lectures on the science of language 13

lectures on the science of language 13

We have thus arrived at the time when, as we saw in an earlier part of

this lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first elementary grammar of

Greek at Rome. Empirical grammar had thus been transplanted to Rome, the

Greek grammatical terminology was translated into Latin, and in this new

Latin garb it has travelled now for nearly two thousand years over the

whole civilized world. Even in India, where a different terminology had

grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some

respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Rome, we may now hear

such words as _case_, and _gender_, and _active_ and _passive_, explained

by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are

curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination

papers of the government schools in India, such questions as—“Write the

genitive case of Siva,” seemed to reduce whole volumes of history into a

single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They

came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from

Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term _case_, or

_ptōsis_, had a philosophical meaning; at Rome, _casus_ was merely a

literal translation; the original meaning of _fall_ was lost, and the word

dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of

language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the mind. The terminology

of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics

was divided into two parts,(97) called _rhetoric_ and _dialectic_, and the

latter treated, first, “On that which signifies, or language;” secondly,

“On that which is signified, or things.” In their philosophical language

_ptōsis_, which the Romans translated by _casus_, really meant fall; that

is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling

or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried

on as to whether the name of _ptōsis_, or fall, was applicable to the

nominative; and every true Stoic would have scouted the __EXPRESSION__ of

_casus rectus_, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did

not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other words of a

sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak

of cases.

 

And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess

the meaning of _genitive_? The Latin _genitivus_ is a mere blunder, for

the Greek word _genikē_ could never mean _genitivus_. _Genitivus_, if it

is meant to express the case of origin or birth, would in Greek have been

called _gennētikē_, not _genikē_. Nor does the genitive express the

relation of son to father. For though we may say, “the son of the father,”

we may likewise say, “the father of the son.” _Genikē_, in Greek, had a

much wider, a much more philosophical meaning.(98) It meant _casus

generalis_, the general case, or rather the case which expresses the

gentus or kind. This is the real power of the genitive. If I say, “a bird

of the water,” “of the water” defines the genus to which a certain bird

belongs; it refers it to the genus of water-birds. “Man of the mountains,”

means a mountaineer. In phrases such as “son of the father,” or “father of

the son,” the genitives have the same effect. They predicate something of

the son or of the father; and if we distinguished between the sons of the

father, and the sons of the mother, the genitives would mark the class or

genus to which the sons respectively belonged. They would answer the same

purpose as the adjectives, paternal and maternal. It can be proved

etymologically that the termination of the genitive is, in most cases,

identical with those derivative suffixes by which substantives are changed

into adjectives.(99)

 

It is hardly necessary to trace the history of what I call the empirical

study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With

Dionysius Thrax the framework of grammar was finished. Later writers have

improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and

original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius

Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman

writers. We find Quintilian in the first century; Scaurus, Apollonius

Dyscolus, and his son, Herodianus, in the second; Probus and Donatus in

the fourth. After Constantine had moved the seat of government from Rome,

grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople.

There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held

professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century,

the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his

work remained an authority during the Middle Ages to nearly our own times.

We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was

followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin

at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our

system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public

schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language,

prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of

Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign

tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE IV. THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.

 

 

We traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical

study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own

school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the

first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component

parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a

terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching

languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic

value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly

intended.

 

Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was

elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature

of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions,

the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial

network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the

grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of

human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences

between the grammatical terminology of the Greeks and the Hindús, which

would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation

for the much-abused grammatical system of the schools. The Hindús are the

only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received

any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in

Sanskrit too the same system of cases, called _vibhakti_, or inflections,

the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons,

divided not exactly, but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.(100)

In Sanskrit, grammar is called _vyâkaraņa_, which means analysis or taking

to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of

Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most

ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The differences between the dialect of

these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and

preserved with a religious care. We still possess the first essays in the

grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called _prâtiśâkhyas_. These

works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper

pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same

time with observations of a grammatical character, and particularly with

those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable,

the Gaņas. These supplied that solid basis on which successive generations

of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection

in the grammar of Pâņini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the

whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of

Pâņini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical

analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything in

the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet of the real nature, and

natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing.

 

What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek

or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar

to our own tongue?

 

We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of

thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative,

the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may

be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form,

may be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas in English the

genitive is marked by a final _s_, or by the preposition _of_, it is in

Greek expressed by a final ος, in Latin by _is_. But what this ος and _is_

represent, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a

genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident

that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish

the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a

mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a

distinction would seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment

beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages

which have distinct forms for these two categories of thought. Even in

Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the nominative and

accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, it is commonly said, has no

grammar at all, that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and

conjugation, in our sense of these words; it makes no formal distinction

of the various parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c. Yet

there is no shade of thought that cannot be rendered in Chinese. The

Chinese have no more difficulty in distinguishing between “James beats

John,” and “John beats James,” than the Greeks and Romans or we ourselves.

They have no termination for the accusative, but they attain the same by

always placing the subject before, and the object after the verb, or by

employing words, before or after the noun, which clearly indicate that it

is to be taken as the object of the verb.(101) There are other languages

which have more terminations even than Greek and Latin. In Finnish there

are fifteen cases, expressive of every possible relation between the

subject and the object; but there is no accusative, no purely objective

case. In English and French the distinctive terminations of the nominative

and accusative have been worn off by phonetic corruption, and these

languages are obliged, like Chinese, to mark the subject and object by the

collocation of words. What we learn therefore at school in being taught

that _rex_ in the nominative becomes _regem_ in the accusative, is simply

a practical rule. We know when to say _rex_, and when to say _regem_. But

why the king as a subject should be called _rex_, and as an object

_regem_, remains entirely unexplained. In the same manner we learn that

_amo_ means I love, _amavi_ I loved; but why that tragical change from

_love_ to _no love_ should be represented by the simple change of _o_ to

_avi_, or, in English, by the addition of a mere _d_, is neither asked nor

answered.

 

Now if there is a science of language, these are the questions which it

will have to answer. If they cannot be answered, if we must be content

with paradigms and rules, if the terminations of nouns and verbs must be

looked upon either as conventional contrivances or as mysterious

excrescences, there is no such thing as a science of language, and we must

be satisfied with what has been called the art (τέχνη) of language, or grammar.