Lectures on The Science of Language 22

Lectures on The Science of Language 22

We have thus traced the modern Teutonic dialects back to four principal

channels,—the _High-German_, _Low-German_, _Gothic_, and _Scandinavian_;

and we have seen that these four, together with several minor dialects,

must be placed in a co-ordinate position from the beginning, as so many

varieties of Teutonic speech. This Teutonic speech may, for convenience’

sake, be spoken of as one,—as one branch of that great family of language

to which, as we shall see, it belongs; but it should always be borne in

mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real

historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the

Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several

distinct national deposits.

 

We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an

Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld’s Great

Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic,

form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.

 

And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local

dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of

Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian,—the languages of Portugal,

of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,(180) and of the Grisons of

Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.(181) The Provençal, which,

in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high

literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere _patois_. The earliest

Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth

century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered

Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d’Oil, or the

ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen

of the Langue d’Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better

preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan

languages than a careful perusal of the “Comparative Grammar of the Six

Romance Languages” by Professor Diez.

 

Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to

Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would

fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the

ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient

dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was

spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have

been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north,

and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken

by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen, had

produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables

of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness

to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan

was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local

dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of

Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the

future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are

still called _vulgar_ or _popular_.(182) A great deal, no doubt, of the

corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form

in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin

dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic

words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is

provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a

smaller extent, the same _barbarizing_ has affected all other Roman

dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin

dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local,

provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of

the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their

classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported

into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the

rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by

the Teutonic conquerors.

 

The next branch of the Indo-European family of speech is the _Hellenic_.

Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The

only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea

of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving

English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin

more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of

Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of

those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious

refutation.

 

The fourth branch of our family is the _Celtic_. The Celts seem to have

been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of

subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them

towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the

Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and

Gadhelic. The _Kymric_ comprises the _Welsh_; the _Cornish_, lately

extinct; and the _Armorican_, of Brittany. The _Gadhelic_ comprises the

_Irish_; the _Galic_ of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the

_Isle of Man_. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts

themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the

Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed

political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and

Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of

Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find

Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the

Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated

inroads into the regions of civilization, familiarizing Latin and Greek

writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of

Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh _brennin_. A Brennus

conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about

the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where

the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls.

Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only

as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed.

A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way

into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken

by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin

might, in their turn, be derived.

 

The fifth branch, which is commonly called _Slavonic_, I prefer to

designate by the name of _Windic_, _Winidae_ being one of the most ancient

and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early

historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions,

the _Lettic_ and the _Slavonic_, and we shall have to subdivide the

Slavonic again into a _South-East Slavonic_ and a _West Slavonic_ branch.

 

The _Lettic_ division consists of languages hardly known to the student of

literature, but of great importance to the student of language. _Lettish_

is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. _Lithuanian_ is the

name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern

Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of

Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism

of 1547.(183) In this, and even in the language as now spoken by the

Lithuanian peasant, there are some grammatical forms more primitive, and

more like Sanskrit, than the corresponding forms in Greek and Latin.

 

The _Old Prussian_, which is nearly related to Lithuanian, became extinct

in the seventeenth century, and the entire literature which it has left

behind consists in an old catechism.

 

_Lettish_ is the language of Kurland and Livonia, more modern in its

grammar than Lithuanian, yet not immediately derived from it.

 

We now come to the _Slavonic_ languages, properly so called. The eastern

branch comprehends the _Russian_ with various local dialects; the

_Bulgarian_, and the _Illyrian_. The most ancient document of this eastern

branch is the so-called Ecclesiastical Slavonic, _i.e._ the ancient

Bulgarian, into which Cyrillus and Methodius translated the Bible, in the

middle of the ninth century. This is still the authorized version(184) of

the Bible for the whole Slavonic race; and to the student of the Slavonic

languages, it is what Gothic is to the student of German. The modern

Bulgarian, on the contrary, as far as grammatical forms are concerned, is

the most reduced among the Slavonic dialects.

 

_Illyrian_ is a convenient or inconvenient name to comprehend the

_Servian_, _Croatian_, and _Slovinian_ dialects. Literary fragments of

_Slovinian_ go back as far as the tenth century.(185)

 

The western branch comprehends the language of _Poland_, _Bohemia_, and

_Lusatia_. The oldest specimen of Polish belongs to the fourteenth

century: the Psalter of Margarite. The Bohemian language was, till lately,

traced back to the ninth century. But most of these old Bohemian poems are

now considered spurious; and it is doubtful, even, whether an ancient

interlinear translation of the Gospel of St. John can be ascribed to the

tenth century.(186)

 

The language of Lusatia is spoken, probably, by no more than 150,000

people, known in Germany by the name of _Wends_.

 

We have examined all the languages of our first or Aryan family, which are

spoken in Europe, with one exception, the _Albanian_. This language is

clearly a member of the same family; and as it is sufficiently distinct

from Greek or any other recognized language, it has been traced back to

one of the neighboring races of the Greeks, the Illyrians, and is supposed

to be the only surviving representative of the various so-called barbarous

tongues which surrounded and interpenetrated the dialects of Greece.

 

We now pass on from Europe to Asia; and here we begin at once, on the

extreme south, with the languages of India. As I sketched the history of

Sanskrit in one of my former Lectures, it must suffice, at present, to

mark the different periods of that language, beginning, about 1500 B. C.,

with the dialect of the Vedas, which is followed by the modern Sanskrit;

the popular dialects of the third century B. C.; the Prakrit dialects of

the plays; and the spoken dialects, such as Hindí, Hindústání, Mahrattí,

Bengalí. There are many points of great interest to the student of

language, in the long history of the speech of India; and it has been

truly said that Sanskrit is to the science of language what mathematics

are to astronomy. In an introductory course of lectures, however, like the

present, it would be out of place to enter on a minute analysis of the

grammatical organism of this language of languages.

 

There is one point only on which I may be allowed to say a few words. I

have frequently been asked, “But how can you prove that Sanskrit

literature is so old as it is supposed to be? How can you fix any Indian

dates before the time of Alexander’s conquest? What dependence can be

placed on Sanskrit manuscripts which may have been forged or

interpolated?” It is easier to ask such questions than to answer them, at