under the influence of Humboldt, who wrote to him : "Absichtlich grammatisch ist gewiss kein vokalwechsel."

Humboldt seems to be the inventor of this term .

MIDDLE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY

? 1. After Bopp and Grimm. ? 2. K. M. Rapp. ? 3. J. H. Bredsdorff. ? 4. August Schleicher. ? 5. Classification of Languages. ? 6. Reconstruction. ? 7. Curtius, Madvig and Specialists. ? 8. Max M?ller and Whitney.

Thanks to the labours of Bopp and Grimm and their co-workers and followers, we see also a change in the status of the study of languages. Formerly this was chiefly a handmaiden to philology--but as this word is often in English used in a sense unknown to other languages and really objectionable, namely as a synonym of study of languages, it will be necessary first to say a few words about the terminology of our science. In this book I shall use the word 'philology' in its continental sense, which is often rendered in English by the vague word 'scholarship,' meaning thereby the study of the specific culture of one nation; thus we speak of Latin philology, Greek philology, Icelandic philology, etc. The word 'linguist,' on the other hand, is not infrequently used in the sense of one who has merely a practical knowledge of some foreign language; but I think I am in accordance with a growing number of scholars in England and America if I call such a man a 'practical linguist' and apply the word 'linguist' by itself to the scientific student of language ; 'linguistics' then becomes a shorter and more convenient name for what is also called the science of language .

Now that the reader understands the sense in which I take these two terms, I may go on to say that the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a growing differentiation between philology and linguistics in consequence of the new method introduced by comparative and by historical grammar; it was nothing less than a completely new way of looking at the facts of language and trying to trace their origin. While to the philologist the Greek or Latin language, etc., was only a means to an end, to the linguist it was an end in itself. The former saw in it a valuable, and in fact an indispensable, means of gaining a first-hand knowledge of the literature which was his chief concern, but the linguist cared not for the literature as such, but studied languages for their own sake, and might even turn to languages destitute of literature because they were able to throw some light on the life of language in general or on forms in related languages. The philologist as such would not think of studying the Gothic of Wulfila, as a knowledge of that language gives access only to a translation of parts of the Bible, the ideas of which can be studied much better elsewhere; but to the linguist Gothic was extremely valuable. The differentiation, of course, is not an absolute one; besides being linguists in the new sense, Rask was an Icelandic philologist, Bopp a Sanskrit philologist, and Grimm a German philologist; but the tendency towards the emancipation of linguistics was very strong in them, and some of their pupils were pure linguists and did no work in philology.

In breaking away from philology and claiming for linguistics the rank of a new and independent science, the partisans of the new doctrine were apt to think that not only had they discovered a new method, but that the object of their study was different from that of the philologists, even when they were both concerned with language. While the philologist looked upon language as part of the culture of some nation, the linguist looked upon it as a natural object; and when in the beginning of the nineteenth century philosophers began to divide all sciences into the two sharply separated classes of mental and natural sciences , linguists would often reckon their science among the latter. There was in this a certain amount of pride or boastfulness, for on account of the rapid rise and splendid achievements of the natural sciences at that time, it began to be a matter of common belief that they were superior to, and were possessed of a more scientific method than, the other class--the same view that finds an expression in the ordinary English usage, according to which 'science' means natural science and the other domains of human knowledge are termed the 'arts' or the 'humanities.'

We see the new point of view in occasional utterances of the pioneers of linguistic science. Rask expressly says that "Language is a natural object and its study resembles natural history" ; but when he repeats the same sentence it appears that he is thinking of language as opposed to the more artificial writing, and the contrast is not between mental and natural science, but between art and nature, between what can and what cannot be consciously modified by man--it is really a different question.

Bopp, in his review of Grimm , says: "Languages are to be considered organic natural bodies, which are formed according to fixed laws, develop as possessing an inner principle of life, and gradually die out because they do not understand themselves any longer , and therefore cast off or mutilate their members or forms, which were at first significant, but gradually have become more of an extrinsic mass.... It is not possible to determine how long languages may preserve their full vigour of life and of procreation," etc. This is highly figurative language which should not be taken at its face value; but expressions like these, and the constant use of such words as 'organic' and 'inorganic' in speaking of formations in languages, and 'organism' of the whole language, would tend to widen the gulf between the philological and the linguistic point of view. Bopp himself never consistently followed the naturalistic way of looking at language, but in ? 4 of this chapter we shall see that Schleicher was not afraid of going to extremes and building up a consistent natural science of language.

The cleavage between philology and linguistics did not take place without arousing warm feeling. Classical scholars disliked the intrusion of Sanskrit everywhere; they did not know that language and did not see the use of it. They resented the way in which the new science wanted to reconstruct Latin and Greek grammar and to substitute new explanations for those which had always been accepted. Those Sanskritists chatted of guna and vrddhi and other barbaric terms, and even ventured to talk of a locative case in Latin, as if the number of cases had not been settled once for all long ago!

Next, Bopp and his nearest successors were chiefly occupied with finding likenesses between the languages treated and discovering things that united them. This was quite natural in the first stage of the new science, but sometimes led to one-sidedness, the characteristic individuality of each language being lost sight of, while forms from many countries and many times were mixed up in a hotch-potch. Rask, on account of his whole mental equipment, was less liable to this danger than most of his contemporaries; but Pott was evidently right when he warned his fellow-students that their comparative linguistics should be supplemented by separative linguistics , as it has been to a great extent in recent years.

Still another feature of the linguistic science of those days is the almost exclusive occupation of the student with dead languages. It was quite natural that the earliest comparativists should first give their attention to the oldest stages of the languages compared, since these alone enabled them to prove the essential kinship between the different members of the great Aryan family. In Grimm's grammar nearly all the space is taken up with Gothic, Old High German, Old Norse, etc., and comparatively little is said about recent developments of the same languages. In Bopp's comparative grammar classical Greek and Latin are, of course, treated carefully, but Modern Greek and the Romanic languages are not mentioned , such later developments being left to specialists who were more or less considered to be outside the sphere of Comparative Linguistics and even of the science of language in general, though it would have been a much more correct view to include them in both, and though much more could really be learnt of the life of language from these studies than from comparisons made in the spirit of Bopp.

The earlier stages of different languages, which were compared by linguists, were, of course, accessible only through the medium of writing; we have seen that the early linguists spoke constantly of letters and not of sounds. But this vitiated their whole outlook on languages. These were scarcely ever studied at first-hand, and neither in Bopp nor in Grimm nor in Pott or Benfey do we find such first-hand observations of living spoken languages as play a great r?le in the writings of Rask and impart an atmosphere of soundness to his whole manner of looking at languages. If languages were called natural objects, they were not yet studied as such or by truly naturalistic methods.

When living dialects were studied, the interest constantly centred round the archaic traits in them; every survival of an old form, every trace of old sounds that had been dropped in the standard speech, was greeted with enthusiasm, and the significance of these old characteristics greatly exaggerated, the general impression being that popular dialects were always much more conservative than the speech of educated people. It was reserved for a much later time to prove that this view is completely erroneous, and that popular dialects, in spite of many archaic details, are on the whole further developed than the various standard languages with their stronger tradition and literary reminiscences.

In Rapp, and even more in Bredsdorff, we get a whiff of the scientific atmosphere of a much later time; but most of the linguists of the twenties and following decades moved in essentially the same grooves as Bopp and Grimm, and it will not be necessary here to deal in detail with their work.

What makes Schleicher particularly important for the purposes of this volume is the fact that in a long series of publications he put forth not only details of his science, but original and comprehensive views on the fundamental questions of linguistic theory, and that these had great influence on the linguistic philosophy of the following decades. He was, perhaps, the most consistent as well as one of the clearest of linguistic thinkers, and his views therefore deserve to be examined in detail and with the greatest care.

The Introductions to Schleicher's two first volumes are entirely Hegelian, though with a characteristic difference, for in the first he says that the changes to be seen in the realm of languages are decidedly historical and in no way resemble the changes that we may observe in nature, for "however manifold these may be, they never show anything but a circular course that repeats itself continually" , while in language, as in everything mental, we may see new things that have never existed before. One generation of animals or plants is like another; the skill of animals has no history, as human art has; language is specifically human and mental: its development is therefore analogous to history, for in both we see a continual progress to new phases. In Schleicher's second volume, however, this view is expressly rejected in its main part, because Schleicher now wants to emphasize the natural character of language: it is true, he now says, that language shows a 'werden' which may be termed history in the wider sense of this word, but which is found in its purest form in nature; for instance, in the growing of a plant. Language belongs to the natural sphere, not to the sphere of free mental activity, and this must be our starting-point if we would discover the method of linguistic science .

Now I, for one, fail to understand how this can be what Schleicher believes it to be, "a refutation of the objection that language is nothing but a consequence of the activity of these organs." The sun exists independently of the human observer; but there could be no such thing as language if there was not besides the speaker a listener who might become a speaker in his turn. Schleicher speaks continually in his pamphlet as if structural differences in the brain and organs of speech were the real language, and as if it were only for want of an adequate method of examining this hidden structure that we had to content ourselves with studying language in its outward manifestation as audible speech. But this is certainly on the face of it preposterous, and scarcely needs any serious refutation. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a language must be in the hearing and understanding; but in order to be heard words must first be spoken, and in these two activities the real essence of language must consist, and these two activities are the primary object of the science of language.

Schleicher goes on to meet another objection that may be made to his view of the 'substantiality of language,' namely, that drawn from the power of learning other languages. Schleicher doubts the possibility of learning another language to perfection; he would admit this only in the case of a man who exchanged his mother-tongue for another in his earliest youth; "but then he becomes by that very fact a different being from what he was: brain and organs of speech develop in another direction." If Mr. So-and-So is said to speak and write German, English and French equally well, Schleicher first inclines to doubt the fact; and then, granting that the same individual may "be at the same time a German, a Frenchman and an Englishman," he asks us to remember that all these three languages belong to the same family and may, from a broader point of view, be termed species of the same language; but he denies the possibility of anyone's being equally at home in Chinese and German, or in Arabic and Hottentot, etc., because these languages are totally different in their innermost essence. Schleicher has to admit that our organs are to some extent flexible and capable of acquiring activities that they had not at first; but one definite function is and remains nevertheless the only natural one, and thus "the possibility of a man's acquiring foreign languages more or less perfectly is no objection to our seeing the material basis of language in the structure of the brain and organs of speech."

Even if we admit that Schleicher is so far right that in nearly all cases of bilingualism one language comes more naturally than the other, he certainly exaggerates the difference, which is always one of degree; and at any rate his final conclusion is wrong, for we might with the same amount of justice say that a man who has first learned to play the piano has acquired the structure of brain and fingers peculiar to a pianist, and that it is then unnatural for him also to learn to play the violin, because that would imply a different structure of these organs. In all these cases we have to do with a definite proficiency or skill, which can only be obtained by constant practice, though of course one man may be better predisposed by nature for it than another; but then it is also the fact that people who speak no foreign language attain to very different degrees of proficiency in the use of their mother-tongue. It cannot be said too emphatically that we have here a fundamental question, and that Schleicher's view can never lead to a true conception of what language is, or to a real insight into its changes and historical development.

Schleicher goes on to say that the classification of mankind into races should not be based on the formation of the skull or on the character of the hair, or any such external criteria, as they are by no means constant, but rather on language, because this is a thoroughly constant criterion. This alone would give a perfectly natural system, one, for instance, in which all Turks would be classed together, while otherwise the Osmanli Turk belongs to the 'Caucasian' race and the so-called Tataric Turks to the 'Mongolian' race; on the other hand, the Magyar and the Basque are not physically to be distinguished from the Indo-European, though their languages are widely dissimilar. According to Schleicher, therefore, the natural system of languages is also the natural system of mankind, for language is closely connected with the whole higher life of men, which is therefore taken into consideration in and with their language. In this book I am not concerned with the ethnographical division of mankind into races, and I therefore must content myself with saying that the very examples adduced by Schleicher seem to me to militate against his theory that a division of mankind based on language is the natural one: are we to reckon the Basque's son, who speaks nothing but French as belonging to a different race from his father? And does not Schleicher contradict himself when on p. 16 he writes that language is "ein v?llig constantes merkmal," and p. 20 that it is "in fortw?hrender ver?nderung begriffen"? So far as I see, Schleicher never expressly says that he thinks that the physical structure conditioning the structure of a man's language is hereditary, though some of his expressions point that way, and that may be what he means by the expression 'constant.' In other places he allows external conditions of life to exercise some influence on the character of a language, as when languages of neighbouring peoples are similar . On such points, however, he gives only a few hints and suggestions.

The reader of the above survey of previous classifications will easily see that in the matter itself Schleicher adds very little of his own. Even the expressions, which are here given throughout in Schleicher's own words, are in some cases recognizable as identical with, or closely similar to, those of earlier scholars.

He made one coherent system out of ideas of classification and development already found in others. What is new is the philosophical substructure of Hegelian origin, and there can be no doubt that Schleicher imagined that by this addition he contributed very much towards giving stability and durability to the whole system. And yet this proved to be the least stable and durable part of the structure, and as a matter of fact the Hegelian reasoning is not repeated by a single one of those who give their adherence to the classification. Nor can it be said to carry conviction, and undoubtedly it has seemed to most linguists at the same time too rigid and too unreal to have any importance.

But apart from the philosophical argument the classification proved very successful in the particular shape it had found in Schleicher. Its adoption into two such widely read works as Max M?ller's and Whitney's Lectures on the Science of Language contributed very much to the popularity of the system, though the former's attempt at ascribing to the tripartition a sociological importance by saying that juxtaposition is characteristic of the 'family stage,' agglutination of 'the nomadic stage' and amalgamation of the 'political stage' of human society was hardly taken seriously by anybody.

From a purely linguistic point of view there are many objections to the usual classification, and it will be well here to bring them together, though this will mean an interruption of the historical survey which is the main object of these chapters.

In a subsequent part of this work I shall deal with the tripartition as representing three successive stages in the development of such languages as our own , and try to show that Schleicher's view is not borne out by the facts of linguistic history, which give us a totally different picture of development.

From both points of view, then, I think that the classification here considered deserves to be shelved among the hasty generalizations in which the history of every branch of science is unfortunately so rich.

AVIS AKVASAS KA

Avis, jasmin varna na ? ast, dadarka akvams, tam, v?gham garum vaghantam, tam, bh?ram magham, tam, manum ?ku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ? vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam.

Akv?sas ? vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvantsvas: manus patis varn?m avis?ms karnanti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varn? na asti.

Tat kukruvants avis agram ? bhugat.

SCHAF UND ROSSE

schaf, welchem wolle nicht war sah rosse, das schweren wagen fahrend, das grosse last, das menschen schnell tragend. schaf sprach rossen: herz wird beengt mir , sehend menschen rosse treibend.

rosse sprachen: H?re schaf, herz wird beengt gesehend-habenden : mensch, herr macht wolle schafe warmen kleide sich und schafen ist nicht wolle .

Dies geh?rt habend bog schaf feld .

FOOTNOTES:

It has been objected to the use of Aryan in this wide sense that the name is also used in the restricted sense of Indian + Iranic; but no separate name is needed for that small group other than Indo-Iranic.

In Lefmann's book on Bopp, pp. 292 and 299, there are some interesting quotations on this point.

A young German linguist, to whom I sent the pamphlet early in 1886, wrote to me: "Wenn man sich den spass machte und das ding ?bersetzte mit der bemerkung, es sei vor vier jahren erschienen, wer w?rde einem nicht trauen? Merkw?rdig, dass solche sachen so unbemerkt, 'dem kleinen veilchen gleich,' dahinschwinden k?nnen." A short time afterwards the pamphlet was reprinted with a short preface by Vilh. Thomsen .

END OF NINETEENTH CENTURY

? 1. Achievements about 1870. ? 2. New Discoveries. ? 3. Phonetic Laws and Analogy. ? 4. General Tendencies.

The new views held in regard to Aryan vowels also resulted in a thorough revision of the theory of apophony . The great mass of Aryan vowel alternations were shown to form a vast and singularly consistent system, the main features of which may be gathered from the following tabulation of a few select Greek examples, arranged into three columns, each representing one 'grade':

p?tomai p?t? ept?mai ?kh? ?khos ?skhon

le?p? l?loipa ?lipon

pe?thomai -- eputh?m?n

d?rkomai d?dorka ?drakon

te?n? t?nos tat?s

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