Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

The question here naturally arises: Is it possible in the way initiated by Schleicher to reconstruct extinct linguistic stages, and what degree of probability can be attached to the forms thus created by linguists? The answer certainly must be that in some instances the reconstruction may have a very strong degree of probability, namely, if the data on which it is based are unambiguous and the form to be reconstructed is not far removed from that or those actually found; but that otherwise any reconstruction becomes doubtful, and naturally the more so according to the extent of the reconstruction (as when a whole text is constructed) and to the distance in time that intervenes between the known and the unknown stage. If we look at the genitives of Lat. genus and Gr. génos, which are found as generis and génous, it is easy to see that both presuppose a form with s between two vowels, as we see a great many intervocalic s’s becoming r in Latin and disappearing in Greek; but when Schleicher gives as the prototype of both (and of corresponding forms in the other languages) Aryan ganasas, he oversteps the limits of the permissible in so far as he ascribes to the vowels definite sounds not really warranted by the known forms. If we knew the modern Scandinavian languages and English only, we should not hesitate to give to the Proto-Gothonic genitive of the word for ‘mother’ the ending -s, cf. Dan. moders, E. mother’s; but G. der mutter suffices to show that the conclusion is not safe, and as a matter of fact, both in Old Norse and in Old English the genitive of this word is without an s. An analogous case is presented when Schleicher reconstructs the nom. of the word for ‘father’ as patars, because he presupposes -s as the invariable sign of every nom. sg. masc., although in this particular word not a single one of the old languages has -s in the nominative. All Schleicher’s reconstructions are based on the assumption that Primitive Aryan had a very simple structure, only few consonant and fewer vowel sounds, and great regularity in morphology; but, as we shall see, this assumption is completely gratuitous and was exploded only a few years after his death. Gabelentz (Spr 182), therefore, was right when he said, with a certain irony, that the Aryan ursprache had changed beyond recognition in the short time between Schleicher and Brugmann. The moral to be drawn from all this seems to be that hypothetical and starred forms should be used sparingly and with the extremest caution.

With regard to inferential forms denoted by a star, the following note may not be out of place here. Their purely theoretical character is not always realized. An example will illustrate what I mean. If etymological dictionaries give as the origin of F. ménage (OF. maisnage) a Latin form *mansionaticum, the etymology may be correct although such a Latin word may never at any time have been uttered. The word was framed at some date, no one knows exactly when, from the word which at various times had the forms (acc.) mansionem, *masione, maison, by means of the ending which at first had the form -aticum (as in viaticum), and finally (through several intermediate stages) became -age; but at what stage of each the two elements met to make the word which eventually became ménage, no one can tell, so that the only thing really asserted is that if the word had been formed at a very early date (which is far from probable) it would have been mansionaticum. It would, therefore, perhaps be more correct to say that the word is from mansione + -aticum.

III.—§ 7. Curtius, Madvig, and Specialists.

Second only to Schleicher among the linguists of those days was Georg Curtius (1820-85), at one time his colleague in the University of Prague. Curtius’s special study was Greek, and his books on the Greek verb and on Greek etymology cleared up a great many doubtful points; he also contributed very much to bridge the gulf between classical philology and Aryan linguistics. His views on general questions were embodied in the book Zur Chronologie der indogermanischen Sprachforschung (1873). While Schleicher died when his fame was at its highest and his theories were seemingly victorious in all the leading circles, Curtius had the misfortune to see a generation of younger men, including some of his own best disciples, such as Brugmann, advance theories that seemed to him to be in conflict with the most essential principles of his cherished science; and though he himself, like Schleicher, had always been in favour of a stricter observance of sound-laws than his predecessors, his last book was a polemic against those younger scholars who carried the same point to the excess of admitting no exceptions at all, who believed in innumerable analogical formations even in the old languages, and whose reconstructions of primitive forms appeared to the old man as deprived of that classical beauty of the ursprache which was represented in his own and Schleicher’s works (Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung, 1885). But this is anticipating.

If Curtius was a comparativist with a sound knowledge of classical philology, Johan Nikolai Madvig was pre-eminently a classical philologist who took a great interest in general linguistics and brought his critical acumen and sober common sense to bear on many of the problems that exercised the minds of his contemporaries. He was opposed to everything of a vague and mystical nature in the current theories of language and disliked the tendency of some scholars to find deep-lying mysterious powers at the root of linguistic phenomena. But he probably went too far in his rationalism, for example, when he entirely denied the existence of the sound-symbolism on which Humboldt had expatiated. He laid much stress on the identity of the linguistic faculty in all ages: the first speakers had no more intention than people to-day of creating anything systematic or that would be good for all times and all occasions—they could have no other object in view than that of making themselves understood at the moment; hence the want of system which we find everywhere in languages: a different number of cases in singular and plural, different endings, etc. Madvig did not escape some inconsistencies, as when he himself would explain the use of the soft vowel a to denote the feminine gender by a kind of sound-symbolism, or when he thought it possible to determine in what order the different grammatical ideas presented themselves to primitive man (tense relation first in the verb, number before case in the noun). He attached too little value to phonological and etymological research, but on the whole his views were sounder than many which were set forth on the same subjects at the time; his papers, however, were very little known, partly because they were written in Danish, partly because his style was extremely heavy and difficult, and when he finally brought out his Kleine philologische schriften in German (1875), he expressed his regret in the preface at finding that many of the theories he had put forward years before in Danish had in the meantime been independently arrived at by Whitney, who had had the advantage of expressing them in a world-language.

One of the most important features of the period with which we are here dealing is the development of a number of special branches of historical linguistics on a comparative basis. Curtius’s work on Greek might be cited as one example; in the same way there were specialists in Sanskrit (Westergaard and Benfey among others), in Slavonic (Miklosich and Schleicher), in Keltic (Zeuss), etc. Grimm had numerous followers in the Gothonic or Germanic field, while in Romanic philology there was an active and flourishing school, headed by Friedrich Diez, whose Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen and Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen were perhaps the best introduction to the methodical study of linguistics that anyone could desire; the writer of these lines looks back with the greatest gratitude to that period of his youth when he had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of these truly classical works. Everything was so well arranged, so carefully thought out and so lucidly explained, that one had everywhere the pleasant feeling that one was treading on firm ground, the more so as the basis of the whole was not an artificially constructed nebulous ursprache, but the familiar forms and words of an historical language. Here one witnessed the gradual differentiation of Latin into seven or eight distinct languages, whose development it was possible to follow century by century in well-authenticated texts. The picture thus displayed before one’s eyes of actual linguistic growth in all domains—sounds, forms, word-formation, syntax—and (a very important corollary) of the interdependence of these domains, could not but leave a very strong impression—not merely enthusiasm for what had been achieved here, but also a salutary skepticism of theories in other fields which had not a similarly solid basis.

III.—§ 8. Max Müller and Whitney.

Working, as we have seen, in many fields, linguists had now brought to light a shoal of interesting facts affecting a great many languages and had put forth valuable theories to explain these facts; but most of their work remained difficult of access except to the specialist, and very little was done by the experts to impart to educated people in general those results of the new science which might be enjoyed without deeper study. But in 1861 Max Müller gave the first series of those Lectures on the Science of Language which, in numerous editions, did more than anything else to popularize linguistics and served to initiate a great many students into our science. In many ways these lectures were excellently adapted for this purpose, for the author had a certain knack of selecting interesting illustrations and of presenting his subject in a way that tended to create the same enthusiasm for it that he felt himself. But his arguments do not bear a close inspection. Too often, after stating a problem, he is found to fly off at a tangent and to forget what he has set out to prove for the sake of an interesting etymology or a clever paradox. He gives an uncritical acceptance to many of Schleicher’s leading ideas; thus, the science of linguistics is to him a physical science and has nothing to do with philology, which is an historical science. If, however, we look at the book itself, we shall find that everything that he counts on to secure the interest of his reader, everything that made his lectures so popular, is really non-naturalistic: all those brilliant exposés of word-history are really like historical anecdotes in a book on social evolution; they may have some bearing on the fundamental problems, but these are rarely or never treated as real problems of natural science. Nor does he, when taken to task, maintain his view very seriously, but partly retracts it and half-heartedly ensconces himself behind the dictum that everything depends on the definition you give of “physical science” (see especially Ch 234, 442, 497)—thus calling forth Whitney’s retort that “the implication here is that our author has a right at his own good pleasure to lay down such a definition of a physical science as should make the name properly applicable to the study of this particular one among the products of human capacities.... So he may prove that a whale is a fish, if you only allow him to define what a fish is” (M 23 f.).

Though Schleicher and Max Müller in their own day had few followers in defining linguistics as a natural or physical science—the opposite view was taken, for instance, by Curtius (K 154), Madvig and Whitney—there can be no doubt that the naturalistic point of view practically, though perhaps chiefly unconsciously, had wide-reaching effects on the history of linguistic science. It was intimately connected with the problems chiefly investigated and with the way in which they were treated. From Grimm through Pott to Schleicher and his contemporaries we see a growing interest in phonological comparisons; more and more “sound-laws” were discovered, and those found were more and more rigorously applied, with the result that etymological investigation was attended with a degree of exactness of which former generations had no idea. But as these phonological studies were not, as a rule, based on a real, penetrating insight into the nature of speech-sounds, the work of the etymologist tended more and more to be purely mechanical, and the science of language was to a great extent deprived of those elements which are more intimately connected with the human ‘soul.’ Isolated vowels and consonants were compared, isolated flexional forms and isolated words were treated more and more in detail and explained by other isolated forms and words in other languages, all of them being like dead leaves shaken off a tree rather than parts of a living and moving whole. The speaking individual and the speaking community were too much lost sight of. Too often comparativists gained a considerable acquaintance with the sound-laws and the grammatical forms of various languages without knowing much about those languages themselves, or at any rate without possessing any degree of familiarity with them. Schleicher was not blind to the danger of this. A short time before his death he brought out an Indogermanische Chrestomathie (Weimar, 1869), and in the preface he justifies his book by saying that “it is of great value, besides learning the grammar, to be acquainted, however slightly, with the languages themselves. For a comparative grammar of related languages lays stress on what is common to a language and its sisters; consequently, the languages may appear more alike than they are in reality, and their idiosyncrasies may be thrown into the shade. Linguistic specimens form, therefore, an indispensable supplement to comparative grammar.” Other and even more weighty reasons might have been adduced, for grammar is after all only one side of a language, and it is certainly the best plan, if one wants to understand and appreciate the position of any language, to start with some connected texts of tolerable length, and only afterwards to see how its forms are related to and may be explained by those of other languages.

Though the mechanical school of linguists, with whom historical and comparative phonology was more and more an end in itself, prevailed to a great extent, the trend of a few linguists was different. Among these one must especially mention Heymann Steinthal, who drew his inspiration from Humboldt and devoted numerous works to the psychology of language. Unfortunately, Steinthal was greatly inferior to Schleicher in clearness and consistency of thought: “When I read a work of Steinthal’s, and even many parts of Humboldt, I feel as if walking through shifting clouds,” Max Müller remarks, with good reason, in a letter (Life, i. 256). This obscurity, in connexion with the remoteness of Steinthal’s studies, which ranged from Chinese to the language of the Mande negroes, but paid little regard to European languages, prevented him from exerting any powerful influence on the linguistic thought of his generation, except perhaps through his emphatic assertion of the truth that language can only be understood and explained by means of psychology: his explanation of syntactic attraction paved the way for much in Paul’s Prinzipien.

The leading exponent of general linguistics after the death of Schleicher was the American William Dwight Whitney, whose books, Language and the Study of Language (first ed. 1867) and its replica, The Life and Growth of Language (1875), were translated into several languages and were hardly less popular than those of his antagonist, Max Müller. Whitney’s style is less brilliant than Max Müller’s, and he scorns the cheap triumphs which the latter gains by the multiplication of interesting illustrations; he never wearies of running down Müller’s paradoxes and inconsistencies,[14] from which he himself was spared by his greater general solidity and sobriety of thought. The chief point of divergence between them was, as already indicated, that Whitney looked upon language as a human institution that has grown slowly out of the necessity for mutual understanding; he was opposed to all kinds of mysticism, and words to him were conventional signs—not, of course, that he held that there ever was a gathering of people that settled the meaning of each word, but in the sense of “resting on a mutual understanding or a community of habit,” no matter how brought about. But in spite of all differences between the two they are in many respects alike, when viewed from the coign of vantage of the twentieth century: both give expression to the best that had been attained by fifty or sixty years of painstaking activity to elucidate the mysteries of speech, and especially of Aryan words and forms, and neither of them was deeply original enough to see through many of the fallacies of the young science. Consequently, their views on the structure of Proto-Aryan, on roots and their rôle, on the building-up and decay of the form-system, are essentially the same as those of their contemporaries, and many of their theories have now crumbled away, including much of what they probably thought firmly rooted for all time.