Lectures on The Science of Language Part 2

There will still be the progress of phonetic corruption, but no longer the restoring influence of dialectic regeneration. The language which the Norwegian refugees brought to Iceland has remained almost the same for seven centuries, whereas on its native soil, and surrounded by local dialects, it has grown into two distinct languages, the Swedish and Danish. In the eleventh century, the languages of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland are supposed(50) to have been identical, nor can we appeal to foreign conquest, or to the admixture of foreign with native blood, in order to account for the changes which the language underwent in Sweden and Denmark, but not in Iceland.(51)

We can hardly form an idea of the unbounded resources of dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped one general term, their dialects will supply fifty, though each with its own special shade of meaning. If new combinations of thought are evolved in the progress of society, dialects will readily supply the required names from the store of their so-called superfluous words. There are not only local and provincial, but also cla.s.s dialects. There is a dialect of shepherds, of sportsmen, of soldiers, of farmers. I suppose there are few persons here present who could tell the exact meaning of a horse's poll, crest, withers, dock, hamstring, cannon, pastern, coronet, arm, jowl, and muzzle. Where the literary language speaks of the young of all sorts of animals, farmers, shepherds, and sportsmen would be ashamed to use so general a term.

"The idiom of nomads," as Grimm says, "contains an abundant wealth of manifold expressions for sword and weapons, and for the different stages in the life of their cattle. In a more highly cultivated language these expressions become burthensome and superfluous. But, in a peasant's mouth, the bearing, calving, falling, and killing of almost every animal has its own peculiar term, as the sportsman delights in calling the gait and members of game by different names. The eye of these shepherds, who live in the free air, sees further, their ear hears more sharply,-why should their speech not have gained that living truth and variety?"

Thus Juliana Berners, lady prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in the fifteenth century, the reputed author of the book of St. Albans, informs us that we must not use names of mult.i.tudes promiscuously, but we are to say, "a congregacyon of people, a hoost of men, a felyshyppynge of yomen, and a bevy of ladies; we must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pec.o.c.kes, a watche of nyghtyngales, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of frerys, a pontificality of prestys, a bomynable syght of monkes, and a superfluyte of nonnes," and so of other human and brute a.s.semblages. In like manner, in dividing game for the table, the animals were not carved, but "a dere was broken, a gose reryd, chekyn frusshed, a cony unlaced, a crane dysplayed, a curlewe unioynted, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfte, a lambe sholdered, a heron dysmembryd, a pec.o.c.ke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd, and a breme splayed."(52)

What, however, I wanted particularly to point out in this lecture is this, that neither of the causes which produce the growth, or, according to others, const.i.tute the history of language, is under the control of man.

The phonetic decay of language is not the result of mere accident; it is governed by definite laws, as we shall see when we come to consider the principles of comparative grammar. But these laws were not made by man; on the contrary, man had to obey them without knowing of their existence.

In the growth of the modern Romance languages out of Latin, we can perceive not only a general tendency to simplification, not only a natural disposition to avoid the exertion which the p.r.o.nunciation of certain consonants, and still more, of groups of consonants, entails on the speaker: but we can see distinct laws for each of the Romance dialects, which enable us to say, that in French the Latin _patrem_ would naturally grow into the modern _pere_. The final _m_ is always dropped in the Romance dialects, and it was dropped even in Latin. Thus we get _patre_ instead of _patrem_. Now, a Latin _t_ between two vowels in such words as _pater_ is invariably suppressed in French. This is a law, and by means of it we can discover at once that _catena_ must become _chaine_; _fata_, a later feminine representation of the old neuter _fatum_, _fee_; _pratum_ a meadow, _pre_. From _pratum_ we derive _prataria_, which in French becomes _prairie_; from _fatum_, _fataria_, the English _fairy_. Thus every Latin participle in _atus_, like _amatus_, loved, must end in French in _e_. The same law then changed _patre_(p.r.o.nounced _pa-tere_) into _paere_, or _pere_; it changed _matrem_ into _mere_, _fratrem_ into _frere_. These changes take place gradually but irresistibly, and, what is most important, they are completely beyond the reach or control of the free will of man.

Dialectical growth again is still more beyond the control of individuals.

For although a poet may knowingly and intentionally invent a new word, its acceptance depends on circ.u.mstances which defy individual interference.

There are some changes in the grammar which at first sight might seem to be mainly attributable to the caprice of the speaker. Granted, for instance, that the loss of the Latin terminations was the natural result of a more careless p.r.o.nunciation; granted that the modern sign of the French genitive _du_ is a natural corruption of the Latin _de illo_,-yet the choice of _de_, instead of any other word, to express the genitive, the choice of _illo_, instead of any other p.r.o.noun, to express the article, might seem to prove that man acted as a free agent in the formation of language. But it is not so. No single individual could deliberately have set to work in order to abolish the old Latin genitive, and to replace it by the periphrastic compound _de illo_. It was necessary that the inconvenience of having no distinct or distinguishable sign of the genitive should have been felt by the people who spoke a vulgar Latin dialect. It was necessary that the same people should have used the preposition _de_ in such a manner as to lose sight of its original local meaning altogether (for instance, _una de multis_, in Horace, _i.e._, one out of many). It was necessary, again, that the same people should have felt the want of an article, and should have used _illo_ in numerous expressions, where it seemed to have lost its original p.r.o.nominal power.

It was necessary that all these conditions should be given, before one individual and after him another, and after him hundreds and thousands and millions, could use _de illo_ as the exponent of the genitive; and change it into the Italian _dello_, _del_, and the French _du_.

The attempts of single grammarians and purists to improve language are perfectly bootless; and we shall probably hear no more of schemes to prune languages of their irregularities. It is very likely, however, that the gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in literary as well as in illiterate languages, to the dialect of children.

The language of children is more regular than our own. I have heard children say _badder_ and _baddest_, instead of _worse_ and _worst_.

Children will say, _I gaed_, _I coomd_, _I catched_; and it is this sense of grammatical justice, this generous feeling of what ought to be, which in the course of centuries has eliminated many so-called irregular forms.

Thus the auxiliary verb in Latin was very irregular. If _sumus_ is _we are_, and _sunt_, _they are_, the second person, _you are_, ought to have been, at least according to the strict logic of children, _sutis_. This, no doubt, sounds very barbarous to a cla.s.sical ear accustomed to _estis_.

And we see how French, for instance, has strictly preserved the Latin forms in _nous sommes_, _vous etes_, _ils sont_. But in Spanish we find _somos_, _sois_, _son_; and this _sois_ stands for _sutis_. We find similar traces of grammatical levelling in the Italian _siamo_, _siete_, _sono_, formed in a.n.a.logy of regular verbs such as _crediamo_, _credete_, _credono_. The second person, _sei_, instead of _es_, is likewise infantine grammar. So are the Wallachian _suntemu_, we are, _sunteti_, you are, which owe their origin to the third person plural _sunt_, they are.

And what shall we say of such monsters as _essendo_, a gerund derived on principles of strict justice from an infinitive _essere_, like _credendo_ from _credere_!

However, we need not be surprised, for we find similar barbarisms in English. Even in Anglo-Saxon, the third person plural, _sind_, has by a false a.n.a.logy been transferred to the first and second persons; and instead of the modern English,

in Old in Gothic.

Norse.

we are er-um sijum(53) you are we find er-udh sijuth they are er-u. sind.

Dialectically we hear _I be_, instead of _I am_; and if Chartism should ever gain the upper hand, we must be prepared for newspapers adopting such forms as _I says_, _I knows_.

These various influences and conditions under which language grows and changes, are like the waves and winds which carry deposits to the bottom of the sea, where they acc.u.mulate, and rise, and grow, and at last appear on the surface of the earth as a stratum, perfectly intelligible in all its component parts, not produced by an inward principle of growth, nor regulated by invariable laws of nature; yet, on the other hand, by no means the result of mere accident, or the production of lawless and uncontrolled agencies. We cannot be careful enough in the use of our words. Strictly speaking, neither _history_ nor _growth_ is applicable to the changes of the shifting surface of the earth. _History_ applies to the actions of free agents; _growth_ to the natural unfolding of organic beings. We speak, however, of the growth of the crust of the earth, and we know what we mean by it; and it is in this sense, but not in the sense of growth as applied to a tree, that we have a right to speak of the growth of language. If that modification which takes place in time by continually new combinations of given elements, which withdraws itself from the control of free agents, and can in the end be recognized as the result of natural agencies, may be called growth; and if so defined, we may apply it to the growth of the crust of the earth; the same word, in the same sense, will be applicable to language, and will justify us in removing the science of language from the pale of the historical to that of the physical sciences.

There is another objection which we have to consider, and the consideration of which will again help us to understand more clearly the real character of language. The great periods in the growth of the earth which have been established by geological research are brought to their close, or very nearly so, when we discover the first vestiges of human life, and when the history of man, in the widest sense of the word, begins. The periods in the growth of language, on the contrary, begin and run parallel with the history of man. It has been said, therefore, that although language may not be merely a work of art, it would, nevertheless, be impossible to understand the life and growth of any language without an historical knowledge of the times in which that language grew up. We ought to know, it is said, whether a language which is to be a.n.a.lyzed under the microscope of comparative grammar, has been growing up wild, among wild tribes, without a literature, oral or written, in poetry or in prose; or whether it has received the cultivation of poets, priests, and orators, and retained the impress of a cla.s.sical age. Again, it is only from the annals of political history that we can learn whether one language has come in contact with another, how long this contact has lasted, which of the two nations stood higher in civilization, which was the conquering and which the conquered, which of the two established the laws, the religion, and the arts of the country, and which produced the greatest number of national teachers, popular poets, and successful demagogues. All these questions are of a purely historical character, and the science which has to borrow so much from historical sources, might well be considered an anomaly in the sphere of the physical sciences.

Now, in answer to this, it cannot be denied that among the physical sciences none is so intimately connected with the history of man as the science of language. But a similar connection, though in a less degree, can be shown to exist between other branches of physical research and the history of man. In zoology, for instance, it is of some importance to know at what particular period of history, in what country, and for what purposes certain animals were tamed and domesticated. In ethnology, a science, we may remark in pa.s.sing, quite distinct from the science of language, it would be difficult to account for the Caucasian stamp impressed on the Mongolian race in Hungary, or on the Tatar race in Turkey, unless we knew from written doc.u.ments the migrations and settlements of the Mongolic and Tataric tribes in Europe. A botanist, again, comparing several specimens of rye, would find it difficult to account for their respective peculiarities, unless he knew that in some parts of the world this plant has been cultivated for centuries, whereas in other regions, as, for instance, in Mount Caucasus, it is still allowed to grow wild. Plants have their own countries, like races, and the presence of the cuc.u.mber in Greece, the orange and cherry in Italy, the potatoe in England, and the vine at the Cape, can be fully explained by the historian only. The more intimate relation, therefore, between the history of language and the history of man is not sufficient to exclude the science of language from the circle of the physical sciences.

Nay, it might be shown, that, if strictly defined, the science of language can declare itself completely independent of history. If we speak of the language of England, we ought, no doubt, to know something of the political history of the British Isles, in order to understand the present state of that language. Its history begins with the early Britons, who spoke a Celtic dialect; it carries us on to the Saxon conquest, to the Danish invasions, to the Norman conquest: and we see how each of these political events contributed to the formation of the character of the language. The language of England may be said to have been in succession Celtic, Saxon, Norman, and English. But if we speak of the history of the English language, we enter on totally different ground. The English language was never Celtic, the Celtic never grew into Saxon, nor the Saxon into Norman, nor the Norman into English. The history of the Celtic language runs on to the present day. It matters not whether it be spoken by all the inhabitants of the British Isles, or only by a small minority in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. A language, as long as it is spoken by anybody, lives and has its substantive existence. The last old woman that spoke Cornish, and to whose memory it is now intended to raise a monument, represented by herself alone the ancient language of Cornwall. A Celt may become an Englishman, Celtic and English blood may be mixed; and who could tell at the present day the exact proportion of Celtic and Saxon blood in the population of England? But languages are never mixed. It is indifferent by what name the language spoken in the British Islands be called, whether English or British or Saxon; to the student of language English is Teutonic, and nothing but Teutonic. The physiologist may protest, and point out that in many instances the skull, or the bodily habitat of the English language, is of a Celtic type; the genealogist may protest and prove that the arms of many an English family are of Norman origin; the student of language must follow his own way. Historical information as to an early substratum of Celtic inhabitants in Britain, as to Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions may be useful to him. But though every record were burned, and every skull mouldered, the English language, as spoken by any ploughboy, would reveal its own history, if a.n.a.lyzed according to the rules of comparative grammar. Without the help of history, we should see that English is Teutonic, that like Dutch and Friesian it belongs to the Low-German branch; that this branch, together with the High-German, Gothic, and Scandinavian branches, const.i.tute the Teutonic cla.s.s; that this Teutonic cla.s.s, together with the Celtic, Slavonic, the h.e.l.lenic, Italic, Iranic, and Indic cla.s.ses const.i.tute the great Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. In the English dictionary the student of the science of language can detect, by his own tests, Celtic, Norman, Greek, and Latin ingredients, but not a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the English language.

The grammar, the blood and soul of the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was when spoken on the sh.o.r.es of the German Ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Juts of the continent.

In thus considering and refuting the objections which have been, or might be, made against the admission of the science of language into the circle of the physical sciences, we have arrived at some results which it may be useful to recapitulate before we proceed further. We saw that whereas philology treats language only as a means, comparative philology chooses language as the object of scientific inquiry. It is not the study of one language, but of many, and in the end of all, which forms the aim of this new science. Nor is the language of Homer of greater interest, in the scientific treatment of human speech, than the dialect of the Hottentots.

We saw, secondly, that after the first practical acquisition and careful a.n.a.lysis of the facts and forms of any language, the next and most important step is the cla.s.sification of all the varieties of human speech, and that only after this has been accomplished would it be safe to venture on the great questions which underlie all physical research, the questions as to the what, the whence, and the why of language.

We saw, thirdly, that there is a distinction between what is called history and growth. We determined the true meaning of growth, as applied to language, and perceived how it was independent of the caprice of man, and governed by laws that could be discovered by careful observation, and be traced back in the end to higher laws, which govern the organs both of human thought, and of the human voice. Though admitting that the science of language was more intimately connected than any other physical science with what is called the political history of man, we found that, strictly speaking, our science might well dispense with this auxiliary, and that languages can be a.n.a.lyzed and cla.s.sified on their own evidence particularly on the strength of their grammatical articulation, without any reference to the individuals, families, clans, tribes, nations, or races by whom they are or have been spoken.

In the course of these considerations, we had to lay down two axioms, to which we shall frequently have to appeal in the progress of our investigations. The first declares grammar to be the most essential element, and therefore the ground of cla.s.sification in all languages which have produced a definite grammatical articulation; the second denies the possibility of a mixed language.

These two axioms are, in reality, but one, as we shall see when we examine them more closely. There is hardly a language which in one sense may not be called a mixed language. No nation or tribe was ever so completely isolated as not to admit the importation of a certain number of foreign words. In some instances these imported words have changed the whole native aspect of the language, and have even acquired a majority over the native element. Turkish is a Turanian dialect; its grammar is purely Tataric or Turanian. The Turks, however, possessed but a small literature and narrow civilization before they were converted to Mohammedanism. Now, the language of Mohammed was Arabic, a branch of the Semitic family, closely allied to Hebrew and Syriac. Together with the Koran, and their law and religion, the Turks learned from the Arabs, their conquerors, many of the arts and sciences connected with a more advanced stage of civilization. Arabic became to the Turks what Latin was to the Germans during the Middle Ages; and there is hardly a word in the higher intellectual terminology of Arabic, that might not be used, more or less naturally, by a writer in Turkish. But the Arabs, again, at the very outset of their career of conquest and conversion, had been, in science, art, literature, and polite manners, the pupils of the Persians, whom they had conquered; they stood to them in the same relation as the Romans stood to the Greeks. Now, the Persians speak a language which is neither Semitic, like Arabic, nor Turanian, like Turkish; it is a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. A large infusion of Persian words thus found its way into Arabic, and through Arabic into Turkish; and the result is that at the present moment the Turkish language, as spoken by the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so entirely overgrown with Persian and Arabic words, that a common clod from the country understands but little of the so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is exactly the same as the grammar which he uses in his Tataric utterance.

There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German-nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words, lie mixed together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone it would be impossible to cla.s.sify English with any other of the established stocks and stems of human speech. Leaving out of consideration the smaller ingredients, we find, on comparing the Teutonic with the Latin, or Neo-Latin or Norman elements in English, that the latter have a decided majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. This may seem incredible; and if we simply took a page of any English book, and counted therein the words of purely Saxon and Latin origin, the majority would be no doubt on the Saxon side. The articles, p.r.o.nouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, all of which are of Saxon growth, occur over and over again in one and the same page. Thus, Hickes maintained that nine tenths of the English dictionary were Saxon, because there were only three words of Latin origin in the Lord's prayer. Sharon Turner, who extended his observations over a larger field, came to the conclusion that the relation of Norman to Saxon was as four to six. Another writer, who estimates the whole number of English words at 38,000, a.s.signs 23,000 to a Saxon, and 15,000 to a cla.s.sical source. On taking, however, a more accurate inventory, and counting every word in the dictionaries of Robertson and Webster, M.

Thommerel has established the fact that of the sum total of 43,566 words, 29,853 came from cla.s.sical, 13,230 from Teutonic, and the rest from miscellaneous sources.(54) On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore, and treating English as a mixed language, it would have to be cla.s.sified together with French, Italian, and Spanish, as one of the Romance or Neo-Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their grammar. Hervas was told by missionaries that in the middle of the eighteenth century the Araucans used hardly a single word which was not Spanish, though they preserved both the grammar and the syntax of their own native speech.(55) This is the reason why grammar is made the criterion of the relationship and the base of the cla.s.sification in almost all languages; and it follows, therefore, as a matter of course, that in the cla.s.sification and in the science of language, it is impossible to admit the existence of a mixed idiom. We may form whole sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Romance words; yet whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called grammar in English is little more than the terminations of the genitive singular, and nominative plural of nouns, the degrees of comparison, and a few of the persons and tenses of the verb. Yet the single _s_, used as the exponent of the third person singular of the indicative present, is irrefragable evidence that in a scientific cla.s.sification of languages, English, though it did not retain a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be cla.s.sed as Saxon, and as a branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech. In ancient and less matured languages, grammar, or the formal part of human speech, is far more abundantly developed than in English; and it is, therefore, a much safer guide for discovering a family likeness in scattered members of the same family. There are languages in which there is no trace of what we are accustomed to call grammar; for instance, ancient Chinese; there are others in which we can still watch the growth of grammar, or, more correctly, the gradual lapse of material into merely formal elements. In these languages new principles of cla.s.sification will have to be applied, such as are suggested by the study of natural history; and we shall have to be satisfied with the criteria of a morphological affinity, instead of those of a genealogical relationship.

I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objections which threatened to deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the circle of the physical sciences. We shall see in our next lecture what the history of our science has been from its beginning to the present day, and how far it may be said to have pa.s.sed through the three stages, the empirical, the cla.s.sificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the childhood, the youth, and the manhood of every one of the natural sciences.

LECTURE III. THE EMPIRICAL STAGE.

We begin to-day to trace the historical progress of the science of language in its three stages, the _Empirical_, the _Cla.s.sificatory_, and the _Theoretical_. As a general rule each physical science begins with a.n.a.lysis, proceeds to cla.s.sification, and ends with theory; but, as I pointed out in my first lecture, there are frequent exceptions to this rule, and it is by no means uncommon to find that philosophical speculations, which properly belong to the last or theoretical stage, were attempted in physical sciences long before the necessary evidence had been collected or arranged. Thus, we find that the science of language, in the only two countries where we can watch its origin and history-in India and Greece-rushes at once into theories about the mysterious nature of speech, and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel without ever having seen the animal or the desert. The Brahmans, in the hymns of the Veda, raised language to the rank of a deity, as they did with all things of which they knew not what they were. They addressed hymns to her in which she is said to have been with the G.o.ds from the beginning, achieving wondrous things, and never revealed to man except in part. In the Brahmanas, language is called the cow, breath the bull, and their young is said to be the mind of man.(56) Brahman, the highest being, is said to be known through speech, nay, speech herself is called the Supreme Brahman. At a very early period, however, the Brahmans recovered from their raptures about language, and set to work with wonderful skill dissecting her sacred body. Their achievements in grammatical a.n.a.lysis, which date from the sixth century, B. C., are still unsurpa.s.sed in the grammatical literature of any nation. The idea of reducing a whole language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted before the sixteenth century by Henry Estienne,(57) was perfectly familiar to the Brahmans, at least 500 B. C.

The Greeks, though they did not raise language to the rank of a deity, paid her, nevertheless, the greatest honors in their ancient schools of philosophy. There is hardly one of their representative philosophers who has not left some saying on the nature of language. The world without, or nature, and the world within, or mind, did not excite more wonder and elicit deeper oracles of wisdom from the ancient sages of Greece than language, the image of both, of nature and of mind. "What is language?"

was a question asked quite as early as "What am I?" and, "What is all this world around me?" The problem of language was in fact a recognized battle-field for the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, and we shall have to glance at their early guesses on the nature of human speech, when we come to consider the third or theoretical stage in the science of language.

At present, we have to look for the early traces of the first or empirical stage. And here it might seem doubtful what was the real work to be a.s.signed to this stage. What can be meant by the empirical treatment of language? Who were the men that did for language what the sailor did for his stars, the miner for his minerals, the gardener for his flowers? Who was the first to give any thought to language?-to distinguish between its component parts, between nouns and verbs, between articles and p.r.o.nouns, between the nominative and accusative, the active and pa.s.sive? Who invented these terms, and for what purpose were they invented?

We must be careful in answering these questions, for, as I said before, the merely empirical a.n.a.lysis of language was preceded in Greece by more general inquiries into the nature of thought and language; and the result has been that many of the technical terms which form the nomenclature of empirical grammar, existed in the schools of philosophy long before they were handed over, ready made, to the grammarian. The distinction of noun and verb, or more correctly, of subject and predicate, was the work of philosophers. Even the technical terms of case, of number, and gender, were coined at a very early time for the purpose of entering into the nature of thought; not for the practical purpose of a.n.a.lyzing the forms of language. This, their practical application to the spoken language of Greece, was the work of a later generation. It was the teacher of languages who first compared the categories of thought with the realities of the Greek language. It was he who transferred the terminology of Aristotle and the Stoics from thought to speech, from logic to grammar; and thus opened the first roads into the impervious wilderness of spoken speech. In doing this, the grammarian had to alter the strict acceptation of many of the terms which he borrowed from the philosopher, and he had to coin others before he could lay hold of all the facts of language even in the roughest manner. For, indeed, the distinction between noun and verb, between active and pa.s.sive, between nominative and accusative, does not help us much towards a scientific a.n.a.lysis of language. It is no more than a first grasp, and it can only be compared with the most elementary terminology in other branches of human knowledge. Nevertheless, it was a beginning, a very important beginning; and if we preserve in our histories of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the four physical elements, the names of a Thales and Anaximenes, we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language-the founders of one of the most useful and most successful branches of philosophy-the first Grammarians.

Grammar then, in the usual sense of the word, or the merely formal and empirical a.n.a.lysis of language, owes its origin, like all other sciences, to a very natural and practical want. The first practical grammarian was the first practical teacher of languages, and if we want to know the beginnings of the science of language, we must try to find out at what time in the history of the world, and under what circ.u.mstances, people first thought of learning any language besides their own. At _that_ time we shall find the first practical grammar, and not till then. Much may have been ready at hand through the less interested researches of philosophers, and likewise through the critical studies of the scholars of Alexandria on the ancient forms of their language as preserved in the Homeric poems. But rules of declension and conjugation, paradigms of regular and irregular nouns and verbs, observations on syntax, and the like, these are the work of the teachers of languages, and of no one else.

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s. 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 doc.u.ments 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds, 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 _rhemha_ 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 cla.s.sics, 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 _diorthoseis_, 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 p.r.o.noun. _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 p.r.o.noun _he_ the first socket, and the relative p.r.o.noun _who_, the second socket;(68) and before Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, 250 B. C., all p.r.o.nouns were simply cla.s.sed as sockets or articles of speech. He was the first to introduce a distinction between personal p.r.o.nouns 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 _ptosis_, 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 cla.s.sical 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.

His work thus became one of the princ.i.p.al channels through which the grammatical terminology, which had been carried from Athens to Alexandria, flowed back to Rome, to spread from thence over the whole civilized world.

Dionysius, however, though the author of the first practical grammar, was by no means the first "_professeur de langue_" who settled at Rome. At his time Greek was more generally spoken at Rome than French is now spoken in London. The children of gentlemen learnt Greek before they learnt Latin, and though Quintilian in his work on education does not approve of a boy learning nothing but Greek for any length of time, "as is now the fashion," he says, "with most people," yet he too recommends that a boy should be taught Greek first, and Latin afterwards.(70) This may seem strange, but the fact is that as long as we know anything of Italy, the Greek language was as much at home there as Latin. Italy owed almost everything to Greece, not only in later days when the setting sun of Greek civilization mingled its rays with the dawn of Roman greatness; but ever since the first Greek colonists started Westward Ho! in search of new homes. It was from the Greeks that the Italians received their alphabet and were taught to read and to write.(71) The names for balance, for measuring-rod, for engines in general, for coined money,(72) many terms connected with seafaring,(73) not excepting _nausea_ or sea-sickness, are all borrowed from Greek, and show the extent to which the Italians were indebted to the Greeks for the very rudiments of civilization. The Italians, no doubt, had their own national G.o.ds, but they soon became converts to the mythology of the Greeks. Some of the Greek G.o.ds they identified with their own; others they admitted as new deities. Thus _Saturnus_, originally an Italian harvest G.o.d, was identified with the Greek _Kronos_, and as _Kronos_ was the son of _Uranos_, a new deity was invented, and _Saturnus_ was fabled to be the son of _Clus_. Thus the Italian _Herculus_, the G.o.d of hurdles, enclosures, and walls, was merged in the Greek _Heracles_.(74) _Castor_ and _Pollux_, both of purely Greek origin, were readily believed in as nautical deities by the Italian sailors, and they were the first Greek G.o.ds to whom, after the battle on the Lake Regillus (485), a temple was erected at Rome.(75) In 431 another temple was erected at Rome to Apollo, whose oracle at Delphi had been consulted by Italians ever since Greek colonists had settled on their soil. The oracles of the famous Sibylla of c.u.mae were written in Greek,(76) and the priests (duoviri sacris faciundis) were allowed to keep two Greek slaves for the purpose of translating these oracles.(77)