lectures on the science of language 11

lectures on the science of language 11

Now, the teaching of languages, though at present so large a profession,

is comparatively a very modern invention. No ancient Greek ever thought of

learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world

into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by

adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian

neighbors. He considered it a privilege to speak Greek, and even dialects

closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes

time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express

oneself in any but one’s own language. The Poles called their neighbors,

the Germans, _Niemiec_, _niemy_ meaning _dumb_;(58) just as the Greeks

called the Barbarians _Aglossoi_, or speechless. The name which the

Germans gave to their neighbors, the Celts, _Walh_ in old High German,

_vealh_ in Anglo-Saxon, the modern _Welsh_, is supposed to be the same as

the Sanskrit _mlechha_, and means a person who talks indistinctly.(59)

 

Even when the Greeks began to feel the necessity of communicating with

foreign nations, when they felt a desire of learning their idioms, the

problem was by no means solved. For how was a foreign language to be

learnt as long as either party could only speak their own? The problem was

almost as difficult as when, as we are told by some persons, the first

men, as yet speechless, came together in order to invent speech, and to

discuss the most appropriate names that should be given to the perceptions

of the senses and the abstractions of the mind. At first, it must be

supposed that the Greek learned foreign languages very much as children

learn their own. The interpreters mentioned by ancient historians were

probably children of parents speaking different languages. The son of a

Scythian and a Greek would naturally learn the utterances both of his

father and mother, and the lucrative nature of his services would not fail

to increase the supply. We are told, though on rather mythical authority,

that the Greeks were astonished at the multiplicity of languages which

they encountered during the Argonautic expedition, and that they were much

inconvenienced by the want of skilful interpreters.(60) We need not wonder

at this, for the English army was hardly better off than the army of

Jason; and such is the variety of dialects spoken in the Caucasian

Isthmus, that it is still called by the inhabitants “the Mountain of

Languages.” If we turn our eyes from these mythical ages to the historical

times of Greece, we find that trade gave the first encouragement to the

profession of interpreters. Herodotus tells us (iv. 24), that caravans of

Greek merchants, following the course of the Volga upwards to the Oural

mountains, were accompanied by seven interpreters, speaking seven

different languages. These must have comprised Slavonic, Tataric, and

Finnic dialects, spoken in those countries in the time of Herodotus, as

they are at the present day. The wars with Persia first familiarized the

Greeks with the idea that other nations also possessed real languages.

Themistocles studied Persian, and is said to have spoken it fluently. The

expedition of Alexander contributed still more powerfully to a knowledge

of other nations and languages. But when Alexander went to converse with

the Brahmans, who were even then considered by the Greeks as the guardians

of a most ancient and mysterious wisdom, their answers had to be

translated by so many interpreters that one of the Brahmans remarked, they

must become like water that had passed through many impure channels.(61)

We hear, indeed, of more ancient Greek travellers, and it is difficult to

understand how, in those early times, anybody could have travelled without

a certain knowledge of the language of the people through whose camps and

villages and towns he had to pass. Many of these travels, however,

particularly those which are said to have extended as far as India, are

mere inventions of later writers.(62) Lycurgus may have travelled to Spain

and Africa, he certainly did not proceed to India, nor is there any

mention of his intercourse with the Indian Gymnosophists before

Aristocrates, who lived about 100 B. C. The travels of Pythagoras are

equally mythical; they are inventions of Alexandrian writers, who believed

that all wisdom must have flowed from the East. There is better authority

for believing that Democritus went to Egypt and Babylon, but his more

distant travels to India are likewise legendary. Herodotus, though he

travelled in Egypt and Persia, never gives us to understand that he was

able to converse in any but his own language.

 

As far as we can tell, the barbarians seem to have possessed a greater

facility for acquiring languages than either Greeks or Romans. Soon after

the Macedonian conquest, we find(63) _Berosus_ in Babylon, _Menander_ in

Tyre, and _Manetho_ in Egypt, compiling, from original sources, the annals

of their countries.(64) Their works were written in Greek, and for the

Greeks. The native language of Berosus was Babylonian, of Menander

Phenician, of Manetho Egyptian. Berosus was able to read the cuneiform

documents of Babylonia with the same ease with which Manetho read the

papyri of Egypt. The almost contemporaneous appearance of three such men,

barbarians by birth and language, who were anxious to save the histories

of their countries from total oblivion, by entrusting them to the keeping

of their conquerors, the Greeks, is highly significant. But what is

likewise significant, and by no means creditable to the Greek or

Macedonian conquerors, is the small value which they seem to have set on

these works. They have all been lost, and are known to us by fragments

only, though there can be little doubt that the work of Berosus would have

been an invaluable guide to the student of the cuneiform inscriptions and

of Babylonian history, and that Manetho, if preserved complete, would have

saved us volumes of controversy on Egyptian chronology. We learn, however,

from the almost simultaneous appearance of these works, that soon after

the epoch marked by Alexander’s conquests in the East, the Greek language

was studied and cultivated by literary men of barbarian origin, though we

should look in vain for any Greek learning or employing any but his own

tongue for literary purposes. We hear of no intellectual intercourse

between Greeks and barbarians before the days of Alexander and Alexandria.

At Alexandria, various nations, speaking different languages, and

believing in different gods, were brought together. Though primarily

engaged in mercantile speculations, it was but natural that in their

moments of leisure they should hold discourse on their native countries,

their gods, their kings, their law-givers, and poets. Besides, there were

Greeks at Alexandria who were engaged in the study of antiquity, and who

knew how to ask questions from men coming from any country of the world.

The pretension of the Egyptians to a fabulous antiquity, the belief of the

Jews in the sacred character of their laws, the faith of the Persians in

the writings of Zoroaster, all these were fit subjects for discussion in

the halls and libraries of Alexandria. We probably owe the translation of

the Old Testament, the Septuagint, to this spirit of literary inquiry

which was patronized at Alexandria by the Ptolemies.(65) The writings of

Zoroaster also, the Zend-Avesta, would seem to have been rendered into

Greek about the same time. For Hermippus, who is said by Pliny to have

translated the writings of Zoroaster, was in all probability

Hermippus,(66) the Peripatetic philosopher, the pupil of Callimachus, one

of the most learned scholars at Alexandria.

 

But although we find at Alexandria these and similar traces of a general

interest having been excited by the literatures of other nations, there is

no evidence which would lead us to suppose that their languages also had

become the subject of scientific inquiry. It was not through the study of

other languages, but through the study of the ancient dialects of their

own language, that the Greeks at Alexandria were first led to what we

should call critical and philological studies. The critical study of Greek

took its origin at Alexandria, and it was chiefly based on the text of

Homer. The general outline of grammar existed, as I remarked before, at an

earlier period. It grew up in the schools of Greek philosophers.(67) Plato

knew of noun and verb as the two component parts of speech. Aristotle

added conjunctions and articles. He likewise observed the distinctions of

number and case. But neither Plato nor Aristotle paid much attention to

the forms of language which corresponded to these forms of thought, nor

had they any inducement to reduce them to any practical rules. With

Aristotle the verb or _rhēmha_ is hardly more than predicate, and in

sentences such as “the snow is white,” he would have called _white_ a

verb. The first who reduced the actual forms of language to something like

order were the scholars of Alexandria. Their chief occupation was to

publish correct texts of the Greek classics, and particularly of Homer.

They were forced, therefore, to pay attention to the exact forms of Greek

grammar. The MSS. sent to Alexandria and Pergamus from different parts of

Greece varied considerably, and it could only be determined by careful

observation which forms were to be tolerated in Homer and which were not.

Their editions of Homer were not only _ekdoseis_, a Greek word literally

rendered in Latin by _editio_, _i.e._ issues of books, but _diorthōseis_,

that is to say, critical editions. There were different schools, opposed

to each other in their views of the language of Homer. Each reading that

was adopted by Zenodotus or Aristarchus had to be defended, and this could

only be done by establishing general rules on the grammar of the Homeric

poems. Did Homer use the article? Did he use it before proper names? These

and similar questions had to be settled, and as one or the other view was

adopted by the editors, the text of these ancient poems was changed by

more or less violent emendations. New technical terms were required for

distinguishing, for instance, the article, if once recognized, from the

demonstrative pronoun. _Article_ is a literal translation of the Greek

word _arthron_. _Arthron_ (Lat. artus) means the socket of a joint. The

word was first used by Aristotle, and with him it could only mean words

which formed, as it were, the sockets in which the members of a sentence

moved. In such a sentence as: “Whoever did it, he shall suffer for it,”

Greek grammarians would have called the demonstrative pronoun _he_ the

first socket, and the relative pronoun _who_, the second socket;(68) and

before Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, 250 B. C., all

pronouns were simply classed as sockets or articles of speech. He was the

first to introduce a distinction between personal pronouns or

_antonymiai_, and the mere articles or articulations of speech, which

henceforth retained the name of _arthra_. This distinction was very

necessary, and it was, no doubt, suggested to him by his emendations of

the text of Homer, Zenodotus being the first who restored the article

before proper names in the Iliad and Odyssey. Who, in speaking now of the

definite or indefinite article, thinks of the origin and original meaning

of the word, and of the time which it took before it could become what it

is now, a technical term familiar to every school-boy?

 

Again, to take another illustration of the influence which the critical

study of Homer at Alexandria exercised on the development of grammatical

terminology,—we see that the first idea of numbers, of a singular and a

plural, was fixed and defined by the philosopher. But Aristotle had no

such technical terms as singular and plural; and he does not even allude

to the dual. He only speaks of the cases which express one or many, though

with him _case_, or _ptōsis_, had a very different meaning from what it

has in our grammars. The terms singular and plural were not invented till

they were wanted, and they were first wanted by the grammarians.

Zenodotus, the editor of Homer, was the first to observe the use of the

dual in the Homeric poems, and, with the usual zeal of discoverers, he has

altered many a plural into a dual when there was no necessity for it.

 

The scholars of Alexandria, therefore, and of the rival academy of

Pergamus, were the first who studied the Greek language critically, that

is to say, who analyzed the language, arranged it under general

categories, distinguished the various parts of speech, invented proper

technical terms for the various functions of words, observed the more or

less correct usage of certain poets, marked the difference between

obsolete and classical forms, and published long and learned treatises on

all these subjects. Their works mark a great era in the history of the

science of language. But there was still a step to be made before we can

expect to meet with a real practical or elementary grammar of the Greek

language. Now the first real Greek grammar was that of _Dionysius Thrax_.

It is still in existence, and though its genuineness has been doubted,

these doubts have been completely disposed of.

 

But who was Dionysius Thrax? His father, as we learn from his name, was a

Thracian; but Dionysius himself lived at Alexandria, and was a pupil of

the famous critic and editor of Homer, Aristarchus.(69) Dionysius

afterwards went to Rome, where he taught about the time of Pompey. Now

here we see a new feature in the history of mankind. A Greek, a pupil of

Aristarchus, settles at Rome, and writes a practical grammar of the Greek

language—of course, for the benefit of his young Roman pupils. He was not

the inventor of grammatical science. Nearly all the framework of grammar,

as we saw, was supplied to him through the labors of his predecessors from

Plato to Aristarchus. But he was the first who applied the results of

former philosophers and critics to the practical purpose of teaching

Greek; and, what is most important, of teaching Greek not to Greeks, who knew Greek and only wanted the theory of their language, but to Romans who had to be taught the declensions and conjugations, regular and irregular.