lectures on the science of language 10

lectures on the science of language 10

These two axioms are, in reality, but one, as we shall see when we examine

them more closely. There is hardly a language which in one sense may not

be called a mixed language. No nation or tribe was ever so completely

isolated as not to admit the importation of a certain number of foreign

words. In some instances these imported words have changed the whole

native aspect of the language, and have even acquired a majority over the

native element. Turkish is a Turanian dialect; its grammar is purely

Tataric or Turanian. The Turks, however, possessed but a small literature

and narrow civilization before they were converted to Mohammedanism. Now,

the language of Mohammed was Arabic, a branch of the Semitic family,

closely allied to Hebrew and Syriac. Together with the Koran, and their

law and religion, the Turks learned from the Arabs, their conquerors, many

of the arts and sciences connected with a more advanced stage of

civilization. Arabic became to the Turks what Latin was to the Germans

during the Middle Ages; and there is hardly a word in the higher

intellectual terminology of Arabic, that might not be used, more or less

naturally, by a writer in Turkish. But the Arabs, again, at the very

outset of their career of conquest and conversion, had been, in science,

art, literature, and polite manners, the pupils of the Persians, whom they

had conquered; they stood to them in the same relation as the Romans stood

to the Greeks. Now, the Persians speak a language which is neither

Semitic, like Arabic, nor Turanian, like Turkish; it is a branch of the

Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. A large infusion of Persian words

thus found its way into Arabic, and through Arabic into Turkish; and the

result is that at the present moment the Turkish language, as spoken by

the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so entirely overgrown with Persian

and Arabic words, that a common clod from the country understands but

little of the so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is exactly the same as

the grammar which he uses in his Tataric utterance.

 

There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the

most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have

brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of

England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish,

Italian, German—nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words, lie mixed

together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone it

would be impossible to classify English with any other of the established

stocks and stems of human speech. Leaving out of consideration the smaller

ingredients, we find, on comparing the Teutonic with the Latin, or

Neo-Latin or Norman elements in English, that the latter have a decided

majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. This may seem incredible; and if

we simply took a page of any English book, and counted therein the words

of purely Saxon and Latin origin, the majority would be no doubt on the

Saxon side. The articles, pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, all

of which are of Saxon growth, occur over and over again in one and the

same page. Thus, Hickes maintained that nine tenths of the English

dictionary were Saxon, because there were only three words of Latin origin

in the Lord’s prayer. Sharon Turner, who extended his observations over a

larger field, came to the conclusion that the relation of Norman to Saxon

was as four to six. Another writer, who estimates the whole number of

English words at 38,000, assigns 23,000 to a Saxon, and 15,000 to a

classical source. On taking, however, a more accurate inventory, and

counting every word in the dictionaries of Robertson and Webster, M.

Thommerel has established the fact that of the sum total of 43,566 words,

29,853 came from classical, 13,230 from Teutonic, and the rest from

miscellaneous sources.(54) On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore,

and treating English as a mixed language, it would have to be classified

together with French, Italian, and Spanish, as one of the Romance or

Neo-Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary,

can never be mixed in their grammar. Hervas was told by missionaries that

in the middle of the eighteenth century the Araucans used hardly a single

word which was not Spanish, though they preserved both the grammar and the

syntax of their own native speech.(55) This is the reason why grammar is

made the criterion of the relationship and the base of the classification

in almost all languages; and it follows, therefore, as a matter of course,

that in the classification and in the science of language, it is

impossible to admit the existence of a mixed idiom. We may form whole

sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Romance words; yet

whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of

Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called grammar in English is little

more than the terminations of the genitive singular, and nominative plural

of nouns, the degrees of comparison, and a few of the persons and tenses

of the verb. Yet the single _s_, used as the exponent of the third person

singular of the indicative present, is irrefragable evidence that in a

scientific classification of languages, English, though it did not retain

a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be classed as Saxon, and as a

branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech. In

ancient and less matured languages, grammar, or the formal part of human

speech, is far more abundantly developed than in English; and it is,

therefore, a much safer guide for discovering a family likeness in

scattered members of the same family. There are languages in which there

is no trace of what we are accustomed to call grammar; for instance,

ancient Chinese; there are others in which we can still watch the growth

of grammar, or, more correctly, the gradual lapse of material into merely

formal elements. In these languages new principles of classification will

have to be applied, such as are suggested by the study of natural history;

and we shall have to be satisfied with the criteria of a morphological

affinity, instead of those of a genealogical relationship.

 

I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objections which threatened to

deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the

circle of the physical sciences. We shall see in our next lecture what the

history of our science has been from its beginning to the present day, and

how far it may be said to have passed through the three stages, the

empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the

childhood, the youth, and the manhood of every one of the natural

sciences.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE III. THE EMPIRICAL STAGE.

 

 

We begin to-day to trace the historical progress of the science of

language in its three stages, the _Empirical_, the _Classificatory_, and

the _Theoretical_. As a general rule each physical science begins with

analysis, proceeds to classification, and ends with theory; but, as I

pointed out in my first lecture, there are frequent exceptions to this

rule, and it is by no means uncommon to find that philosophical

speculations, which properly belong to the last or theoretical stage, were

attempted in physical sciences long before the necessary evidence had been

collected or arranged. Thus, we find that the science of language, in the

only two countries where we can watch its origin and history—in India and

Greece—rushes at once into theories about the mysterious nature of speech,

and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel

without ever having seen the animal or the desert. The Brahmans, in the

hymns of the Veda, raised language to the rank of a deity, as they did

with all things of which they knew not what they were. They addressed

hymns to her in which she is said to have been with the gods from the

beginning, achieving wondrous things, and never revealed to man except in

part. In the Bráhmaņas, language is called the cow, breath the bull, and

their young is said to be the mind of man.(56) Brahman, the highest being,

is said to be known through speech, nay, speech herself is called the

Supreme Brahman. At a very early period, however, the Brahmans recovered

from their raptures about language, and set to work with wonderful skill

dissecting her sacred body. Their achievements in grammatical analysis,

which date from the sixth century, B. C., are still unsurpassed in the

grammatical literature of any nation. The idea of reducing a whole

language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted

before the sixteenth century by Henry Estienne,(57) was perfectly familiar

to the Brahmans, at least 500 B. C.

 

The Greeks, though they did not raise language to the rank of a deity,

paid her, nevertheless, the greatest honors in their ancient schools of

philosophy. There is hardly one of their representative philosophers who

has not left some saying on the nature of language. The world without, or

nature, and the world within, or mind, did not excite more wonder and

elicit deeper oracles of wisdom from the ancient sages of Greece than

language, the image of both, of nature and of mind. “What is language?”

was a question asked quite as early as “What am I?” and, “What is all this

world around me?” The problem of language was in fact a recognized

battle-field for the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, and we

shall have to glance at their early guesses on the nature of human speech,

when we come to consider the third or theoretical stage in the science of

language.

 

At present, we have to look for the early traces of the first or empirical

stage. And here it might seem doubtful what was the real work to be

assigned to this stage. What can be meant by the empirical treatment of

language? Who were the men that did for language what the sailor did for

his stars, the miner for his minerals, the gardener for his flowers? Who

was the first to give any thought to language?—to distinguish between its

component parts, between nouns and verbs, between articles and pronouns,

between the nominative and accusative, the active and passive? Who

invented these terms, and for what purpose were they invented?

 

We must be careful in answering these questions, for, as I said before,

the merely empirical analysis of language was preceded in Greece by more

general inquiries into the nature of thought and language; and the result

has been that many of the technical terms which form the nomenclature of

empirical grammar, existed in the schools of philosophy long before they

were handed over, ready made, to the grammarian. The distinction of noun

and verb, or more correctly, of subject and predicate, was the work of

philosophers. Even the technical terms of case, of number, and gender,

were coined at a very early time for the purpose of entering into the

nature of thought; not for the practical purpose of analyzing the forms of

language. This, their practical application to the spoken language of

Greece, was the work of a later generation. It was the teacher of

languages who first compared the categories of thought with the realities

of the Greek language. It was he who transferred the terminology of

Aristotle and the Stoics from thought to speech, from logic to grammar;

and thus opened the first roads into the impervious wilderness of spoken

speech. In doing this, the grammarian had to alter the strict acceptation

of many of the terms which he borrowed from the philosopher, and he had to

coin others before he could lay hold of all the facts of language even in

the roughest manner. For, indeed, the distinction between noun and verb,

between active and passive, between nominative and accusative, does not

help us much towards a scientific analysis of language. It is no more than

a first grasp, and it can only be compared with the most elementary

terminology in other branches of human knowledge. Nevertheless, it was a

beginning, a very important beginning; and if we preserve in our histories

of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the four

physical elements, the names of a Thales and Anaximenes, we ought not to

forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language—the

founders of one of the most useful and most successful branches of

philosophy—the first Grammarians.

 

Grammar then, in the usual sense of the word, or the merely formal and

empirical analysis of language, owes its origin, like all other sciences,

to a very natural and practical want. The first practical grammarian was

the first practical teacher of languages, and if we want to know the

beginnings of the science of language, we must try to find out at what

time in the history of the world, and under what circumstances, people

first thought of learning any language besides their own. At _that_ time

we shall find the first practical grammar, and not till then. Much may

have been ready at hand through the less interested researches of

philosophers, and likewise through the critical studies of the scholars of

Alexandria on the ancient forms of their language as preserved in the

Homeric poems. But rules of declension and conjugation, paradigms of regular and irregular nouns and verbs, observations on syntax, and the like, these are the work of the teachers of languages, and of no one else.