Lectures on The Science of Language 4

Lectures on The Science of Language 4

In the same manner, if we study living languages, it is not for their own

sake that we acquire grammars and vocabularies. We do so on account of

their practical usefulness. We use them as letters of introduction to the

best society or to the best literature of the leading nations of Europe.

In comparative philology the case is totally different. In the science of

language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes

the sole object of scientific inquiry. Dialects which have never produced

any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the

Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese are as

important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important,

than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know

languages, we want to know language; what language is, how it can form a

vehicle or an organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature,

its laws; and it is only in order to arrive at that knowledge that we

collect, arrange, and classify all the facts of language that are within

our reach.

 

And here I must protest, at the very outset of these lectures, against the

supposition that the student of language must necessarily be a great

linguist. I shall have to speak to you in the course of these lectures of

hundreds of languages, some of which, perhaps, you may never have heard

mentioned even by name. Do not suppose that I know these languages as you

know Greek or Latin, French or German. In that sense I know indeed very

few languages, and I never aspired to the fame of a Mithridates or a

Mezzofanti. It is impossible for a student of language to acquire a

practical knowledge of all tongues with which he has to deal. He does not

wish to speak the Kachikal language, of which a professorship was lately

founded in the University of Guatemala,(12) or to acquire the elegancies

of the idiom of the Tcheremissians; nor is it his ambition to explore the

literature of the Samoyedes, or the New-Zealanders. It is the grammar and

the dictionary which form the subject of his inquiries. These he consults

and subjects to a careful analysis, but he does not encumber his memory

with paradigms of nouns and verbs, or with long lists of words which have

never been used in any work of literature. It is true, no doubt, that no

language will unveil the whole of its wonderful structure except to the

scholar who has studied it thoroughly and critically in a number of

literary works representing the various periods of its growth.

Nevertheless, short lists of vocables, and imperfect sketches of a

grammar, are in many instances all that the student can expect to obtain,

or can hope to master and to use for the purposes he has in view. He must

learn to make the best of this fragmentary information, like the

comparative anatomist, who frequently learns his lessons from the smallest

fragments of fossil bones, or the vague pictures of animals brought home

by unscientific travellers. If it were necessary for the comparative

philologist to acquire a critical or practical acquaintance with all the

languages which form the subject of his inquiries, the science of language

would simply be an impossibility. But we do not expect the botanist to be

an experienced gardener, or the geologist a miner, or the ichthyologist a

practical fisherman. Nor would it be reasonable to object in the science

of language to the same division of labor which is necessary for the

successful cultivation of subjects much less comprehensive. Though much of

what we might call the realm of language is lost to us forever, though

whole periods in the history of language are by necessity withdrawn from

our observation, yet the mass of human speech that lies before us, whether

in the petrified strata of ancient literature or in the countless variety

of living languages and dialects, offers a field as large, if not larger,

than any other branch of physical research. It is impossible to fix the

exact number of known languages, but their number can hardly be less than

nine hundred. That this vast field should never have excited the curiosity

of the natural philosopher before the beginning of our century may seem

surprising, more surprising even than the indifference with which former

generations treated the lessons which even the stones seemed to teach of

the life still throbbing in the veins and on the very surface of the

earth. The saying that "familiarity breeds contempt" would seem applicable

to the subjects of both these sciences. The gravel of our walks hardly

seemed to deserve a scientific treatment, and the language which every

plough-boy can speak could not be raised without an effort to the dignity

of a scientific problem. Man had studied every part of nature, the mineral

treasures in the bowels of the earth, the flowers of each season, the

animals of every continent, the laws of storms, and the movements of the

heavenly bodies; he had analyzed every substance, dissected every

organism, he knew every bone and muscle, every nerve and fibre of his own

body to the ultimate elements which compose his flesh and blood; he had

meditated on the nature of his soul, on the laws of his mind, and tried to

penetrate into the last causes of all being—and yet language, without the

aid of which not even the first step in this glorious career could have

been made, remained unnoticed. Like a veil that hung too close over the

eye of the human mind, it was hardly perceived. In an age when the study

of antiquity attracted the most energetic minds, when the ashes of Pompeii

were sifted for the playthings of Roman life; when parchments were made to

disclose, by chemical means, the erased thoughts of Grecian thinkers; when

the tombs of Egypt were ransacked for their sacred contents, and the

palaces of Babylon and Nineveh forced to surrender the clay diaries of

Nebuchadnezzar; when everything, in fact, that seemed to contain a vestige

of the early life of man was anxiously searched for and carefully

preserved in our libraries and museums,—language, which in itself carries

us back far beyond the cuneiform literature of Assyria and Babylonia, and

the hieroglyphic documents of Egypt; which connects ourselves, through an

unbroken chain of speech, with the very ancestors of our race, and still

draws its life from the first utterances of the human mind,—language, the

living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race, was never

cross-examined by the student of history, was never made to disclose its

secrets until questioned and, so to say, brought back to itself within the

last fifty years, by the genius of a Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, Bunsen, and

others. If you consider that, whatever view we take of the origin and

dispersion of language, nothing new has ever been added to the substance

of language, that all its changes have been changes of form, that no new

root or radical has ever been invented by later generations, as little as

one single element has ever been added to the material world in which we

live; if you bear in mind that in one sense, and in a very just sense, we

may be said to handle the very words which issued from the mouth of the

son of God, when he gave names to “all cattle, and to the fowl of the air,

and to every beast of the field,” you will see, I believe, that the

science of language has claims on your attention, such as few sciences can

rival or excel.

 

Having thus explained the manner in which I intend to treat the science of

language, I hope in my next lecture to examine the objections of those

philosophers who see in language nothing but a contrivance devised by

human skill for the more expeditious communication of our thoughts, and

who would wish to see it treated, not as a production of nature, but as a

work of human art.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE II. THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO THE HISTORY OF

LANGUAGE.

 

 

In claiming for the science of language a place among the physical

sciences, I was prepared to meet with many objections. The circle of the

physical sciences seemed closed, and it was not likely that a new claimant

should at once be welcomed among the established branches and scions of

the ancient aristocracy of learning.(13)

 

The first objection which was sure to be raised on the part of such

sciences as botany, geology, or physiology is this:—Language is the work

of man; it was invented by man as a means of communicating his thoughts,

when mere looks and gestures proved inefficient; and it was gradually, by

the combined efforts of succeeding generations, brought to that perfection

which we admire in the idiom of the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, and in

the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Now it is perfectly

true that if language be the work of man, in the same sense in which a

statue, or a temple, or a poem, or a law are properly called the works of

man, the science of language would have to be classed as an historical

science. We should have a history of language as we have a history of art,

of poetry, and of jurisprudence, but we could not claim for it a place

side by side with the various branches of Natural History. It is true,

also, that if you consult the works of the most distinguished modern

philosophers you will find that whenever they speak of language, they take

it for granted that language is a human invention, that words are

artificial signs, and that the varieties of human speech arose from

different nations agreeing on different sounds as the most appropriate

signs of their different ideas. This view of the origin of language was so

powerfully advocated by the leading philosophers of the last century, that

it has retained an undisputed currency even among those who, on almost

every other point, are strongly opposed to the teaching of that school. A

few voices, indeed, have been raised to protest against the theory of

language being originally invented by man. But they, in their zeal to

vindicate the divine origin of language, seem to have been carried away so

far as to run counter to the express statements of the Bible. For in the

Bible it is not the Creator who gives names to all things, but Adam. “Out

of the ground,” we read, “the Lord God formed every beast of the field,

and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would

call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the

name thereof.”(14) But with the exception of this small class of

philosophers, more orthodox even than the Bible,(15) the generally

received opinion on the origin of language is that which was held by

_Locke_, which was powerfully advocated by _Adam Smith_ in his Essay on

the Origin of Language, appended to his Treatise on Moral Sentiments, and

which was adopted with slight modifications by _Dugald Stewart_. According

to them, man must have lived for a time in a state of mutism, his only

means of communication consisting in gestures of the body, and in the

changes of countenance, till at last, when ideas multiplied that could no

longer be pointed at with the fingers, “they found it necessary to invent

artificial signs of which the meaning was fixed by mutual agreement.” We

need not dwell on minor differences of opinion as to the exact process by

which this artificial language is supposed to have been formed. Adam Smith

would wish us to believe that the first artificial words were _verbs_.

Nouns, he thinks, were of less urgent necessity because things could be

pointed at or imitated, whereas mere actions, such as are expressed by

verbs, could not. He therefore supposes that when people saw a wolf

coming, they pointed at him, and simply cried out, “He comes.” Dugald

Stewart, on the contrary, thinks that the first artificial words were

nouns, and that the verbs were supplied by gesture; that, therefore, when

people saw a wolf coming, they did not cry “He comes,” but “Wolf, Wolf,” leaving the rest to be imagined.(16)