lectures on the science of language 18

lectures on the science of language 18

A few years later (1795) he had arrived at more definite views on the

relation of Sanskrit to Greek; and he writes,(163) “Mr. Wilkins has proved

to my conviction such a resemblance betwixt the Greek and the Shanscrit,

that the one must be a dialect of the other, or both of some original

language. Now the Greek is certainly not a dialect of the Shanscrit, any

more than the Shanscrit is of the Greek. They must, therefore, be both

dialects of the same language; and that language could be no other than

the language of Egypt, brought into India by Osiris, of which,

undoubtedly, the Greek was a dialect, as I think I have proved.”

 

Into these theories of Lord Monboddo’s on Egypt and Osiris, we need not

inquire at present. But it may be of interest to give one other extract,

in order to show how well, apart from his men with, and his monkeys

without, tails, Lord Monboddo could sift and handle the evidence that was

placed before him:—

 

“To apply these observations to the similarities which Mr. Wilkins has

discovered betwixt the Shanscrit and the Greek;—I will begin with these

words, which must have been original words in all languages, as the things

denoted by them must have been known in the first ages of civility, and

have got names; so that it is impossible that one language could have

borrowed them from another, unless it was a derivative or dialect of that

language. Of this kind are the names of numbers, of the members of the

human body, and of relations, such as that of father, mother, and brother.

And first, as to numbers, the use of which must have been coeval with

civil society. The words in the Shanscrit for the numbers from one to ten

are, _ek_, _dwee_, _tree_, _chatoor_, _panch_, _shat_, _sapt_, _aght_,

_nava_, _das_, which certainly have an affinity to the Greek or Latin

names for those numbers. Then they proceed towards twenty, saying ten and

one, ten and two, and so forth, till they come to twenty; for their

arithmetic is decimal as well as ours. Twenty they express by the word

_veensatee_. Then they go on till they come to thirty, which they express

by the word _treensat_, of which the word expressing three is part of the

composition, as well as it is of the Greek and Latin names for those

numbers. And in like manner they go on expressing forty, fifty, &c., by a

like composition with the words expressing simple numerals, namely, four,

five, &c., till they come to the number one hundred, which they express by

_sat_, a word different from either the Greek or Latin name for that

number. But, in this numeration, there is a very remarkable conformity

betwixt the word in Shanscrit expressing twenty or twice ten, and the

words in Greek and Latin expressing the same number; for in none of the

three languages has the word any relation to the number two, which, by

multiplying ten, makes twenty; such as the words expressing the numbers

thirty, forty, &c., have to the words expressing three or four; for in

Greek the word is _eikosi_, which expresses no relation to the number two;

nor does the Latin _viginti_, but which appears to have more resemblance

to the Shanscrit word _veensatee_. And thus it appears that in the

anomalies of the two languages of Greek and Latin, there appears to be

some conformity with the Shanscrit.”

 

Lord Monboddo compares the Sanskrit _pada_ with the Greek _pous_, _podos_;

the Sanskrit _nâsa_ with the Latin _nasus_; the Sanskrit _deva_, god, with

the Greek _Theos_ and Latin _deus_; the Sanskrit _ap_, water, with the

Latin _aqua_; the Sanskrit _vidhavâ_ with the Latin _vidua_, widow.

Sanskrit words such as _gonia_, for angle, _kentra_, for centre, _hora_,

for hour, he points out as clearly of Greek origin, and imported into

Sanskrit. He then proceeds to show the grammatical coincidences between

Sanskrit and the classical languages. He dwells on compounds such as

_tripada_, from _tri_, three, and _pada_, foot—a tripod; he remarks on the

extraordinary fact that Sanskrit, like Greek, changes a positive into a

negative adjective by the addition of the _a_ privative; and he then

produces what he seems to consider as the most valuable present that Mr.

Wilkins could have given him, namely, the Sanskrit forms, _asmi_, I am;

_asi_, thou art; _asti_, he is; _santi_, they are; forms clearly of the

same origin as the corresponding forms, _esmi_, _eis_, _esti_, in Greek,

and _sunt_ in Latin.

 

Another Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, was much less inclined to

yield such ready submission. No doubt it must have required a considerable

effort for a man brought up in the belief that Greek and Latin were either

aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew, to bring himself to

acquiesce in the revolutionary doctrine that the classical languages were

intimately related to a jargon of mere savages; for such all the subjects

of the Great Mogul were then supposed to be. However, if the facts about

Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the

conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the

reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous

essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together, after the model of

Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars the Brahmans, and that

the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition. I mention this fact,

because it shows, better than anything else, how violent a shock was given

by the discovery of Sanskrit to prejudices most deeply ingrained in the

mind of every educated man. The most absurd arguments found favor for a

time, if they could only furnish a loophole by which to escape from the

unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same kith and kin

as the language of the black inhabitants of India. The first who dared

boldly to face both the facts and the conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship

was the German poet, Frederick Schlegel. He had been in England during the

peace of Amiens (1801-1802), and had learned a smattering of Sanskrit from

Mr. Alexander Hamilton. After carrying on his studies for some time at

Paris, he published, in 1808, his work, “On the Language and Wisdom of the

Indians.” This work became the foundation of the science of language.

Though published only two years after the first volume of Adelung’s

“Mithridates,” it is separated from that work by the same distance which

separates the Copernican from the Ptolemæan system. Schlegel was not a

great scholar. Many of his statements have proved erroneous; and nothing

would be easier than to dissect his essay and hold it up to ridicule. But

Schlegel was a man of genius; and when a new science is to be created, the

imagination of the poet is wanted, even more than the accuracy of the

scholar. It surely required somewhat of poetic vision to embrace with

_one_ glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany,

and to rivet them together by the simple name of Indo-Germanic. This was

Schlegel’s work; and in the history of the intellect, it has truly been

called “the discovery of a new world.”

 

We shall see, in our next lecture, how Schlegel’s idea was taken up in

Germany, and how it led almost immediately to a genealogical

classification of the principal languages of mankind.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE V. GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES.

 

 

We traced, in our last Lecture, the history of the various attempts at a

classification of languages to the year 1808, the year in which Frederick

Schlegel published his little work on “The Language and Wisdom of the

Indians.” This work was like the wand of a magician. It pointed out the

place where a mine should be opened; and it was not long before some of

the most distinguished scholars of the day began to sink their shafts, and

raise the ore. For a time, everybody who wished to learn Sanskrit had to

come to England. Bopp, Schlegel, Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, all spent some

time in this country, copying manuscripts at the East-India House, and

receiving assistance from Wilkins, Colebrooke, Wilson, and other

distinguished members of the old Indian Civil Service. The first minute

and scholar-like comparison of the grammar of Sanskrit with that of Greek

and Latin, Persian, and German, was made by Francis Bopp, in 1816.(164)

Other essays of his followed; and in 1833 appeared the first volume of his

“Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian,

Slavonic, Gothic, and German.” This work was not finished till nearly

twenty years later, in 1852;(165) but it will form forever the safe and

solid foundation of comparative philology. August Wilhelm von Schlegel,

the brother of Frederick Schlegel, used the influence which he had

acquired as a German poet, to popularize the study of Sanskrit in Germany.

His “Indische Bibliothek” was published from 1819 to 1830, and though

chiefly intended for Sanskrit literature, it likewise contained several

articles on Comparative Philology. This new science soon found a still

more powerful patron in William von Humboldt, the worthy brother of

Alexander von Humboldt, and at that time one of the leading statesmen in

Prussia. His essays, chiefly on the philosophy of language, attracted

general attention during his lifetime; and he left a lasting monument of

his studies in his great work on the Kawi language, which was published

after his death, in 1836. Another scholar who must be reckoned among the

founders of Comparative Philology is Professor Pott, whose “Etymological

Researches” appeared first in 1833 and 1836.(166) More special in its

purpose, but based on the same general principles, was Grimm’s “Teutonic

Grammar,” a work which has truly been called colossal. Its publication

occupied nearly twenty years, from 1819 to 1837. We ought, likewise, to

mention here the name of an eminent Dane, Erasmus Rask, who devoted

himself to the study of the northern languages of Europe. He started, in

1816, for Persia and India, and was the first to acquire a knowledge of

Zend, the language of the Zend-Avesta; but he died before he had time to

publish all the results of his learned researches. He had proved, however,

that the sacred language of the Parsis was closely connected with the

sacred language of the Brahmans, and that, like Sanskrit, it had preserved

some of the earliest formations of Indo-European speech. These researches

into the ancient Persian language were taken up again by one of the

greatest scholars that France ever produced, by Eugène Burnouf. Though the

works of Zoroaster had been translated before by Anquetil Duperron, his

was only a translation of a modern Persian translation of the original. It

was Burnouf who, by means of his knowledge of Sanskrit and Comparative

Grammar, deciphered for the first time the very words of the founder of

the ancient religion of light. He was, likewise, the first to apply the

same key with real success to the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and

Xerxes; and his premature death will long be mourned, not only by those

who, like myself, had the privilege of knowing him personally and

attending his lectures, but by all who have the interest of oriental

literature and of real oriental scholarship at heart.

 

I cannot give here a list of all the scholars who followed in the track of

Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm, and Burnouf. How the science of language

has flourished and abounded may best be seen in the library of any

comparative philologist. There has been for the last ten years a special

journal of Comparative Philology in Germany. The Philological Society in

London publishes every year a valuable volume of its transactions; and in

almost every continental university there is a professor of Sanskrit who

lectures likewise on Comparative Grammar and the science of language.

 

But why, it may naturally be asked, why should the discovery of Sanskrit

have wrought so complete a change in the classificatory study of

languages? If Sanskrit had been the primitive language of mankind, or at

least the parent of Greek, Latin, and German, we might understand that it

should have led to quite a new classification of these tongues. But

Sanskrit does not stand to Greek, Latin, the Teutonic, Celtic, and

Slavonic languages in the relation of Latin to French, Italian, and

Spanish. Sanskrit, as we saw before, could not be called their parent, but

only their elder sister. It occupies with regard to the classical

languages a position analogous to that which Provençal occupies with

regard to the modern Romance dialects. This is perfectly true; but it was

exactly this necessity of determining distinctly and accurately the mutual

relation of Sanskrit and the other members of the same family of speech,

which led to such important results, and particularly to the establishment

of the laws of phonetic change as the only safe means for measuring the

various degrees of relationship of cognate dialects, and thus restoring

the genealogical tree of human speech. When Sanskrit had once assumed its

right position, when people had once become familiarized with the idea

that there must have existed a language more primitive than Greek, Latin,

and Sanskrit, and forming the common background of these three, as well as

of the Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic branches of speech, all languages

seemed to fall by themselves into their right position. The key of the

puzzle was found, and all the rest was merely a work of patience. The same

arguments by which Sanskrit and Greek had been proved to hold co-ordinate

rank were perceived to apply with equal strength to Latin and Greek; and

after Latin had once been shown to be more primitive on many points than

Greek, it was easy to see that the Teutonic, the Celtic, and the Slavonic

languages also, contained each a number of formations which it was impossible to derive from Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin. It was perceived that all had to be treated as co-ordinate members of one and the same class.