•p. 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THB INCOME 
 PROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OP 
 
 mimtu ^^ Sage 
 
 1S91 
 
 AhMAlH ^h.:Ln^ 
 
m-^mt M f 
 
 ^^ -^-h^ij: 
 
 ±3- 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.A. 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 p 121.M94W62 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026441364 
 
MAX MtlLBER 
 
 AND THB 
 
MAX MULLER 
 
 AND fan 
 
 Science of Language: 
 
 A CRITICISM, 
 
 BY 
 
 William Dwight Whitney,- 
 
 Professor in Yale University. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 D. APPIvETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 1892. 
 
Copyright by 
 WlI,I<IAM BwiGHT WHITNBY. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 In preparing this criticism of the last revised edi- 
 tion of the work which is its subjedt, the writer has 
 not refrained from discussing, anew matters already 
 treated by him in criticisms of the original editions of 
 the same work. Such may be found in the North 
 American Review, vol. c. (April, 1865). p. 565 £F.; and 
 vol. cxiii. (October, 1871), p. 430 ff.; also in two or 
 three other places referred to in foot-notes below. 
 
 YaivB University, 
 New Haven, Conn., Feb., 1892. 
 
MAX MUIvIvER AND THE SCIENCE OF 
 I.ANGUAGE. 
 
 There; has appeared recently a new and revised 
 edition of Miiller's well-known work on lyanguage,* 
 followed by the usual array of commendatory notices. 
 Hence it may well be submitted once more to a criti- 
 cal examination, in order to the determination of its 
 true place in the past history and present apparatus 
 of the science. For many it has been their first in- 
 trodudlion to linguistic study ; and doubtless to a 
 large proportion of English-speaking readers, es- 
 pecially, it is still the principal and most authoritative 
 text-book of that study, as regards both methods and 
 results. A work holding such a position calls for 
 careful criticism, that it may not be trusted where it 
 is untrustworthy, and so do harm to the science which 
 it was intended to help. 
 
 THE REVISION OF THE WORK. 
 
 The revision undergone by the volumes has been 
 indeed no merely nominal one. They have been 
 changed from ledtures into a series of chapters, with 
 effacement of the more personal cast belonging to the 
 ledlure-form. Very numerous additions have been 
 made, of every extent, from a line or two, or a brief 
 note, to passages covering many pages ; on the other 
 
 * The Science of I<anguage, founded on ledtures delivered at 
 the Royal Institution in i86i and 1863, by P. Max Miiller. . . 
 In two volumes, i2mo. pp. xliv, 582 ; viii, 744. New York : 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1891. 
 
2 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 hand, thougli in far from corresponding measure, 
 there are not a few omissions ; passages have been re- 
 cast, with more or less alteration, consisting chiefly 
 in expansion ; and the arrangement of material has 
 been sometimes changed, by transfer from one place 
 to another. Enough has been done, certainly, to 
 make the work in its present shape an authoritative 
 record of its author's latest and most matured opin- 
 ions. 
 
 And yet, if any one looks here for any serious 
 modification of what had been already given, he will 
 find himself disappointed. In all essential respedls, 
 the chapters are still what the lectures were. The 
 additions, for example, are mostly of material quite 
 accordant in kind with what was there before. Among 
 them we may note, as of conspicuous extent and im- 
 portance, a protradled account (i. 163-195) of the his- 
 tory of the Sanskrit language and of European ac- 
 quaintance with it : a matter having, to be sure, no 
 more than an indiredl bearing upon the science of 
 language, yet of like charadler with much that was 
 in the volumes before, and in itself interesting 
 enough ; a story (i. 303-306) of the life and labors of 
 the noted philologist Pott, of which the same may be 
 said; a succindl description (ii. 1 13-125) of Melville 
 Bell's analysis of the spoken alphabet, very much in 
 place ; a revised and altered account (ii. 251-281), 
 with considerable additions, of the phenomena com- 
 prehended under the name of Grimm's I^aw ; in a 
 note (ii. 507-511). a long letter from Mr. Gladstone, 
 explaining and defending his view of the relation of 
 Greek mythology to Hebrew traditions ; a quantity of 
 
The Revision. 3 
 
 additional material (ii. 670-674) respedling the super- 
 stitions connedled with barnacle — and so on, and so 
 oii. The recastings and expansions are also for the 
 most part of the same general nature : at the most, 
 they concern matters of detail in the comparative 
 treatment of languages (one or two of these we shall 
 have occasion to notice later) ; with the great ques- 
 tions which underlie the study, and of which the 
 science of language is made up, they have next to 
 nothing to do. As to these questions, and their mode 
 of discussion, our author's views seem to remain what 
 they were thirty years ago ; he has gained no new 
 light upon them from the criticisms that have been 
 made upon his work, nor from studying the discordant 
 views of others, nor from his own review and com- 
 parison and coordination of his old opinions. And 
 this, although a lack of cohesion and. o£-system- has 
 b€eS"""conspicuous among the faults found with his 
 pfesentaSon'or his subjedl. ff might seem as if, hav- 
 ing'written with such popular effusion, and,miscellane-_ 
 Qusness about so many matters bearing upon language, 
 he would have seized gladly the opportunity of a final 
 revision to ponder and recombine it all, establishing 
 in his own mind a certain connedled and" clearly held 
 body of opinions which should yield one another 
 mutual support. An improved consistency, even at 
 the cost of some attradlive disquisition, might well 
 have been one of the objedts aimed at. Of course, it 
 was for him to decide what he would and what he 
 would not undertake to do ; it is not for his readers to 
 prescribe the scope and limits of his task. But it is 
 ours, now that the work is done, to criticise it ; to ex- 
 
If. Mutter's Science of Language. 
 
 amine and report whether his achievement is worthy 
 of his reputation ; whether he has duly felt and re- 
 sponded to the responsibility resting on one whom so 
 many have taken for their guide, and almost for their 
 prophet. 
 
 To this end, we may begin by taking up and analyz- 
 ing a passage in the second volume (ii. 84-85), which 
 will lead us as well as any other into the very heart of 
 our author's philosophy, and method of discussing 
 linguistic questions. It is found in his chapter on 
 "I^anguage and Reason," and has for its special 
 object to justify him in " dissedling the dead body 
 of language" — that is, in giving an account of the 
 spoken alphabet and of the processes of utterance ; 
 and it is headed — 
 
 "THE SOUND OF WORDS HAS NO INDEPENDENT EXISTENCE." 
 
 The author's intention is, as he states at the begin- 
 ning, ' ' to show clearly that reason cannot become 
 real without speech ;" and this, strangely enough, is 
 to be accomplished by proving that ' ' articulate 
 sounds, or what we may call the body of language, 
 exist nowhere, have no independent reality." And 
 this, in its turn, is to be inferred from the fadls that 
 we say experimetii (of which the etymology is given 
 in all detail), and not esperiment or exporiment or the 
 like, and that English speakers say chdracter, with ac- 
 cent on the first syllable, while Germans say chardkter, 
 on the second, and Frenchmen caracfire, on the third. 
 But the logical coherence of this ' ' less metaphysical 
 but more convincing" argument, as he calls it, is as 
 obscure even as any metaphysician could demand. 
 
The Body of La nguage. 5 
 
 " ChdraBer," it is added in explanation, "has a 
 meaning in Knglish, but none in German or French," 
 and so with the other two forms respedlively ; and 
 " articulate sound without meaning is even more un- 
 real than inarticulate sound." That is to say, ex- 
 poriment and esperiment, and, in Knglish, chardkter 
 and cara£llre, do not exist ; and that proves the 
 " body of language " to " have no independent exist- 
 ence" ! In plainer English, there is not to be found 
 anywhere in existence (i. e. in use, for existence in 
 such matters is use, and, as our author himself 
 teaches, use gives existence to even chardkter and 
 cara£lire in other languages) a body of words or 
 word-like combinations of articulate sounds apart 
 from those which, endowed with meanings, form a 
 part of one or another language. And (the argu- 
 ment goes on), if not now, then there never can have 
 been found any such ; and hence, since they did not 
 exist, our conceptions could never have gotten them 
 from anywhere ; and consequently our conceptions, 
 which really, as we must confess, now have words 
 representing them, must have been born in combina- 
 tion with these words, and so could not have existed 
 without them ! His own way of putting the argu- 
 ment is this : "I think it follows that this so-called 
 body of language [i. e. uttered expression] could 
 never have been taken up anywhere by itself, and 
 added to our conceptions from without ; from which 
 it would follow again that our conceptions, which are 
 now always clothed in the garment of language, 
 could never have existed in a naked state." He 
 adds complacently : ' ' this would be perfectly corredl 
 
6 Mullet's Science of Language, 
 
 reasoning, if applied to anything else ; nor do I see 
 that it can be objedled to as bearing on thought and, 
 language. ' ' Is that so ? let us try it on " garments ' ' 
 of another class. In the community X is worn a 
 dress of one particular fashion, in Y of another, in Z 
 of yet another. X's dress is non-existent in Y or Z ; 
 no one would put it on there ; and a dress without a 
 person in it is even more unreal than uncut cloth. If 
 then, these garments exist nowhere laid up for possi- 
 ble future use (this part of the comparison, it must 
 be confessed, does not fit so well in these days of 
 great clothing-warehouses as in the good old time, 
 when every man was measured for his own coat : and 
 yet, after all, what but such warehouses are the > 
 Greek and Latin didlionaries, in which men of sci- 
 ence, from metaphysicians to badleriologists, go and 
 rummage when they wish to get their new concep- 
 tions so clad as to be presentable in society ?), it fol- 
 lows that they cannot have been brought from any 
 where and put upon the people that wear them ; and 
 hence, again, that people were born with them on, 
 and could never have existed in a naked state. And 
 we may add in our turn that, with a true view of 
 what expression is to thought, this argument is no 
 mere joke, but precisely as good as our author's. To 
 clinch the latter, he appends a pair of illustrations : 
 " If we never find skins except as the teguments of 
 animals, we may safely conclude that animals cannot 
 exist without skins [so all the earlier editions read, as 
 the connedlion demands]. If color cannot exist by 
 itself, it follows that neither can anything that is col- 
 ored exist without color." Now of the second illus- 
 
The Body of Language. 7 
 
 tration the conclusion is unquestionable, as much so as 
 that nothing that is shaped can exist without shape, 
 nor anything that is numbered without number. It 
 does not, however, follow from the premise stated, but 
 from this very different premise : that nothing is found 
 by us to exist, or conceivable as existing, without (in 
 the light) possessing color, as without shape or num- 
 ber. Our author's argument, as he uses it, would 
 have been just as good in this form : if the color red 
 cannot exist by itself, it follows that nothing can exist 
 without being red. That this is a non-seguitur would 
 probably be perceptible even to him ; but it is not 
 really more plainly so than his other illustration con- 
 cerning skins, the quality of which he might have 
 tested by varying it thus : if we never find horns 
 and tails except as the appendages of animals, we 
 may safely conclude that animals cannot exist without 
 horns and tails. In fadl, this test of the quality of the 
 reasoning involved was applied to it, some time 
 since ;* and, for once, he appears to have seen the 
 point, and been led, not to omit the unfortunate sen- 
 tence altogether, but to change slightly its conclud- 
 ing words, which in this finally revised text read ' ' we 
 may safely conclude that skins cannot exist without 
 animals. ' ' This is a very harmless statement ; though 
 "if we found" and "we might conclude" would be 
 yet safer, because it would probably puzzle our author 
 to show that apples and potatoes, for example, are not 
 as properly said to have ' ' skins ' ' as animals. But the 
 alteration, though it has spoiled the sentence as a 
 
 * North American Review, vol. cxiii., 0(9;., 1871, pp. 439-40. 
 
8 Muller' s Science of Langtiage. 
 
 quotation for the chapter on fallacies in a treatise of 
 logic, has at the same time destroyed its value as a 
 part of the author's argument ; it goes now to show 
 only that words cannot exist without conceptions, not 
 that conceptions cannot exist without words, and is 
 quite out of conne<5lion with what precedes and fol- 
 lows. It is not possible to support the doctrine that 
 conceptions and words are one and indivisible by 
 pointing out that the skins of animals cannot exist 
 without the animals to which they belong. 
 
 In some respedls it is unfair to begin our review 
 with a discussion of this passage, because it is per- 
 haps (there are others that run it hard) the weakest 
 in the two volumes. It is more than weak ; it is 
 inane (what a German would call albern). But it is 
 one of the passages to which, in a finally and thor- 
 oughly revised edition, one who knows the work can- 
 not help first turning, in order to see what the qual- 
 ity of the revision has been. Moreover, it is not in 
 its charadler an exceptional case, but rather the acme 
 of the author's method ; this is the kind of ratiocina- 
 tion by which, on no small scale, he arrives at unten- 
 able conclusions from misunderstood or half-under- 
 stood premises. Yet again, it concerns a matter, the 
 relation of expression to thought, which is of the 
 most central and fundamental importance in linguistic 
 philosophy, respedling which if any one goes wrong 
 he is liable to fail at every point. The false views 
 here involved ramify very widely through our author's 
 whole work, and it may be well for us to go on and 
 follow them out as they show themselves elsewhere 
 in his reasonings. 
 
Meaning of Conventional. g 
 
 WHAT DOES " CONVBNTIONAI< " MEAN? 
 
 We may note first his assumption, clearly made in 
 these pages, that, if words and ideas (we may well 
 enough use these terms in their popular sense, instead 
 of seeking others more exadl) were not confessed to 
 be identical, or at least eternally joined and insepa- 
 rable, we should have to believe that an array of ar- 
 ticulate signs was produced in advance, and then by 
 deliberate and formal agreement added to or imposed 
 upon a like array of ideas that had been waiting for 
 signs. That is our author's view of what is involved 
 in the dodlrine that the signs which make up lan- 
 guage are "conventional." I^et us see how he ex- 
 presses himself in regard to it throughout his two 
 volumes. 
 
 At i. 29, speaking of certain erring modern phi- 
 losophers, he describes them as holding ' ' that the 
 varieties of human speech arose from different na- 
 tions agreeing on different sounds as the most appro- 
 priate signs of their different ideas ;" and so it is not 
 difficult for him to point out, a little later (i. 32), that 
 " no one has yet explained how, without language, a 
 discussion, however imperfedl, on the merits of each 
 word, such as must needs have preceded a mutual 
 agreement, could have been carried on." Again, at 
 i. 94 : "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 abstradlions of the mind. ' ' Yet again, 
 at i. 329, the idea is repudiated of " a congress for 
 settling the proper exponents of such relations as 
 
lo Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 nominative, genitive," etc. Once more, at ii. 432, he 
 asserts that I<ocke ' ' never questions for a moment the 
 received theory that at some time or other in the his- 
 tory of the world men had accumulated a treasure of 
 anonymous general conceptions, to which, when the 
 time of intelledlual and social intercourse had arrived, 
 they skilfully attached those phonetic labels which we 
 call words." And so in other passages which might 
 be quoted, and to which nothing of a different char- 
 adler could be opposed ; for though in general, where 
 he formally adopts a wrong view of anything, our 
 author yet shows here and there glimpses of the right 
 view, with regard to this he is consistent from one 
 end to the other of his work ; ' ' conventional' ' is 
 everywhere regarded as necessarily implying a con- 
 vention of people, gathered to discuss and decide on 
 the words and forms by which conceptions should be 
 represented. 
 
 Now it may be extremely convenient to dispose in 
 this manner of a docftrine opposed to one's own ; but 
 what are we to think of the charadter of a work which 
 seriously puts forward such an absurd caricature, and 
 thinks to win by rebutting it ? Did our author really 
 believe that to be the meaning of the word ' ' conven- 
 tional ' ' as used by any human being in reference to 
 language ? It would be more credible provided the 
 term were so used in reference to anything else ; but 
 can he bring up a single connection in which that is 
 the case? It is "conventional" with us to bow or 
 shake hands on meeting a friend, instead of rubbing 
 noses with him, or patting the pit of one's own 
 stomach : was that settled at a " convention ' ' of the 
 
Meaning of Conventional. it 
 
 forefathers of our division of the race? It is "con- 
 ventional ' ' to wear a dress-coat, with other articles of 
 clothing to match, at an evening entertainment ; but 
 he who transgressed the rule would not be excused on 
 the plea that he could find no record of the vote by 
 which it was carried in the original "convention." 
 It has been, and is still in some measure, "conven- 
 tional ' ' to write ' ' your obedient servant ' ' at the end 
 of a letter : when and where was the gathering of 
 epistolographers that decided it ? And so on, through 
 the whole range of adls and habits called ' ' conven- 
 tional ;" the word everywhere signifies neither more 
 nor less than ' resting on a mutual understanding or 
 a community of habit.' As applied to any word con- 
 stituting a part of language, it means that that word, 
 instead of being bound to its sense by an internal and 
 necessary tie, is so only by an external one, a tie of 
 mutual understanding and common usage, formed by 
 acquired habit on the part of every user. 
 
 And this is the most fundamental fadl in the study 
 of language ; its recognition would sweep away a 
 great part of the difiiculties in which our author in- 
 volves himself thoughout his linguistic investigations. 
 It is also the most obvious fadt, if one will but take up 
 the study at the right end. Thus, for example, for 
 the idea ' one ' (which we may seledl as an example of 
 a conception of the simplest and most absolute kind) 
 there are as many different names as there are lan- 
 guages in the world (and these are innumerable) : 
 there is our one (i. e. wun), Germ, ein, Fr. un, Ital. 
 uno, Gr. eis, Skt. eka. Each of these names answers 
 its purpose precisely as well as any of the others, and 
 
12 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 only a fool — or else an ignorant who did not know that 
 any of them save his own was in existence — would 
 think of maintaining that one or another was the real 
 sign for the conception ' one, ' the rest being shams 
 or blunders. Moreover, no living being ever comes 
 to use any one of the series except as he learns it 
 from others. There was a time when our author, great 
 and learned man as he now is, was taken on some 
 one's knee and taught, not without difficulty, to say 
 eins, zwei, drei, and so on, and to associate these signs 
 with conceptions of number which his possession of 
 human faculties gave him the ability to frame ; since 
 that time he has learned many different but equivalent 
 series, either from living teachers, or from books, or 
 from both sources combined. It was within the reach, 
 probably, of his present memory, and by a conscious 
 effort, that he learned one, two, three, and yet more eka, 
 dva, tri ; and it is only because the acquisition of the 
 first series lies beyond his recoUedtion that he appar- 
 ently thinks it born into his mind along with the first 
 and simplest distindtions of number, while confessing 
 that the English and Sanskrit names were in fadl 
 obtained by an external process. If this is his 
 opinion, it rests upon him to explain why all per- 
 sons who develop the beginnings of speech, in a com- 
 munity that says eins, zwei, drei develop this particu- 
 lar set of names and no other — and so with one, two, 
 three, with un, deux, trois, and all the rest. 
 
 For that it does not depend in any measure upon 
 grade of intelledl, or upon bent of charadler, or upon 
 endowment of soul, is too obvious to be questioned ; 
 all in the one community, fools and wise, tender and 
 
Meaning of Conventional. ij 
 
 truculent, imaginative and prosaic, grow up to say 
 eins, zwei, drei ; all in the other, of like diversity of 
 gifts, grow up to say one, two, three. Equally is it 
 independent of race or blood, as is shown by the most 
 numerous and varied proofs. Individuals', classes, 
 races, especially in our modern mixed communities, 
 speak languages which were strange to their ances- 
 tors. The children of Germans who go to live in 
 England, as our author perhaps knows by experience, 
 are apt to learn the English signs first, and if their 
 blood is mixed, by having parents of two races, it 
 does not in the least degree tend to give them that 
 (according to him) impossibility, a mixed language. 
 
 If, instead of these simple notions of number (which, 
 if any such thing were possible, would seem most 
 likely of all to generate corresponding incorporations 
 in speech), we took a highly intricate notion, the 
 produdl of a somewhat advanced civilization, such as 
 ' city, ' we should find the same thing true : city, stadt, 
 ville, urbs, polis, nagara, are only specimens (all from 
 one family of related languages) of the utter diversity 
 of nomenclature that would present itself : as many 
 different names as there are human tongues, all equal- 
 ly good for their purpose, none possessed by a single 
 individual that has not learned it, each used effedlive- 
 ly, to mutual understanding, between persons who, 
 having learned it, know in what sense it should be 
 used. And so in all classes of words, and in all the 
 words of each class. 
 
 Hence it follows that every language known to us 
 is a body of conventional signs for ideas, which has to 
 be learned by those whose purposes it is to serve. 
 
i^ Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 which can be acquired and used by any human being, 
 and which avails in intercourse among those who, 
 having aHke acquired it, can understand it from one 
 another's lips and hands. 
 
 It ought not to be necessary to make such an ele- 
 mentary exposition as this ; but unfortunately it is 
 necessary, and in the highest degree, and it cannot be 
 made too distindlly and impressively. The truths 
 here brought out are even expressly denied by a few ; 
 they are misunderstood and misrepresented and ig- 
 nored by many more (as by our author) ; and they 
 are left out of sight in the linguistic reasonings of the 
 majority. But they are the most fundamental and 
 indispensable principles of linguistic science ; fruitful 
 investigation in that science is possible only in pro- 
 portion as they are seen and acknowledged and laid 
 at the basis of reasoning. 
 
 LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF ARTEMtJS WARD AND HIS SCHOOI,. 
 
 It is reported of Artemus Ward (on how good au- 
 thority need not concern us) that he said it was all 
 natural enough that people should have learned some- 
 thing about the size and distance and motions of the 
 planets, but that what puzzled him entirely was how 
 they ever found out their names. There are a plenty 
 of scholars besides our author who are unconscious 
 adherents in this matter of the Wardian philosophy, 
 holding that things possess by nature names of their 
 own which men have to find out, instead of having 
 names given them by men. It is the old and famous 
 question of cpvasi or deffsi, and Artemus and his fol- 
 lowers say cpvasi. 
 
Mispronunciation. i^ 
 
 MISPRONUNCIATION DOES NOT ANNIHII,ATE; A WORD. 
 
 Kven a small degree of appreciation of the true 
 charadler of a word would have saved our author from 
 the assertion made by him in the passage we began 
 with examining (ii. 84), that, if of a given word we 
 ' ' change only the accent, ' ' we get what ' ' is nothing ; 
 change one vowel or one consonant . . . and we have 
 mere noises, what Heraclitus would call a m.erQ psophos, 
 but no words. ' ' This is not only wrong, but ludi- 
 crously wrong ; it flies diredlly in the face of fadts 
 without number with which every one is familiar in 
 every-day life. Some people, even among the best 
 classes of speakers, say dlly instead oi ally', kardss in- 
 stead of kdrass, without failing to be understood ; no 
 one is conscious of a blank, or a Heraclitean psophos, 
 where words should have stood in their sentences. 
 Many such people say nefew instead of nevew, eksert in- 
 stead of egzert (spelt nephew, exert^, with a similar re- 
 sult. Men of more or less deficient education are all 
 the time committing so-called errors of pronunciation, 
 or even of significance, which do not prevent their 
 sharing in the general benefits of language. Dialecftic 
 varieties of speech, of varying kind and degree — 
 Scotch, I,ancashire, Yankee, Southern negro, and so 
 on — are yet, with more or less difficulty, intelligible 
 to us, however irksome we may find them in the 
 measure in which they are nowadays thrust before us 
 in literature. The efforts of most young children to 
 reproduce the signs which they are learning to asso- 
 ciate with their conceptions are attended with a dread- 
 ful slaughter of accents and consonants and vowels, 
 but no one thinks of calling their utterance " mere 
 
1 6 Muller' s Science of Language. 
 
 noises." All these things are as familiar to our au- 
 thor as to everybody else ; he simply loses sight of 
 them in the heat of his great argument to prove ' ' that 
 reason cannot become real without speech:" what 
 have the humble fadts of the every-day life of lan- 
 guage to do with so grand and far-reaching a conclu- 
 sion ? If he knew that words are only the signs of 
 ideas, it would be plain to him that such signs, if 
 seriously used with the intent to communicate, will 
 bear a great deal of disguisement before they lose 
 their intelligibility, and that their intelligibility is 
 their existence. That difference of chdrader and char- 
 Akter and caracfire, which now he deems so portentous, 
 would appear to him not less insignificant than it does 
 to the enlightened readers of his book ; it is nothing 
 more than the varying habit of pronunciation by dif- 
 ferent members of the great Buropean community of a 
 sign obtained by them all from a common source for a 
 certain common conception ; it has no more import- 
 ance than the difference of fashion in the cut of a 
 coat. 
 
 WSTS OF WORDS AND WSTS OF IDBAS WAITING FOR UNION. 
 
 Another thing that would become clear to our 
 author is the true reason why there is not, and never 
 was, even in the imaginations of those to whom he 
 gratuitously ascribes the dodlrine, a scheme of signs 
 and a scheme of conceptions waiting to be matched 
 with one another. Whenever a conception takes such 
 distindtness of form as to call for expression, expres- 
 sion is at once found for it ; that is the simple way in 
 which language grows now, and has grown ever since 
 
Lists of Words and Ideas. ly 
 
 we have known anything of it. Our author himself, 
 when he thought he had recognized a force, or a com- 
 bination of forces, in the development of language, 
 which had escaped previous observation, found it a 
 naked infant which needed to be " clothed in the 
 garment of language, ' ' and he proceeded to throw 
 about it the loose wrapper of dialectic regeneration ; 
 and he has doubtless done such things at various other 
 times, before and since. He made the wrapper out of 
 old cloth ; for, in the present condition of language, 
 at least, there is so much of the finished stuff lying 
 ready to hand that one very rarely finds it necessary 
 or expedient to go back to the raw material. If his 
 analysis of forces is approved by his fellow students of 
 language, this name will be accepted on his proposal, 
 and he will prove himself to have performed what he 
 declares an impossibility : he wiU have ' ' taken up' ' 
 a bit of ' ' the so-called body of language, ' ' and added 
 it to his conception from without. Grimm, when he 
 had demonstrated certain processes and facts in lan- 
 guage-history, called them lautverschiebung ( ' a shoving 
 away of sound :' a very indefinite name) and stark 
 and schwach inflection ('strong' and 'weak' : utterly 
 fanciful ; he might just as suitably have named them 
 ' black' and ' white' ) ; and, as a result, all who deal 
 with Germanic infledlion are obliged, whether they 
 will or no, to talk of strong and weak conjugation and 
 declension. I,et it not be pleaded that these are ex- 
 amples only of new applications of old names ; if the 
 conception designated is new, it has its body added 
 from without, whether this be obtained from the pre- 
 viously existing stores of one's own language, or from 
 
i8 Midler's Science of Language. 
 
 those of another, living or dead — and not less than if 
 the nomenclator had made for it a sign which no 
 human ear ever heard before : like, for example, Bul- 
 wer's vril (in A Strange Story). 
 
 THE INDIVIDUAI,'S P0W:BK. OVER IvANGUAGE. 
 
 Our author has an infinite deal of trouble — as, in- 
 deed, could not fail to be the case, considering his 
 false view of what a word is — with the subject of the 
 adtion of individuals on language. He began with 
 declaring (i. 39) that, ''although_there--is--a---G©stisu-^ 
 ous change in language, it is not in the power of man 
 either to produce or to prevent it." But later he ap- 
 , peafi to have thought better of this ; he already saw 
 that the theory of inherent forces in language itself, 
 which by their own energy bring about its changes, 
 is (i. 46) ' ' sheer mythology, ' ' and he was also appar- 
 ently unwilling to suppose a constant miraculous en- 
 ergy of the Almighty working out the same results ; 
 and the only possible third alternative was human 
 adtion in some way or of some kind. Accordingly, 
 in one or another edition later than the first, he al- 
 tered his text to read ' ' not in the power of any man ' ' 
 etc. ; and so it stands at present. The next sentence, 
 however, still reads as at first : " we [not ' ' one of us' '] 
 might think as well of changing the laws which con- 
 trol the circulation of our blood, or of adding one 
 cubit to our stature, as of altering the laws of speech, or 
 inventing new words according to our own pleasure." 
 Considering that, by changing "man" into "any 
 man, ' ' he had virtually acknowledged that ' ' man' ' 
 does after all have something to do withthe growth 
 
The Individual and Language. ip 
 
 of language, and considering tliat lie denies witli sucli 
 superfluous copiousness the combined adlion of men 
 upon it in " conventions" held for the purpose, one 
 might think that he would feel a special call to in- 
 vestigate further, and determine what the mode of 
 adlion of individuals really is, and how far it goe'S ; 
 and it is possible that in that case he would have come 
 upon the truth of the matter — that indi-nduajs^inidats. 
 changes, and the communitx^either accepts and uses 
 tEein, making them language^ by its usCj or rejects an^^, 
 aimulsThem by refusingJ:o use thenij and that a re- 
 'cognition of this simple process, the mutual a«5lion of 
 individual and community, explains everything. This, 
 however, he does not do ; and his various expressions 
 on the subjedl, though sometimes betraying an ink- 
 ling of the truth, are confused, indistindl, and incon- 
 sistent. I^et us look through a few of them. 
 
 If even so great a man as an emperor could not 
 (i. 39) by a blunder change the gender oischisma from 
 neuter to feminine, it was only because the established 
 habit was otherwise, and the reason for a change was 
 insufficient — not to mention that the emperor himself 
 in his more instrudled moments would not insist upon 
 it. To found upon such incidents a dogma of the 
 inaccessibility of all language to any change by an in- 
 dividual would be the height of absurdity. A little 
 class of I^atin neuters plural in a appear in French as 
 feminines singular(examples are arwf , bible, merveille), 
 as the result of similar blunders committed by speak- 
 ers far below the rank of emperor. Our author him- 
 self tells us (ii. 440, note) that essentia is a blundering 
 formation, for which somebody is to be held respon- 
 
20 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 sible ; but essence, essential, etc., have long been unim- 
 peacliable parts of European language ; all language 
 is full of the results of such blunders. He further says 
 that, if we ever come to say very delighted, ' ' it will not 
 be by the will of any individual, nor by the mutual 
 agreement of any large number of men, but rather in 
 spite of the exertions of grammarians and academies." 
 In this, however, he is altogether mistaken ; it will 
 be by the mutual agreement of large numbers of men, 
 of numbers so large that the small minority of gram- 
 marians and academicians quite disappears in compar- 
 ison with them. Here is to be seen again our author's 
 unaccountable persuasion that ' ' mutual agreement' ' 
 can signify only formal and ceremonious agreement to 
 do a thing, in a " convention" held for the purpose, 
 instead of, as is usual in real life, tacit agreement in 
 doing it. We are plainly told at i. 63 and ii. 39 how 
 changes are brought about in certain languages by 
 the conscious and intended adlion of individuals. At 
 i. 65 (note) is quoted with approval the statement that 
 in a small community a single eminent man may make 
 great changes in a language. At ii. 193, it is " con- 
 ceded that single individuals or single families may 
 sometimes influence the fates of a language. Personal 
 defedls in pronunciation, at first congenital, may 
 spread by imitation." How near our author comes 
 here to the true principle — initiation by an individual, 
 imitation by his fellows — if he would only open his 
 eyes and see it ! Also at i. 41-42 this principle can 
 be seen to be involved, though almost hopelessly 
 mixed up with obscuring elements : ' ' though the 
 individual seems to be [read instead "is"] the prime 
 
The Individual and Language. 21 
 
 agent in producing new words and new grammatical 
 forms, lie is so only after his individuality has been 
 merged in the common adlion of the family, tribe, or 
 nation to which he belongs [that is, in plain English, 
 it needs the common acceptance and use to make his 
 produdl a part of the common language]. He can do 
 nothing by himself [of course, and for the reason just 
 stated] ; and the first impulse to a new formation, 
 though always given by an individual [a most im- 
 portant admission !], is mostly, if not always, given 
 without premeditation — nay, unconsciously [thus, 
 then, such a new formation, in spite of the categorical 
 denials elsewhere, may perhaps sometimes be given 
 with conscious premeditation !]. The individual, as 
 such, is powerless [repetition of what was said in the 
 preceding sentence], and the results apparently pro- 
 duced by him [no, only initiated ; production by an 
 individual is not even apparent] depend on laws be- 
 yond his control [that is stuff : read ' ' on influences of 
 whose adlion he is mostly unconscious"], and on the 
 cooperation of all those who form together with him 
 one class, one body, or one organic whole [i. e., in 
 less turgid phrase, of his fellow-speakers]." And one 
 may compare further ii. 219-220. There are individu- 
 als and individuals ; and the amount of influence ex- 
 erted by any single one will depend on his weight in 
 the community, as well as on the special circumstan- 
 ces of each case — ^which, again, will resolve them- 
 selves mainly into consonance with the established 
 habits and resulting preferences of the community ; 
 in all their general features they admit of approxi- 
 mate determination, although the free adlion of the 
 
22 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 human will introduces an element of uncertainty which 
 baffles complete analysis. 
 
 It is very difficult to strike the balance of such 
 warring and wavering views ; but on the whole we 
 may perhaps most safely assume that our author really 
 teaches that men as a race, and even individual men, 
 can and do effedl change in language. It is true that, 
 when he comes to sum up his inquiries, under the 
 heading ' ' causes of change in language ' ' (i. 46) , he 
 gives us nothing more definite than this : ' ' though 
 it may be quite true that language cannot be changed 
 or molded by the taste, the fancy, or genius of any 
 individual man, it is equally true that it is through 
 the instrumentality of man alone that language can 
 be changed. ' ' This both denies the admissions made 
 elsewhere, and is a palpably fragmentary explanation, 
 since we can not but inquire at once what is the real 
 effective force that produces the changes, employing 
 the " instrumentality of man " to work "through." 
 The addition of the next sentence brings us no light : 
 "if language grows, it can grow on one soil only, and 
 that soil is man. ' ' A very little prosaic clearness of 
 view and consistency of statement would be far more 
 edifying than all this poetic fancy. A nearer ap- 
 proach to definiteness, perhaps, is found at i. 533, 
 where we read that ' ' what is antecedent to the pro- 
 dudlion of roots is the work of nature ; what follows 
 after is the work of man." Here, to be sure, the pro- 
 dudlion itself of roots seems to fall to the ground be- 
 tween two stools ; but, even if we understand this as 
 included with what is "antecedent to" it, as the 
 work of nature, nearly the whole substance of Ian- 
 
Is Linguistics a Physical Science? 2j 
 
 guage is of human produdlion, and its history a 
 history of human adlivity. And yet our author 
 declares the study of language to be a physical 
 science ! 
 
 WHBTHER THB ST0DY OP I,ANGtrAGE IS A PHYSICAI, SCIENCE. 
 
 He so declares it, too, in the first chapter of his 
 first volume. It must have seemed strange to many 
 readers that a question of this character should be 
 thus settled off-hand at the start, as a kind of minor 
 preliminary to the presentation of the study, and 
 before the author had enlightened his public as to its 
 subject and methods. If he had put it off to the end 
 of his work, it is hardly credible that he would have 
 come to the same conclusion ; but, as he has made no 
 retraction even in this final edition, we must take it 
 as a doctrine which at any rate he means to stand by. 
 There is no reason why we should enter into a seri- 
 ous discussion of it ; for probably no student of lan- 
 guage who has any claim to public attention agrees 
 with him ; nor is there anything serious to be urged 
 in his defense. Moreover, in the second volume (ii. 
 7), he seems half-inclined to withdraw the teaching of 
 the first, acknowledging that it was meant to be 
 taken in a Pickwickian sense ; yet not without a 
 hearty slur at his critics, as a " certain class of 
 scholars" who "ignore your definitions and then 
 show that you have been quite wrong. " The impli- 
 cation here (and also on p. viii of the preface to the 
 present edition) is that our author had a right at his 
 own good pleasure to lay down such a definition of a 
 physical science as should make the name properly 
 
24- Mullef' s Science of Language. 
 
 applicable to the study of this particular one among 
 the produdls of human capacities — acting, as human 
 capacities always do act, under conditions and in 
 methods which are withdrawn from the full light of 
 consciousness. So he may prove that a whale is a 
 fish, if you only allow him to define what a fish is. If 
 he were minded to deny altogether the existence of a 
 division line between physical and historical sciences, 
 his position would be intelligible, and his reasons 
 would have a prima facie claim to attention. But, 
 acknowledging as he does (i. 22) the classification, 
 and giving the rude but generally acceptable distinc- 
 tion, that "physical science deals with the works of 
 God, historical science with the works of man ' ' (he 
 does, indeed, insert in this edition ' ' it has been said, ' ' 
 as if he had his migivings about it), that he should 
 still reckon the study of language to the former class 
 is simply unaccountable. Nor does he allege any 
 reason for doing so, except, on the one hand, that its 
 methods have a strong resemblance to those of the 
 physical sciences (but this is true, in greater or less 
 degree, of other historical sciences in their modem 
 forms) ; and, on the other hand, that the science of 
 language, though called sometimes "comparative 
 philology, " is a very different thing from philology 
 as commonly understood (e. g. classical philology), 
 since it deals with languages themselves, and not 
 with literary records as such. His argument may, 
 without doing it any injustice, be succindlly stated 
 thus : philology is, as all agree, a historical science ; 
 but the science of language is of a quite other char- 
 adler ; therefore the science of language is a physical 
 
Schleicher's View. 23 
 
 science. The logic of this is not at all discordant 
 with that of his reasonings in general, as we have 
 seen and shall see abundantly. It does not occur to 
 him that the same material may be studied from differ- 
 ent points of view while the fundamental character of 
 the study remains the same. He adds in this edition 
 a comparison to illustrate the distindtion as he views 
 it (i. 22) : " thus the science of optics, including all 
 the laws of light and color, is a physical science, 
 whereas the science of painting, with all its laws of 
 manipulation and coloring, being that of a man-created 
 art, is a purely historical science. ' ' Precisely so ; 
 and in like manner the science of acoustics, including 
 all the laws of sound and hearing in all their modifi- 
 cations (everything in speech that can be imitated by 
 a speaking-machine), is a physical science ; but the 
 science of articulate sounds, as made by men's wills 
 and applied to the needs of human expression and 
 intercourse, is a purely historical science. The com- 
 parison offered us is a totally false one ; the analogue 
 of the science of language is not the science of optics, 
 but would be a science of artistic expression, dealing 
 with all the instrumentalities and methods and his- 
 tory of the various kinds of art, as related to the art 
 capacities and instindls of men ; and no one would 
 hesitate as to where that should be classed. 
 
 SCHLEICHER CALLED TO AID. 
 
 It was said above that hardly anyone whom the world 
 has reason to listen to agrees with our author on the 
 point now under discussion. There are, of course, ex- 
 ceptions. A notable one was the German philologist 
 
26 Mailer's Science of Language. 
 
 Schleicher (died in 1868), who, in a pamphlet entitled 
 The Darwinidh Theory and the Science of Language 
 (Weimar, 1863), expresses himself thus : "languages 
 are natural organisms, which, without being deter- 
 minable by the will of man, grew and developed 
 themselves in accordance with fixed laws, and then 
 again grow old and die out ; to them, too, belongs 
 that succession of phenomena which is wont to be 
 termed life. Glottik, the science of language, is ac- 
 cordingly a natural science ; its method is on the 
 whole and in general the same with that of the other 
 natural sciences." This is a thoroughly consistent 
 paragraph ; a dogmatic statement and a logical infer- 
 ence from it ; the two hang together, and must be 
 together accepted or rejedted. Now it will hardly be 
 credited, but is nevertheless true, that our author 
 (i. 46) quotes in substance the first part of the para- 
 graph, the dogmatic statement, as an example of 
 ' ' sheer mythology ' ' in treating of language, and at 
 another place (i. 28, note) gives the other part, the 
 inference, as a support to his own view ! It would 
 not be easy to find a more remarkable example of try- 
 ing to sit on two stools at once. If our author can 
 accept Schleicher's theory of language, he has the 
 right to take with it the resulting view of the char- 
 adler of its science ; but if he (with good reason) 
 rejedls the former as totally wrong, then his own 
 doctrine is condemned by its agreement with the 
 latter. 
 
 THE IDENTITY OF I^ANGUAGE AND THOUGHT. 
 
 But there is an additional term to this comparison 
 of views. In various passages of his second volume, 
 
Language and Thought. 27 
 
 our author teaches that thought and speech are iden- 
 tical. Respedling this subjedl, to be sure, as respedl- 
 ing nearly every other, he expresses himself quite dif- 
 ferently in different places. At ii. 70, he claims only 
 ' ' that thought, in one sense of the word, i. e. in the 
 sense of reasoning, is impossible without language or 
 without signs ;" and in the next sentence he allows 
 "the reality of thought or mental activity in ani- 
 mals ;" while, a little further on (p. 71), he is willing 
 to ' ' concede to animals sensation, perception, memory, 
 will, and judgment." If judgment, or the drawing 
 of conclusions from premises, is to be conceded to ani- 
 mals, one wonders wherein can lie the immense differ- 
 ence between thought and reasoning. There seems to 
 be here another instance of that liberty (or license) of 
 definition on his part which, as we saw above, our 
 author reproaches his critics with desiring improperly 
 to abridge. ' ' Reasoning is that kind of thought 
 which is carried on only by means of language ; hence, 
 reasoning is impossible without language." That is 
 at any rate logically immaculate ; but one does not 
 seem to get on very much by it in his knowledge of 
 either thought or language. If we look further on 
 for more light, we find (p. 82) that, " without words, 
 not even such simple ideas as white or black can for a 
 moment be realized." Is that possible? Can any 
 one doubt that many even of the lower animals dis- 
 tinguish white and black, and know each when they 
 see it, as clearly as we do ourselves? But perhaps 
 this again is a matter of definition, and the trick is in 
 the word realized : ' ' realizing is that kind of compre- 
 hension which is given only by language ; hence, to 
 
28 Muller' s Science of Language. 
 
 realize white and black is impossible without lan- 
 guage." The next page, instead of enlightening us, 
 confuses us still more. We are there informed that 
 "a child knows [the italics are the author's] as cer- 
 tainly before it can speak the difference between sweet 
 and bitter (i. e. that sweet is not bitter) as it knows 
 afterwards (when it comes to speak) that wormwood 
 and sugarplums are not the same thing." It appears, 
 then, that to know that sweet is not bitter is possible 
 without language, but to know that wormwood is not 
 sugarplums is only attainable by means of words ; 
 therein lies the difference between mere thought and 
 reasoning ; and that is the sort of power one acquires 
 by learning to talk ! Some one who happens to have ' 
 a child not yet able to speak might do well to try the 
 experiment of slipping into its mouth a bit of worm- 
 wood instead of a sugarplum ; perhaps, after all, he 
 would find that the child not only "knew" the dif- 
 ference, but "realized" it not less thoroughly than 
 the man who can talk an hour without stopping. 
 But our author goes directly on to explain further : 
 "a child receives the sensation of sweetness, it enjoys 
 it, it recoUedls it, it desires it again ; but it does not 
 know what sweet is ; it is absorbed in its sensations, 
 its pleasures, its recoUedtions ; it cannot look at them 
 from above, it cannot reason on them, it cannot tell of 
 them." Poor child! It is to be inferred, then, that 
 our author, who has learned to speak, does know 
 what sweet is ? Physicists would be much obliged to 
 him if he would kindly tell them. The general opin- 
 ion is that . sweetness is a subjective sensation, not 
 further de^nable, caused in the nerves of gustation by 
 
Langtcage and Thought. zg 
 
 certain substances, which we therefore call sweet ; 
 and that we apply the name not because we thereby 
 know or realize any better what sweet is, but in order 
 that we may " tell of it." A child, it is true, may be 
 more "absorbed" in the enjoyment of sweets than 
 a man, owing to the absence in its life of other ab- 
 sorbing interests that occupy the mind of a man ; but 
 even the man is not ordinarily tempted to ' ' reason on ' ' 
 the sensation. As to "looking at it from above," we 
 may as well give that up, as too difiEicult a puzzle, 
 suppressing at the same time the timid suspicion that 
 the phrase is perhaps mere ornament, and does not 
 mean anything. The real balance of result for the 
 science of language which we arrive at is simply this : 
 the man and the child alike do not know what sweet 
 is ; but the man differs from the child in being able to 
 tell of it : no great gain to boast of Our author, 
 however, derives from it and from his other reasonings 
 here reported "the one and indivisible character of 
 language and thought" (ii. 85), and "considers the 
 identity of language and reason as one of the funda- 
 mental principles of our science" (ii. 86); just as in 
 the first volume (i. 527) he maintained that "words 
 without thought are dead sounds, thoughts without 
 words are nothing ; to think is to speak low, to speak 
 is to think aloud." 
 
 Probably the number of those who hold this doc- 
 trine, of the identity of thought or reason with lan- 
 guage, is as small as the number of those who hold 
 that the study of language is a physical science. But 
 also, beyond doubt, the number of those who hold the 
 two docSrines together is not greater than unity, be- 
 
JO Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 ing limited to our author himself. It takes a mind 
 very peculiarly constituted to contain them both with- 
 out being disturbed by their repugnance. Nor is it 
 every one who could manage to be so far wrong in 
 both the mutually- destructive parts of one theory. 
 
 The erroneous view that thought and language are 
 identical is arrived at by three stages : 
 
 1 . I^anguage is of immense importance to thought. 
 This is incontestably true ; a great deal of our 
 
 adlual thinking is of a kind and degree that could 
 not be carried on without the aid of the symbols called 
 words, any more than intricate mathematical processes, 
 even the multiplication of larger numbers, can be per- 
 formed without figures, or than many processes of 
 mechanical art without tools. 
 
 2. No thought is possible without language. 
 
 This is simply an exaggeration : as if one were to 
 hold that figures are necessary in order to show how 
 one and one make two, or how twice two are four ; or 
 that the bare hands are unable to accomplish any- 
 thing. 
 
 3. Thought and language are identical. 
 
 This is the merest confusion and absurdity, like 
 maintaining the identity of processes of mathematical 
 reasoning with mathematical signs, or of the hands 
 with tools. With which of the words one, ein, eka, 
 etc. (to recur to a former illustration: p. 11), is the 
 conception ' one ' identical ? or is ' city ' identical 
 with city, or urbs, or nagara, or any other of its 
 thousand signs ? The infinite diversity of language 
 is of itself a sufficient refutation of its identity, or 
 even of its close and inseparable union, with thought, 
 
Language and Ethnology. ji 
 
 which in its lower and simpler processes is substan- 
 tially one and the same in all men. 
 
 I<A.NGUAGE AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 One of the most important bearings of a sound sci- 
 ence of language is upon ethnology. Having no clear 
 and defensible view of language as related to race, 
 our author can, of course, make no useful contribu- 
 tion to the discussion of the relation of these two 
 branches of study ; he rather complains that they 
 ' ' have both suffered most seriously from being mixed 
 up together " (i. 458), without telling us how or why ; 
 or he withdraws himself behind the plea that ' ' the 
 Science of I^anguage has nothing to do with skulls ' ' 
 (ii. 296) : that is, that we are debarred even the attempt 
 to coordinate the two classes of evidence, linguistic 
 and physical, so as to make language furnish its part 
 toward the unraveling of the early history of man- 
 kind. If we once see distinctly and hold firmly the 
 truth (as stated above) that a language is a body of 
 external signs for conceptions, which has to be learned 
 by every human being that uses it, and which can be 
 learned by a man of any race ; and, further, that cir- 
 cumstances are fully capable of leading not only indi- 
 viduals, but large bodies of individuals, even whole 
 communities, to learn languages unknown to their 
 ancestors — then we have established a principle which 
 governs all the relations of linguistic and physical 
 evidence ; and this, while of necessity limiting nar- 
 rowly the value and reach of linguistic evidence, yet 
 leaves it so much importance as should satisfy every 
 linguist. 
 
32 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 I,ANGUAGE AS BARRIER BBTWEEN MAN AND THE I,OWER 
 A^IMAI^S. 
 
 Again, it is only a distindl understanding of the 
 same fundamental truths as to the nature of language 
 and its relation to thought that can give any value at 
 all to statements made respecting its bearing on the 
 distindlion between man and brute. To declare, as 
 our author does in various places (i. 12, 480, etc.), that 
 language is the barrier, or the one impassable barrier, 
 or the like, is unscientific and worthless. Language 
 is not the only barrier, for there are a plenty of other 
 difierences which are not a whit less charadleristic. 
 If he had said " it is a barrier, and the one which, as 
 a professed student of language, I most notice and 
 appreciate, ' ' he would have taken up a position capa- 
 ble of defense. As it is, he might precisely as well 
 have said "the Ural mountains are the barrier be- 
 tween Great Britain and Kamchatka." Even as a 
 barrier, as one among many, it calls for a better lin- 
 guistic philosophy than our author's to show that the 
 difference is one of kind, and not of degree merely. 
 Since many of the lower animals possess means of 
 communicating with one another, and some of them 
 to a noteworthy extent, it is incumbent on a student 
 of language who meddles with the subjedt at all to 
 show what, if anything, there is in the mode of com- 
 munication possessed by men that is distinctive, that 
 is different in principle from the methods of other ani- 
 mals. This our author does not do, and, holding his 
 opinions, is quite unable to do ; and yet nothing is 
 more easy, if one knows what human speech is. In 
 the complete conventionality of our spoken signs for 
 
Language as Barrier between Man and Brute, jj 
 
 thought is found the (so far as we know or have any 
 reason to suspect at present) full and sufficient distinc- 
 tion ; in the fadt that no sign in any human language 
 depends for its value upon an internal and immedi- 
 ately or instindlively apprehensible connedlion be- 
 tween sign and sense ; that every such sign has to be 
 learned and associated with its sense by every one 
 who understands and uses it. This element is what 
 has to be sought after in the mutual communication 
 of animals, if any parallel is to be drawn between that 
 and ours. If, for example, the chatterings of a cer- 
 tain species of monkeys are at once intelligible to all 
 the animals of that species, wherever born and how- 
 ever reared, and yet more if they are intelligible also 
 to other species, they are not analogous with men's 
 speech ; to be this, they must, however strong their 
 appeal to monkeys of the given species from a certain 
 locality, leave entirely unaffected those from another 
 and distant locality, or individuals brought up away 
 from the society of their fellows. It is precisely 
 among the lowest and least cultivated races of men, 
 as our author abundantly points out (chap. ii. of his 
 first volume), that dialedlic diversity is greatest, so 
 that on a petty Polynesian island, peopled by tribes 
 undeniably of the same stock, each tribe may be 
 found to have a different speech, unintelligible to the 
 others : and this by the universal and normally-acting 
 laws of growth of human language. It is only com- 
 munication, not kindred, that makes and keeps 
 mutual intelligibility among human beings. Any 
 means of communication that is immediately intelligi- 
 ble to a whole species, or to more than one, does not 
 
 3 
 
j^ Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 correspond with language, but with those natural 
 and instindlive signs whose use we must -necessarily 
 assume to have preceded the historical development 
 of language and led the way to it, and which could, 
 even were every now existent dialect wiped out, still 
 be made available for a certain restridled amount of 
 mutual intelligence — probably a greater amount than 
 we now realize ; since the use of language, as a vastly 
 more perfedl instrumentality, has dulled both our 
 power to produce and our quickness to understand 
 such signs : indeed, we may perhaps even suppose, in 
 accordance with modern views of heredity, that those 
 powers have undergone actual degradation and efFace- 
 ment by long disuse. We ought also to hold our 
 minds open to the possibility that traces of conven- 
 tional intercourse, improbable as it now appears, may 
 yet be found among some of the lower animals ; and 
 certainly we need not be in the smallest degree afraid 
 of such a discovery ; it is for men like our author, 
 who appear able to see only one "barrier," to dread 
 even its smallest redudlion, as threatening a removal. 
 To us it is far enough from Great Britain to Kam- 
 chatka, though the Urals between were razed to the 
 level of the steppe. 
 
 If we wish to put the absence of language among 
 the lower animals in the class of deficiencies to which 
 it belongs, and whose analogies explain its character, 
 we must use the term "institution." Every human 
 language is an institution, a part of the civilization of 
 the race that has produced it, slowly wrought out and 
 shaped, like the race's other institutions, in the strug- 
 gle of man with his surroundings, and handed down 
 
The Origin of Language. 35 
 
 by tradition, not by inheritance, from one generation 
 to another, and even sometimes, like other institu- 
 tions, from one race to another ; the linguistic philos- 
 ophy of no one who does not see and acknowledge 
 this has a really solid foundation. The lower ani- 
 mals, whatever their capacities, in some respedls sur- 
 passing ours, may be, have no progressive civiUzation, 
 no growing institutions ; and, with the rest, they have 
 no language. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OP I^ANGUAGE. 
 
 There is yet another subjedl, one of the most inter- 
 esting in the science, and, if taken up aright, neither 
 mysterious nor obscure, namely the origin of lan- 
 guage, as to which our author's fundamental fail- 
 ure to see what a word is in relation to its idea ren- 
 ders him incapable of saying anything worthy of 
 serious attention. It is a subject upon which his 
 views have undergone some degree of modification, 
 though hardly of clarification. In his first edition he 
 appeared to put forward as his own the so-called ' ' ding- 
 dong" theory: namely, that in man's "primitive and 
 perfedl [!] state " an idea that struck him rang by his 
 tongue, and so furnished him a "phonetic type" of 
 the idea ; and that, when its necessary work had been 
 accomplished, and man provided with a set of " roots' ' 
 for language to grow from, this instinctive capa- 
 city disappeared again. In later editions we learned 
 that we had been mistaken ; that this account was 
 meant only as a quotation from a certain German 
 authority (whose name, however, had not been even 
 mentioned in the Index to the volume) ; and in the 
 
j(5 Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 present work it is indeed, though retained, sufficiently 
 hedged about with cautions against our attributing 
 to it any substantial value. The simpler way might 
 have been to omit it, and to put in its place a definite 
 account of the author's own view ; but this would not 
 have accorded, apparently, with the plan of his revi- 
 sion. So, also, in the final preface to the first volume 
 (p. x), he makes an admiring and approving reference 
 to Noire' s utterly fantastic theory, called by him 
 "synergastic," that the first roots arose from the 
 involuntary common exclamations of a troop of men 
 engaged in performing a work together, like sailors 
 pulling on a rope ; but he neither describes nor de- 
 fends this theory in the chapter devoted to the sub- 
 ject. So much at least is clear, that to him " roots" 
 are the initial elements of speech. In regard to this, 
 doubtless no sound philologist will disagree with him ; 
 for roots are simply words in which no grammatical 
 charadler, whether of part of speech or of form of in- 
 fledlion, is discernible ; and all such distindlive char- 
 adlers are demonstrably the produdl of later growth 
 in language, and do not belong to its primitive stage. 
 That, however, in any given language, or even body 
 of related languages, we can point out the body of 
 roots which antedated the development of grammatical 
 distinctions is by no means to be believed. Bodies of 
 roots as arrived at by the sole process within our 
 reach, namely by analysis of existing forms, would be 
 only in part coincident even in the various tongues of 
 our own family. Our author repeatedly insists that 
 no new roots have ever been made since the original 
 root-making period ; that is doubtless not true in any 
 
The Origin of Language. jy 
 
 sense ; but it is especially untrue in the lower and 
 practical sense, since the forces of linguistic change 
 are all the time reducing to the semblance of roots 
 elements that are really derivative or compound : 
 such are, for example, English preach and cost (from 
 prm-dicare and con-stare), or French ptrir and cueillir 
 {ixova. per-ire and con-legere), or Latin debere and posse 
 (from de-habere smA potis-esse) . Of these, to be sure, 
 we happen to have recorded information that enables 
 us to trace the genealogy ; but we are totally ignorant 
 how many and which, if not all, of what we call Indo- 
 European roots are really of the same secondary char- 
 adler. Our author points out (ii. 445), with good ■ 
 reason, that the period from now to the time of the 
 Vedas is as nothing compared with that through which 
 a word like the pronoun aham ' I ' comes down to us ; 
 it may be added that the distance of time from us to 
 the birth of aham is as nothing compared with that 
 which would take us back to the actual beginnings of 
 human speech. As to the phonetic form of these be- 
 ginnings we know nothing, nor can hope ever to know 
 anything ; as to their kind, we can draw confident 
 conclusions from our knowledge of the chara«5ler and 
 the history of language within historic times. 
 
 In regard to the origination of the primeval stock of 
 roots our author, as we have already seen, is partly 
 inconsistent and partly non-committal. At one time 
 he calls them the ofispring of an instindl which died 
 in giving them birth ; at another (e. g. ii. 375) he re- 
 quires us to accept them simply as ultimate facts. At 
 any rate, their recognition is, he says, opposed to the 
 interjectional and onomatopoetic theories (i. 526) ; and 
 
j<S Mailer's Science of Language. 
 
 yet (i. 536) he is not unwilling to call the mental in- 
 stindt which produced all that is material in language 
 either interjectional, or onomatopoetic, or mimetic. 
 Still later, however, in his Lectures on Mr. Darwin's 
 Philosophy of Language (1873 ; since only a magazine 
 reprint is accessible, a more definite reference can- 
 not be given*), he says that roots "represent the 
 nuclei formed in the chaos of interjedlional or imita- 
 tive sounds ;" and again, that " interjedlions and imi- 
 tations are the only possible materials out of which 
 human languages could be formed." If he really 
 reached this conclusion, and in such a way as to hold it 
 firmly, why should it not appear in this final revision 
 of his text-book on the science ? And if (i. 528, note) 
 his Science of Thought has yet later and more matured 
 conclusions, why should he not report them also here, 
 at least in brief, instead of only serving up to us once 
 more his crude and superseded notions of thirty 
 years ago ? 
 
 The essential determining element in any real theory 
 of the beginnings of speech must be the same recog- 
 nition of the true nature of speech which we have al- 
 ready found efficient above in deciding other questions : 
 namely, that words are only external signs for con- 
 ceptions. The plain and undeniable existing result 
 of the unnumbered centuries of linguistic growth has 
 been to provide all the different races of men with 
 bodies of such signs, all conventional, all requiring to 
 to be learned, all diverse. And through the whole 
 known history of language the thing striven after has 
 
 * See North American Review, vol cxix. (July, 1874), p. 61 flf. 
 
The Origin of Language. jp 
 
 been the same : to obtain, always from the most con- 
 venient source, signs whicli should be associated with 
 whatever new ideas were conceived, and should ex- 
 press these by representation. There is no reason 
 for our assuming anything else to have been the case 
 from the first ; though the circumstances were very 
 different, the intent was the same ; the beginnings 
 of speech were the successful results of the attempt to 
 arrive at mutually intelligible signs. That is what 
 takes place nowadays between two human beings who 
 have not learned one another's speech and who desire 
 intercourse ; that would, if living languages were to 
 disappear suddenly^ be the way in which a start was 
 made toward the recovery of the lost possession. The 
 exigencies of primitive human intercourse called out 
 the first signs ; the possibilities of mutual intelligence 
 suggested them. The primum cognitum had nothing 
 whatever to do with the matter ; it was determined 
 by a combination of the primum designandum and the 
 primum designabile (if we may coin the term). What- 
 ever was most plainly suggestive of an intended mean- 
 ing was put to use ; and it is simply because such 
 suggestiveness is found especially in imitative utter- 
 ances, whether interjectional or onomatopoetic, that 
 these must be acknowledged as the initiators of speech. 
 If we seek an instructive parallel, we may find it in 
 the beginnings of writing, which, as no one questions, 
 were the depidlions, the recognizable imitations, of 
 visible objects — and for the same reason, because they 
 were mutually intelligible signs. Or, again, in the 
 written language of mathematics, which has become a 
 great system, fearfully and wonderfully made to the 
 
4-0 Midler's Science of Language. 
 
 apprehension of those who are not familiar with it, 
 and wholly independent of ordinary speech, but which 
 has its starting-point in one, two, and three strokes, 
 suggestive signs for 'one,' 'two,' and 'three.' At 
 present, it is true, no suggestive character is to be 
 traced in the signs of speech — or, if in exceptional 
 cases discernible, it is unessential, decorative rather 
 than significant ; but that is because, after a certain 
 amount of use, each sign came to be habitually em- 
 ployed, no longer because of its suggestiveness, but 
 because it had been used and understood before. So 
 we no longer see the two and three strokes in our 
 figures 2 and 3, although they are really there, dis- 
 guised from view. So we no longer discover pictures 
 in our own alphabetic characters, nor in the cuneiform 
 signs, nor in the Chinese mode of writing, while yet 
 not questioning their hidden presence there ; out of 
 hieroglyphical signs, which have their original sug- 
 gestiveness, grow everjrwhere hieratical and demotical 
 signs, in which this is lost, and may grow alphabetic 
 signs, involving an altogether difierent principle. In 
 this sense (though one not recognized by him), it is 
 strictly true, as claimed by our author (i. 507), that 
 language begins where imitation ends : that is, hu- 
 man speech, as a system of conventional signs, began 
 its history when the signs lost their pictorial or depic- 
 tive character, and were used because others had used 
 them before. That out of a very small array of such 
 signs a whole rich language could with the process 
 of time be developed no one can deny — least of 
 all our author, who in his chapter on ' ' the root mar ' ' 
 (ii. 408 ff.) has shown how from a single starting-point 
 
Dialects. /f.i 
 
 (and one which he himself acknowledges may have 
 been originally imitative : p. 408) a whole scheme 
 of diverse senses and applications, of every class, 
 could arise. 
 
 DIAI,BCTS. 
 
 That a word is the conventional sign for a thought, 
 not its depletion or inseparable refledlion, is a fadl that 
 underlies also of necessity the constant change of every 
 language ; and the latter is unintelligible without its 
 full and formal recognition. That this change is the 
 cause, and the only cause, of the divarication of any 
 given language with the course of time into dialedls 
 is one of the truths without which the theory of dia- 
 ledls cannqt possibly be understood. Another is that 
 communication, intercourse, is the counteradting and 
 regulating force which prevents indefinite divarica- 
 tion, maintaining a degree of unity of speech within 
 the limits of a community. Of these fundamental 
 truths our author has no clear vision, but only oc- 
 casional and imperfedt glimpses, and hence all that he 
 says of dialedls is obscure and full of inconsistencies. 
 It is altogether doubtful even how he would define a 
 dialedl as distinguished from a language ; he often ex- 
 presses himself as if the two names belonged to differ- 
 ent things, instead of to the same thing under different 
 aspects. A dialedl is simply a related language. The 
 two differ only as a brother, a cousin, an uncle, dif- 
 fers from a man. Kvery dialedl is a language, as fully 
 entitled to the name as any other. Every language 
 is also a dialedl, provided it have any relatives, de- 
 scendants with it from the same more original speech ; 
 
4-2 Mutter's Science of Language. 
 
 and, as a matter of fa<?b, no language known to us 
 fails to have such relatives ; all languages are found 
 to occur in groups having, in very varying degrees, 
 that kind of resemblance which comes from sharing a 
 common tradition ; proved produdls of the divergent 
 alteration of a single tongue. One dialedl in a group, 
 or more than one, may be more conspicuous and im- 
 portant than the rest, or all may be alike obscure : 
 this has nothing to say against the double character 
 of every one, as dialedl and at the same time language. 
 The world of speech, as of men, is made up of all 
 sorts of individuals. 
 
 Our author rightly says (i. 6i) that " literary lan- 
 guages, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and I^atin, are the 
 royal heads in the history of language ' ' ; and a con- 
 siderable part of his lucubrations on the subject is 
 open to but little criticism. But, here as everywhere 
 else, he has no such definite conceptions as he can 
 hold fast to ; and another considerable part is of a very 
 contrary charadter. On the page already quoted from 
 (i. 6i), he thinks it may be shown cL priori "that dia- 
 ledls must have existed before uniform literary lan- 
 guages." Considering how late phenomena even the 
 earliest literary languages are, could it possibly have 
 entered into the mind of any one to believe otherwise ? 
 But what is a " uniform literary language ' ' ? for we are 
 immediately after told that, even under the sway of a 
 literary language, ' ' hardly any one even now speaks 
 like everybody [he doubtless means ' ' anybody ' ' ] else. ' ' 
 And hence we are made to infer that ' ' from its very 
 first beginning language existed in the form of dia- 
 ledls." But that is by no means true, unless before 
 
Families of Languages. 4.3 
 
 ' ' the very first beginning ' ' there existed a common 
 language to divaricate from. Half the time our 
 author seems to see no distinction between dialectic 
 variety and non-dialedlic diversity. If we bring to- 
 gether an English, a Chinese, a Zulu, and a red In- 
 dian person or family, we shall have difference of 
 speech enough, but it will not be dialedlic variety, but 
 fundamental discordance. Dialedts imply previous 
 connedlion ; and if (which we do not know) language 
 did not come into being until after there were ' ' clans 
 and tribes" as well as "individuals and families" 
 (i. 61), then there were as many diverse languages as 
 centers where it arose, and, later, just so many groups 
 of dialedts descended from these — not "from," but 
 afier the very first beginning of speech. 
 
 FAMIWES OF LANGUAGES. 
 
 Further on in the volume (i. 239), we are warned 
 against ' ' the common but altogether gratuitous sup- 
 position that the principle of genealogical classifica- 
 tion must be applicable to all languages. ' ' But why ? 
 Are not all existing and recorded tongues descended 
 from other tongues ; and is not dialectic divarication, 
 even "from the very first beginning," a necessary 
 tendency of all human speech ; and is it not therefore 
 the first question we have to ask, respecting any 
 human speech whose history we wish to investigate, 
 with what others it is related? That and nothing 
 else is what is meant by ' ' the principle of genealog- 
 ical classification ;" and to deny its universal applica- 
 tion is to deny altogether the scientific charadler of 
 language-study. 
 
^4- Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 As, however, we go on to examine our author's 
 further reasonings upon this subjedl, we are led to 
 suspect that, as often elsewhere, he perhaps does not 
 mean precisely what he says, but only intends to 
 intimate that, in the present condition of our knowl- 
 edge, we are not able to carry out everywhere a satis- 
 fadtory genealogical classification. For he points out 
 (i. 240) the great importance, as signs of relationship, 
 of " formal or grammatical elements" ("which," he 
 sagely adds, ' ' after they have been affedled by pho- 
 netic change, can be kept up only by a continuous tra- 
 dition " — as if any of the elements of speech ever were 
 or could be kept up in any other way !) ; and, show- 
 ing that some languages may lack these, he concludes 
 (i. 241) that a "genealogical classification of such 
 languages is, therefore, from the nature of the case, 
 simply impossible, at least if such classification is 
 chiefly to be based on grammatical or formal evi- 
 dence." A most coherent argument, certainly, where 
 a ' ' simple natural impossibility ' ' is tempered by an 
 "at least if" and a "chiefly"! What he really 
 means is rather this : ' ' since grammatical or formal 
 evidence is of the highest value and most convincing 
 charadler as between dialedts, we shall find it very 
 difficult, and sometimes impossible, to make a com- 
 plete genealogical classification where it is wanting ;" 
 and in this there is much truth. Elsewhere, how- 
 ever, he is far more liberal in regard to the admission 
 of evidence ; he allows (i. 400) a real relationship of 
 all ' ' Turanian ' ' speech on the ground of ' ' common 
 words and common roots which have been discovered 
 in the most distant branches," and even (i. 399) 
 
How Many Families? 4J 
 
 points out that, instead of our finding here "the 
 same family likeness which holds the Semitic or 
 Aryan languages together, ... it is the very absence 
 of that family likeness which constitutes one of the 
 distinguishing features of the Turanian dialects." If 
 even the absence of family likeness can be relied on to 
 prove family relationship, there is no reason, certainly, 
 to deny the universal application of the principle of 
 genealogical classification in any sense, or to despair 
 of bringing all languages without exception together 
 into families ; many of them exhibit a great deal of 
 that -kind of evidence. 
 
 HOW MANY PAMIWES OF I<ANGUAGES ? 
 
 On account, probably, of the general lack of evi- 
 dence of both kinds, family likeness and the absence 
 of family likeness, our author declares that there are 
 not more than two or three families of language to be 
 recognized in the world. After his denial of the pos- 
 sibility of general genealogical classification, indeed, 
 no one can be surprised to find him (i. 385) maintain- 
 ing that, " strictly speaking, the Aryan and Semitic 
 are the only fanfilies of speech which fully deserve 
 that title." A little further on (i. 396), however, he 
 says of the ' ' North-Turanian ' ' languages that ' ' they 
 share not only common morphological features, but 
 they are held together by a real genealogical relation- 
 ship, though not a relationship so close as that which 
 holds the Aryan or Semitic languages together." It 
 seems, accordingly, that "real relationship" does not 
 make a family, unless it reaches a certain undefined 
 grade of closeness. Yet at i. 156 we are told of cer- 
 
^6 Midler's Science of Language. 
 
 tain dialedls " now classed as members of tlie Tura- 
 nian family." Again, at i. 389, we read of the Bantu 
 languages that ' ' not only their strongly marked 
 grammatical features [so they do not lack even this 
 highest class of evidence !], but their common prop- 
 erty in certain important words also leaves no doubt 
 of their being descendants of one and the same 
 family." Without some explanation, not vouch- 
 safed, no one can be fairly expedled to see what the 
 distinction is between being a family and being the 
 descendants of a family. Still earlier (i. 156), we are 
 told of ' ' one of the most brilliant discoveries in the 
 history of the science of language, the establishment 
 of the Malay and Polynesian family of speech." 
 Amid all these uncertainties and discordances, the 
 only thing we see clearly is that here is another sub- 
 jedl respedling which our author does not know his 
 own opinion well enough to adhere to it from chapter 
 to chapter, even from page to page, of a finally revised 
 work. There is, in fact, no discoverable reason for 
 limiting the name ' ' family' ' to Aryan and Semitic, ex- 
 cept that these two are such extremely respedlable old 
 families, whose fame is spread through all the earth. 
 And this our author elsewhere deems no sound reason, 
 when he (rightly) teaches us that, from the point of 
 view of the science of language, one dialedl is as good 
 as another, the uncultivated as the cultivated, the ob- 
 scure as the noted, the recent as the ancient. It can- 
 not be in addition because we know all about Aryan 
 and Semitic, while the limits of other families are un- 
 certain ; for there are a plenty of uncertainties beset- 
 ting even these two, as regards not only their own 
 
Aryan, etc., the Only Families. if/ 
 
 limits, but their connedlion with other recognized 
 families (if we may provisionally speak of others), and 
 even with one another ; many scholars maintain the 
 original identity of Hamitic with Semitic ; many more 
 of Semitic with Aryan ; and a trusted authority re- 
 peatedly quoted by our author (e. g. i. 475, note) 
 makes not the least difficulty of connedling Chinese 
 and Mongol with Aryan. 
 
 WHY ARYAN, SBMITIC, AND TURANIAN ARB THE ONI,Y 
 
 IfAMIUBS. 
 
 In a work {Introduction to the Science of Religion, Lon- 
 don, 1873) of considerably later date than the original 
 I^edlures of which the present is the final edition, our 
 author fully admits three real families instead of two, 
 and says (p. i6r) that "the reason why scholars have 
 discovered no more than these two or three great fam- 
 ilies of speech is very simple. There were no more, 
 and we cannot make more. Families of languages 
 are very peculiar formations ; they are, and they must 
 be, the exception, not the rule, in the growth of lan- 
 guage. ' ' And he goes on to point out the ' ' possibil- 
 ity," but the absence of "necessity for human speech 
 leaving its primitive stage of wild growth and wild 
 decay," and attributes the cases of withdrawal which 
 actually occurred to " a purely spontaneous act on 
 the part of the ancestors of the Semitic, Aryan, and 
 Turanian races " — with more, which must be seen in 
 order to be credited.* Of all the theories with which 
 our author's fertile brain has decked the outside of the 
 
 * It is discussed more fully in the Transactions of the Ameri- 
 tan Philological Association for 1880, p. 100 ff. 
 
^.8 Mutter's Science of Language. 
 
 science of language, this is doubtless the most orig- 
 inal and surprising. The "conventions" by which 
 he (with everybody else) denies that men, assembling, 
 formed their conventional speech would be as nothing 
 compared with the spontaneous movements here as- 
 sumed for these three ancient races, meeting together 
 and combining their dialedts into a family, and re- 
 solving that they would never, never have anything 
 more to do with wild growth and wild decay — only, 
 alas, how vainly ! since the records show that they 
 have since gone on growing and decaying not less 
 wildly than before. We ought not, indeed, to lay too 
 much stress on the theory, since it may possibly be- 
 long only in the environment of the particular work 
 from which we have taken it, and not among its 
 author's general linguistic dodlrines — though it has 
 been quoted with acceptance by some of his followers. 
 But, at any rate, it is not too late for students of lan- 
 guage, by spontaneous acts of their own, to make up 
 for negledt on the part of the ancient speakers of 
 tongues outside the pale of the grand trio, by them- 
 selves gathering those tongues as now spoken into 
 groups and branches and families. That is just what 
 they are doing, as rapidly and thoroughly as the cir- 
 cumstances, often unfavorable, will allow ; they are 
 tracing out dialedtic afiSnities, and classifying accord- 
 ingly, making up just so many families as the fadts 
 seem to warrant, but acknowledging that much of 
 their work is provisional only, and that, if even Aryan 
 and Semitic are in some degree doubtful designations, 
 other family names must long, or always, continue 
 such. To work in this way is to take a part in the 
 
Old Turanian Family Abandoned. ^.g 
 
 progress of linguistic science ; to do otherwise is to 
 stand apart from that progress. 
 
 THE OI<D TURANIAN lfAMII,Y ABANDONED. 
 
 Our author should have due credit for finally 
 abandoning in this edition the old "Turanian" ag- 
 gregation, which, as established by himself, and 
 widely accepted on his authority, has for a generation 
 been a stumbling-block in the way of science. He is 
 still, however, apparently under the impression that 
 his labors upon it were a part of the advance of knowl- 
 edge ; that the setting up of a " Turanian family ' ' to 
 contain all the Asiatic languages which are neither 
 Aryan nor Semitic was a step forward, and its present 
 repudiation another. In this he is doubtless mistaken; 
 the classification was always a groundless and unsci- 
 entific one, a classification of ignorance, or a practical 
 erecflion of the absence of family likeness into a family 
 tie — a principle which, as seen above, he has not yet 
 given up in theory. It was a step backward, in which 
 our author dragged with him a great many weak or 
 ill-informed followers ; and these, unfortunately, will 
 be slow in retrieving it ; the name Turanian will 
 probably long continue, as it has long been, one of 
 the watchwords of sciolism. 
 
 DOES UNITY OE SPEECH PRECEDE DIVERSITY? 
 
 In parts of his discussions respecting dialedls and 
 families, our author appears distindlly to recognize 
 the principle that dialedlic resemblances point back to 
 original unity of speech. Thus, at i. 33, he speaks of 
 " an earlier language, the mother, if we may so call it, 
 of the whole Indo-European or Aryan family of 
 
JO Muller' s Science of Language. 
 
 speech;" of "the original language of the Semitic 
 race;" and of the Ural-Altaic languages, "all radii 
 from one common center of speech ;" and again at 
 i. 235, and in the second volume at p. 350, nothing 
 could well be more explicit than his statements to a 
 like effedl. But at i. 247, where he comes to speak of 
 the Germanic or Teutonic dialedls, he surprises us by 
 declaring that ' ' there never was a common, uniform 
 Teutonic langfuage ; nor is there any evidence to 
 show that there existed at any time a uniform High- 
 German or a uniform I/Ow-German language, from 
 which all High-German and I,ow-German dialedls 
 are respedlively derived ;" and then follows a page or 
 two of rambling discussion, in which truisms and 
 errors are intermingled, in a way that it would re- 
 quire many pages of comment to unravel and set 
 right. Since the unity of Germanic speech rests on 
 precisely the same basis of fadl and inference as that 
 of Indo-European or Aryan speech, we cannot but 
 wonder to find the one denied and the other main- 
 tained between the same covers. In fadt, the one is 
 just as true, and needs to be taken with the same 
 limitations, as the other. Insistence on the qualifica- 
 tion ' ' uniform, ' ' which our author uses in connedlion 
 with his Germanic statement, will not relieve him 
 from the charge of inconsistency ; for, as he has 
 recognized elsewhere (see above, p. 42), there is not 
 now, and so of course there never was, a wholly uni- 
 form speech, spoken by a limited community, even a 
 cultivated community, anywhere in the world ; hence 
 the unity which is postulated at the point of divarica- 
 tion of a set of dialedls is one that necessarily involves 
 
Antecedent Unity of Speech. 31 
 
 a certain, not inconsiderable, percentage of variety. 
 It is only that kind and degree of unity which is pos- 
 sible in human speech, a unity in comparison with the 
 much greater variety which grows out of it. 
 
 But all this concerns chiefly our author's first vol- 
 ume. When we come to the second, in a long pas- 
 sage (ii. 1 8 1-5) which is now for the first time added, 
 and must therefore be taken as representing his latest 
 and ripest opinions, we learn that the original Aryan 
 language itself is also a fidlion (ii. 184) : "it was for- 
 merly [i. e. in the preceding volume ?] the fashion to 
 speak of a Proto-Aryan language from which Sanskrit, 
 Greek, I^atin, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic were all 
 derived, just as French was derived from I^atin, or 
 EJnglish from Anglo-Saxon. That theory, however, 
 has hardly held its own for a longer time than the 
 theory which it was meant to replace, namely that all 
 Aryan languages were derived from Sanskrit." If 
 our author has really gained new light which over- 
 throws the theory in question, making it a blunder 
 comparable with the ignorant opinion, never held by 
 any one of any degree of instruction, that Sanskrit 
 was the mother-tongue of the Indo-Kuropean family, 
 why, in this final revision, should not the statements 
 in the first volume which taught the blunder have 
 been rectified ? We found there a seeming inconsist- 
 ency of one kind ; now we have one of another kind, 
 and of a degree that may fairly be called a stultifica- 
 tion. The theory has ' ' held its own ' ' in those ear- 
 lier chapters even till now ; and, thanks to our au- 
 thor's heedlessness, it bids fair to hold its own there 
 still as long as this text-book of the Science of I^an- 
 guage shall endure. 
 
^2 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 There would seem, at the very least, to be due us 
 ■here some rendering of a reason for the abandonment 
 of the theory elsewhere taught. Are the differences 
 of Sanskrit, Greek, I^atin, and the rest, eternal? 
 Converging as they plainly do in the past, do they 
 never meet or almost meet ? Was there ' ' from the 
 very first beginning, " as it is said elsewhere, no Pro- 
 to- Aryan, but only a Proto-Sanskrit, a Proto-Greek, 
 and so on ? Then why not also a Proto-French and a 
 Proto-English ? What are we to put in place of our 
 old belief, if now discarded ? These are questions to 
 which the succeeding paragraph seems to undertake 
 to furnish a reply ; and it is so curious and charadler- 
 istic a specimen of our author's peculiar style of 
 ratiocination that we cannot help giving it a little 
 detailed examination. 
 
 WHY THBRB WAS NO PROTO-ARYAN I,ANGnAGE. 
 
 He begins his paragraph of explanation thus : 
 ' ' And yet there was some truth in that theory, if only 
 rightly understood." Its essential untruthfulness, 
 then, is not to be proved, but only taken for granted ; 
 that is our first disillusionment. Still, if the single 
 phase of truth which it presents is clearly set forth, 
 according to the apparent promise of this sentence, 
 we shall perhaps be able to infer wherein the remain- 
 ing falsity consists. But we are again disappointed, 
 for in what follows is made no attempt to let us 
 " rightly understand " what the " some truth in that 
 theory ' ' is. He goes on, namely, thus : "To imag- 
 ine that there was a settled Proto- Aryan language, as 
 settled as Sanskrit, and that it became modified after- 
 
No Proto-Aryan Language. ^j 
 
 wards, according to strict phonetic rules, is, no 
 doubt, impossible." No one lias ever ventured to 
 imagine that the original Aryan tongue was ' ' as set- 
 tled as Sanskrit," or settled at all in any such sense ; 
 yet, on the other hand, every competent linguistic 
 scholar will not only imagine, but confidently hold, 
 that whatever phonetic modifications it afterward 
 underwent were " according to strict phonetic rule," 
 and could not have been otherwise. It is not every 
 one who could combine into one sentence a truism 
 and a false assumption, each of which has no bearing 
 on the other, while neither has any bearing on the 
 subject under discussion. The question whether a 
 language must be "as settled as Sanskrit" in order 
 to have its phonetic changes take place according to 
 rule is a quite new one, which historical students of 
 language have not yet taken up, and to which it will 
 probably be found impossible to induce them to diredl 
 serious attention. On the contrary, since we find 
 that phonetic changes do occur with a great degree of 
 regularity through the whole body of Aryan' lan- 
 guages, we shall be tempted, on our author's own 
 principles, to deem it rather necessary than impossible 
 to imagine a settled Proto-Aryan language. Further : 
 ' ' That process can be studied to great advantage in 
 the transition of Sanskrit into Prakrit dialedls." 
 Doubtless ; but why point it out here ? Such an 
 obiter diElum merely disturbs the strained attention 
 with which we are trying to follow the argument. It 
 proceeds: "But we have only to study languages 
 before they are reduced to writing in order to see that 
 the natural state of language is always dialedlic." 
 
5^ Mulleins Science of Language. 
 
 That is unquestionably true — or after they are reduced 
 to writing, either. The writing of both Sanskrit and 
 Prakrit has not prevented the multifariousness of later 
 Hindu dialedls, nor the writing of Latin that of Ro- 
 manic dialedls, nor the more recent writing of Italian 
 that of modern Italian dialedls, nor the writing of sev- 
 eral successive stages of German that of German dia- 
 ledls. Dialedlic divarication is so necessary an ac- 
 companiment of the growth of language that no.adlual 
 linguistic conditions have been found able to prevent 
 it ; only ideal conditions, which may be approached 
 but probably never realized in the future, can put an 
 end to it altogether. But we must go on and finish 
 the sentence we began to quote above : " . . . is al- 
 ways dialedlic, and dialedlic, not in the sense in which 
 Italian, Spanish, and French are dialedls, derived 
 from Latin, but as we often find in the smallest Poly- 
 nesian island two or three dialedls existing side by 
 side, not one of which has a right to claim precedence 
 before the others." This is the end of the paragraph ; 
 and, instead of explaining anything, it raises a whole 
 array of new difficulties. It appears to be claimed 
 that language is ' ' naturally ' ' dialedlic in the Polyne- 
 sian sense, but unnaturally so in the Romanic sense. 
 But wherein the difference lies is not made clear. Is 
 it derivation from lyatin ? or being found on a small 
 island ? or existence side by side ? or the absence of 
 precedence in the one case but not in the other? 
 Possibly, however, our author meant rather to say 
 ' ' not only in the one ' ' sense, ' ' but also ' ' in the 
 other ; we ought in charity to allow him to emend to 
 that effect, since it is impossible by any other means 
 
No Proto-Aryan Language. 55 
 
 to put even the smallest degree of sense into the 
 statement. There would be left, then, the wrong and 
 untenable doctrine that a body of dialedls into the 
 development of which has come as one element the in- 
 fluence of a written or cultivated, a ' ' settled ' ' lan- 
 guage, are essentially different from others that have 
 always lacked that element. ' Among the infinite va- 
 riety of circumstances that influence the growth of 
 dialedts, the grade of civilization of their speakers is 
 one, and a very important one ; and if this reaches the 
 point at which writing is developed, it attains a corre- 
 spondingly increased importance. But its mode of 
 adlion is solely by adding strength to the forces of 
 communication, which make for unity of speech ; 
 there is no difference of principle ; Romanic dialedls 
 and Polynesian dialedls are produdls of the same ten- 
 dencies, working in the same way ; either group is 
 enough to illustrate the truth that in the Proto-Aryan 
 speech — unless it were, as no one supposes, an out- 
 and-out original tongue, with absolutely nothing 
 earlier behind it — there must have been dialedlic dif- 
 ferences, and yet a sufficient unity to make it one 
 tongue, able to transmit a family likeness to its de- 
 scendants. Dialedls are always the result of divarica- 
 tion, and the simple reason why our historical re- 
 searches never find language otherwise than in a con- 
 dition of dialedlic division is that the remotest period 
 in language-history to which we are able to penetrate 
 is still very far short of the beginning. Our author 
 shows in many of his utterances that he does not see 
 this, but imagines human speech to have adlually 
 sprung into being in the form of related dialedls. 
 
36 Muller's Science of Language. 
 
 UNBIlfFERENTIATED ALPHABETIC SOUNDS. 
 
 We discover in the sequel why it is that our author 
 wants to set up a distindtion between the "natural" 
 dialedls of unsettled languages and the unnatural and 
 regularly modified dialedts of settled or written lan- 
 guages. It is because of the prominent importance 
 which he proceeds (ii. 185 ff.) to attribute to the 
 occurrence of undifferentiated ' ' letters ' ' (read every- 
 where "sounds ") in the former class, assuming it to 
 be impossible in the latter. He quotes from sundry 
 authorities statements as to the uncertain charadler of 
 various consonantal sounds in Polynesian, American 
 Indian, and other languages, and points out how dif- 
 ferences might appear in the descendants of those lan- 
 guages which did not imply a transition from one 
 consonant-sound to another, but only a diverse differ- 
 entiation of a primitively indistindl sound. For ex- 
 ample, in Hawaiian there is no real distindtion of t 
 and k (p. 187) ; hence, of two dialedts descended from 
 Hawaiian, if we were to find, in words apparently 
 corresponding, a t prevailing in the one and 2Lk'va. the 
 other, we should not be justified in saying that either 
 k or i was original, and that k had been changed to i, 
 or vice versd. In this he is unquestionably right ; 
 and it is to be hoped that no historical student of lan- 
 guage will be (if it is fair to suppose that any have 
 been, which is doubtful) otherwise than duly mindful 
 of the principle ; if it be ignored, an occasional false 
 etymology might be the result. But the danger also 
 exists that an incautious student, thinking himself to 
 have brought out a new principle like this, will let 
 himself be rtm away with by it, and will apply it 
 
Undifferentiated Alphabetic Sounds. sy 
 
 where it has nothing to do. And to this danger our 
 author has plainly succumbed. He assumes that in 
 general, and on a very large scale, wherever among the 
 Indo-European languages we find different conso- 
 nantal sounds in two forms apparently of the same 
 word, we are to ascribe the fadl to a diverse differ- 
 entiation of an originally indistind; consonant. In 
 so doing he leaves out of sight, as if it did not 
 exist, the overwhelming evidence we possess that the 
 ' ' Proto- Aryan ' ' did distinguish guttural and labial 
 and dental consonants, even to three varieties of each 
 class, from one another. As a prevailing rule, the 
 words which in one modern language of the family 
 show a dental show it likewise in all the others ; and 
 so with guttural and with labial. That this would 
 not be the case if they were results of the differentia- 
 tion of a unitary sound is palpable. If there ever 
 was a time in the history of our language when a 
 Hawaiian indistindlness of consonantal utterance pre- 
 vailed, it could only have been in the pre- Proto- Aryan 
 period ; and no sound scholar has paid or will pay 
 any attention to our author's claims. Cases like Gr. 
 tettares, Skt. chatwar, Lat. quatuor (p. 187; Germ. 
 fidvor should have been added), our four, will con- 
 tinue to be treated, as they have been, as special 
 exceptions, calling for separate investigation. In 
 casting about for support, the author descends to 
 such pleading as this (p. 188) : " there is nothing to 
 show that in thermos [=Skt. gharma] Greek ever had 
 an initial guttural ; and to say that Sanskrit gh be- 
 came Greek th is in reality sdying what is impossible. 
 No Sanskrit letter can become a Greek letter ' ' ! This 
 
5<? Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 is like making the fact that it is not scientifically 
 exadl to say ' ' the sun rises ' ' a reason for denying 
 that night ever turns to day. What is next added is 
 still more amusing : "in fact, no letter ever becomes ; 
 people pronounce letters ; and they either pronounce 
 them properly or improperly." Very true; but we 
 need a definition of ' ' properly. ' ' It might have be- 
 come proper for the Greeks to say th where it had 
 been proper for their ancestors to say gk in the word 
 in question : just as it is proper for us to pronounce 
 laugh with a final/, though evidence of all kinds 
 proves that our ancestors pronounced instead a gut- 
 tural spirant, not less distinctly, and with equal pro- 
 priety. And if any one chose to say that in such 
 words (numerous enough) a more original gh had 
 ' ' become ' ' f, who would have the right to criticise 
 him ? Our author is welcome to ' ' assume that in an 
 earlier or, as it is now called, a pre-historic state of the 
 Greek language the pronunciation [of thermos'] fludlu- 
 ated or hesitated between ' ' guttural and dental, pro- 
 vided he will not insist on transferring this fluctua- 
 tion back to the " Proto- Aryan " period, where all 
 evidences show that it did not exist. Cannot such a 
 fludtuation, followed by an out-and-out shift of pro- 
 nunciation, arise in the course of linguistic history, 
 instead of being necessarily primitive? and, if not, 
 why not? We are taught further on (p. 198) that 
 the French dialedtic pronunciation of m^kier and 
 moikii for m.iUer and moitii, and their like, is a real 
 "becoming" of ^ to k; why not, then, as well in 
 Jioric poka iox pote, and soon (p. 188, note), which he 
 wants to make out an original phenomenon ? This 
 
Grimm's Law. 5j> 
 
 whole chapter on ' ' Phonetic Change ' ' (ch. iv. of vol. 
 ii.), which is in great part re-written, is one of the 
 most remarkable examples of wrong or half-wrong 
 premises and false conclusions from them that the 
 literature of linguistics has to show. 
 
 GRIMM'S I<AW. 
 
 But the height of the argumentation is not reached 
 until the next chapter, on " Grimm's lyaw," where 
 the whole extremely complicated set of phenomena 
 popularly included under that name are also attrib- 
 uted to a sort of Proto- Aryan ' ' fluctuation or hesita- 
 tion ' ' of utterance. But it is of a different order. 
 Whereas we were taught in the preceding chapter 
 that the Proto- Aryans did not well distinguish k and t, 
 here we find that they not only made this distinction 
 clearly, but (ii. 232) that "some of them, at all 
 events, had elaborated a threefold, if not a fourfold, 
 modification of the consonantal checks " — the Greeks, 
 for example, a t, th, and d, and the Sanskrit-speakers 
 a. t, th, d, and dh — all ' ' for the sake of distinguishing 
 a number of roots which they required in their intel- 
 ledlual intercourse." The later recorded Greek lan- 
 guage has no dh ; hence, we are taught, ' ' from the 
 very beginning" th appeared in its place. The 
 Romans, on the same evidence, ' ' never ' ' had either 
 th or dh, and hence " it is clear that in their language 
 the distinctions so carefully elaborated at first, and so 
 successfully kept up in Sanskrit and Greek, would be 
 lost." One gets hopelessly confused among these 
 "from the very beginnings" and "nevers" and "at 
 firsts." If a triple, or a quadruple, distindlion was 
 
6o Miiller's Science of Language. 
 
 really made "at first," and lias only been " kept up " 
 in Sanskrit and Greek, can the Romans ' ' never ' ' 
 liave had it, while yet they have "lost" the distinc- 
 tions conveyed by it ? And, if they have lost th and dh, 
 might not Greek also have lost dh in the same way ? 
 On the next page (234) it is made yet clearer that the 
 Romans, though they "never" had aspirates, had 
 once distinguished the two roots da ' give ' and dha 
 ' put ;' and we are even taught to admire their " good 
 sense, ' ' in that, ' ' when they felt that they could pot 
 ef&ciently keep the two roots apart," they frankly 
 let one go, and used something else instead. This 
 "feeling" and consequent adiion comes dangerously 
 near, once more, to that sort of "convention" of 
 which, as gratuitously ascribed by him to his oppo- 
 nents, our author in his first volume so strongly repro- 
 bated the assumption. 
 
 But the same convention shows yet more strikingly 
 further on. The sturdy Germanic tribes (p. 235) did 
 not ' ' submit to ' ' the losses of their aspirates ' ' without 
 an effort to counteradl them." Though "without 
 real aspirates, yet, in taking possession of the phonetic 
 inheritance of their Aryan . . . forefathers, they re- 
 tained the consciousness of the threefold variety of 
 their consonantal checks, and they tried to meet this 
 threefold claim as best they could." And " hence," 
 where Sanskrit had dh and Greek ih, the Gothic (like 
 I^atin, Celtic, etc.) "preferred" a d, and High-Ger- 
 man a i.- that is, for example, the rood dha was in 
 Gothic da, and in High-German ia. But, not only 
 did ' ' none [of these] borrow from the other ' ' (a thing 
 which no one ever supposed or could suppose), but 
 
Grimm's Law. 6i 
 
 also " none was before or after the other ; all four . . . 
 must be taken as dialedlic varieties of one and the 
 same type. ' ' This last is the cardinal feature of our 
 author's system : the contemporaneousness of all dia- 
 ledlic forms ; and he insists upon it wherever occasion 
 offers: for example, at ii. 183, where we are taught 
 that I/at. tres and Goth, threis, or duo and iwai, or 
 our door, Gr. thyra, and I^at. foris, ' ' are parallel, not 
 successive forms, and no one can say which was 
 before or after the other." Accordingly, the four 
 forms dM, tha, da, and ta of the root dha were coex- 
 istent and equally primitive, and the root da also 
 must have had at the same time the same four forms : 
 and how the Proto-Aryans managed to understand 
 one another is a question crying for solution. 
 
 The "good sense" of the Romans, who, when 
 they had lost the distindlion of dha from da, let it go 
 and said something else, saved them from endless 
 throes which the more stubborn Germanic races had 
 to suffer. There were also roots and words beginning 
 "in all the Aryan languages" with d — and yet the 
 root dar 'tear,' our author's chosen example, must, it 
 would seem, have had the same four coexistent and not 
 successive forms as dha, among which speakers had 
 only to seledl according to their dialedlic preference. 
 He goes on (p. 235) to explain: "What could the 
 Goths ... do ? they had really robbed Peter to pay 
 Paul, . . . had spent their sonant checks [as d'\ to sup- 
 ply the place of the aspirates [as dK\." Yet their </'s 
 of the kind now used in da for dha ' ' could not be 
 allowed to run together and be lost" by confusion 
 with the other kind of d's in dar ' tear ' and its hke. 
 
62 Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 Accordingly, ' ' tlie Goths, guided by a wisli to keep 
 distindl wliat must be kept distindl, fixed ' ' these lat- 
 ter a?' s as fs; and so they, as we do, said tar 'tear' 
 instead of dar. And, having thus further robbed Paul 
 to pay John, when "the same pressure" was "felt 
 once more" in reference to the words that had an 
 original (though coexistent with the other three 
 varieties) t in them, they "were driven to adopt the 
 only remaining expedient," and employed instead of / 
 "the corresponding surd spirant . . . thy Surely, 
 rather than go through all this, the Goths might 
 well have submitted quietly to be conquered by the 
 Romans, whose "good sense" had been shown in 
 burying their dead consonants when they were dead, 
 and making no further fuss about them. 
 
 If it appears impossible that the operations here 
 described should have been carried on without a 
 ' ' convention, ' ' and considerable lively debate, the 
 High-German performances still more evidently de- 
 mand it. I^et us read the whole story (p. 236) : 
 ' ' The High-German tribes passed through nearly the 
 same straits. What the Greeks took for surd aspi- 
 rates [as tK\ they had taken for surd tenues [as t\. 
 Having spent their . . . ^'s, they were driven to 
 adopt the spirants, . . . s's, as the second variety ; 
 while, when the third variety came to be expressed, 
 nothing remained but the mediae [as a?]." And that 
 is why Sanskrit tad, our that, is in German das. 
 With a bit of imagination, one can realize their per- 
 plexity ; can see them scratch their heads and swear 
 a little, vote that they will neither give up their 
 
Grimm's Law. 6j 
 
 precious three-fold distinAion nor retrace the first 
 fatal step of change, and finally, under the guidance 
 of some prehistoric Grimm or Mtiller, work their way 
 out of the confusion. 
 
 This we are expedted to receive as an explanation 
 of the phenomena of the Lautverschiebung ! There 
 have been a great many explanations proposed before, 
 and some of them of a very high degree of eminence 
 in their particular provinces of absurdity ; but it may 
 fairly be questioned whether this is not at the head 
 of them all ; certainly, none proceeding from an 
 equally noted source can rival it. We painfully 
 miss, however, one feature (omitted in this edition) 
 which its earlier versions contained — the comparison 
 with the Isle of Man, which has three promontories, 
 looking respedtively at England, Scotland, and Ire- 
 land, like a Goth or a High-German at his t, th, and 
 d; it was a comparison really admirably adapted to 
 the charadler of the argument it was introduced to 
 illustrate. 
 
 We might feel tempted to draw out a scheme of the 
 linguistic principles involved in our author's reason- 
 ings, but it is safer to refrain ; one would run the risk 
 of dizziness, or even of a permanent, obfuscation of the 
 logical faculty. The grand central principle, per- 
 haps, is what we may call the eternal generation of 
 dialedls ; nothing in known languages (with certain 
 exceptions, which our author does not give us the 
 secret of ) is so because it has "become" so in the 
 course of linguistic development ; it was there ' ' from 
 the very first. ' ' 
 
<5^ Mailer's Science of Language. 
 
 PHONETIC DECAY AND DIAI<ECTIC REGENERATION. 
 
 It is on the basis of such principles as are here 
 involved that our author founds his distindlion of 
 "phonetic decay" and "dialedlic regeneration" 
 (i. 47 £F.), or of "phonetic change" and " dialedlic 
 growth" (ii. 183 £f.), on which he lays much stress. 
 The distindlion is of no value, and hence the nomen- 
 clature will never be accepted as part of the language 
 of science. All languages are dialedts, and hence 
 whatever goes on in language, destrudlive or construc- 
 tive, goes on in dialedts ; phonetic decay or change is 
 not less dialedlic than any thing else ; it is linguistic, 
 and growth is linguistic. Nor can any line of de- 
 marcation be drawn between phonetic change and 
 growth ; the one and the other are part of the same 
 process. Some changes result more regeneratively 
 than others ; each change must be followed up along 
 its own history, and estimated according to its own 
 effedl. 
 
 ON WORDS FOR 'FIR,' 'OAK,' AND 'BEECH.' 
 
 In the sequel of the discussions we have here been 
 reviewing occurs the (as we may fairly call it) noted 
 excursus " on words for fir, oak, and beech," which 
 we cannot help being in no small degree astonished at 
 finding at full length and unmodified in this finally 
 revised edition. The repetition fairly challenges and 
 provokes a repetition, as briefly as possible, of the 
 exposure already made of its unsound and fantastic 
 charadler.* 
 
 * See Transactions of the American Philological Association 
 for 1876, p. 73 ff. 
 
Fir, Oak, and Beech. 6j 
 
 Tha.tl,a.t. fag-US, Germ, doka signify 'beech,' while 
 Gr. phegos means ' oak' , was an obvious and familiar 
 fact ; but that I^at. quercus ' oak ' is the same with 
 O&rsn. foraha, our ' fir,' was, it is believed, left for our 
 author's ingenuity to bring to light. Here were two 
 words that had curiously changed their meaning 
 respectively from ' fir ' to ' oak ' and from ' oak ' to 
 ' beech ' (or else the contrary) ; why had this taken 
 place ? Now our author chanced to read in I^yell that 
 in Denmark, during the latest geological period, ending 
 with the present, there had been a succession of forests, 
 first fir, then oak, then beech : ' ' the oak has in its 
 turn been almost superseded by the common beech." 
 He proceeded, accordingly, to connedl the two phe- 
 nomena, putting forward the latter as the cause of the 
 former, and founding on the connedlion certain far- 
 reaching conclusions as to the period of arrival in 
 Europe of the tribes speaking languages of our fam- 
 ily. This was all very ingenious and entertaining ; 
 but unfortunately it was only that ; for the theory in- 
 volves not less than three obviously fatal fallacies : 
 
 I. That the succession of forest-trees in a limited 
 locality in northern Europe, one tree superseding an- 
 other, and the beech being left as victor, has been true 
 in general of Europe, including especially Italy, where 
 the change of quercus from ' fir ' to ' oak ' is found. 
 
 This objection, as formerly made, our author* pro- 
 fessed to understand as merely an echo of his own ex- 
 pressed desire for a scientific investigation of the fadts ; 
 but in all these twenty-nine years he has not suc- 
 
 * " In Self-defense," in Chips etc., vol. iv. 
 
&6 Muller' s Science of Language. 
 
 ceeded in finding any testimony to convince him that 
 in Italy all other trees have not been ' ' superseded by 
 the common beech. ' ' He has not even been willing to 
 draw a philologist's natural conclusion from the cir- 
 cumstance that words for 'fir,' 'oak,' and 'beech,' all 
 the three, are found in every European language. 
 
 2. That the supersession of the meaning 'fir' by 
 that of ' oak,' for example, in a name can be in any 
 way coordinated with the supersession of the one tree 
 by the other in a distridl or region. 
 
 Such coordination is even absurdly impossible. The 
 latter process must have been a very long-drawn one 
 (lyyell tells of "at least 4000 years, ' ' with the possi- 
 bility of " a number of centuries . . . four times as 
 great"), and during many generations the new oaks 
 must have been struggling on equal terms with the 
 old firs ; and meanwhile there must have been in use 
 names for both trees, the old name for 'fir ' dying out 
 with the firs, and the new name for ' oak ' surviving 
 with the oaks. This is too clear to be disputed ; nor 
 does our author try to bring up anything against it. 
 
 3. That a people would have changed the sense of 
 quercus in order to obtain a name for ' oak, ' when, 
 according to the terms of our author's theory itself, 
 they had already the name fagus ' oak, ' which they 
 later proceeded to change to ' beech ' — ^by the impos- 
 sible process above described, when the beeches super- 
 seded the oaks — as they did not. To this also he 
 has nothing to oppose. 
 
 Certainly, any man who can put one and one to- 
 gether to make two must see that our author's genial 
 theory never had a foot to stand upon. The apparent 
 
The Spoken Alphabet. 67 
 
 correspondence was simply an amusing coincidence, a 
 proper subjedt for jocose exposition over a dinner- 
 table, but not serious enough for a meeting of a philo- 
 logical society, even a local one. What shall we think 
 of the would-be founder of a new science who gives it 
 a dozen pages in his text-book, prints it in edition after 
 edition, and saves every word of it in his final revision 
 — and that, too, though it met long ago the thorough 
 refutation which he himself, at the end of his exposi- 
 tion of it, professed himself ready to welcome ? How 
 easy it would have been for him, when he found him- 
 self incapable of answering the objections raised, to 
 drop out the whole little discussion, which was never 
 anything but an excrescence on his work ! 
 
 THE SPOKBN AI,PHABBT. 
 
 There is also another section of the second volume 
 which might to decided advantage have been omitted in 
 this revised edition, namely that on the vocal organs 
 and the modes of formation of the different alphabetic 
 sounds (or, as he calls them, letters), with the cuts by 
 which the latter are illustrated. There was more ex- 
 cuse for introducing this material in 1863, when com- 
 paratively little had been done in phonetics, and that 
 little was comparatively inaccessible to English read- 
 ers ; but it is all at present so thoroughly antiquated 
 that its reprodudlion is an error. Kspecially those im- 
 possible pidlures of positions of utterance, with their 
 exaggerated cavernous mouth-cavities, and their 
 totally inaccurate tongue-postures, are nothing better 
 than caricatures ; one has only to compare them with 
 other depidlions of the same positions, such as Melville. 
 
68 Mutter's Science of Language. 
 
 Bell's, to see how incapable they are of teaching any- 
 thing. Whoever is to instrudl others on phonetic 
 subjedls must as a first requisite have a pretty clear 
 and corredt idea, at least so far as concerns matters of 
 prime importance, of what goes on in his own mouth 
 in the processes of utterance ; yet we find our author, 
 after near thirty years of added experience and obser- 
 vation, still declaring (ii. 130), as he declared in 1863, 
 that, " if I could trust my own ear, I should say that 
 this vowel [i. e. the neutral vowel, that in but, son, 
 blood, etc.J was always pronounced with non-sonant or 
 whispered breath ; that it is in fa<5l a whispered, not 
 a voiced, vowel." It is not too much to say of a per- 
 son who is able to make that statement that nothing 
 which he brings forward on phonetic subjedls can be 
 of any degree of authority, or of value save by acci- 
 dent. It is as if we had a mathematical treatise from 
 one who in the course of it declared that he could 
 never really convince himself that six and six do not 
 make sixteen, or a zoological discussion from one who 
 confessed that in his private opinion a bat is a species 
 of butterfly. The whole phonetic exposition is, in 
 fact, what might be expedted firom such an authority ; 
 truth, error, and absurdity are inextricably intermin- 
 gled in it. Only one whose antecedent ignorance is 
 great can learn anything from it ; and even he, if he 
 trusts it, will be taught more confusion and error than 
 valuable knowledge. 
 
 VIVAKASVASAGHOSHAH AND SAMVARANADAGHOSHAH. 
 
 At the end of this chapter, the author introduces a 
 bit of blundering pedantry, to which we may dire«ft a 
 
Vivarasvasaghoshah etc. 6g 
 
 moment's attention. In reviewing and summing up 
 the classification of alphabetic sounds (ii. 163), he 
 says of certain sounds : "these are called surd letters 
 or non-sonant (psila, tenues, hard, sharp ; vivarasva- 
 saghoshah ; ■ • . these are called sonant letters (mesa, 
 mediae, soft, blunt [he means "flat"]; sa»?varana- 
 daghosha^)." The addition of these long Sanskrit 
 compounds to the two lists of synonyms it is impossi- 
 ble to regard as otherwise than pedantic, since they 
 must be unknown and unintelligible to any one but a 
 scholar specially versed in the Sanskrit phonetic lit- 
 erature (if not also to him) ; nothing that precedes 
 has prepared the way for them, or furnished any 
 ground for their citation ; but, on the familiar prin- 
 ciple of omne ignotum pro magnifico, they give to our 
 author's closing page that show of profundity which 
 belongs to obscurity, and help him to ' ' split the ears 
 of the groundlings. ' ' In his striving after this result, 
 however, he has committed an oversight, and taken 
 matter unsuited to his purpose ; for the two com- 
 pounds in question are not descriptive epithets at all ; 
 they are only fortuitous lists of charadteristic quali- 
 ties, put together as in Sanskrit one puts together 
 into one word ' hands-and-feet, ' or ' gods-and-men- 
 and-demons, ' or the like : the one means ' opening- 
 and-breath-and-non-sonance, ' the other ' closure- and- 
 tone-and-sonance.' It is as if one were to give, as 
 synonyms of devil, "Satan, Old Nick, Evil One; 
 homs-and-hoofs-and-tail." The matter is recurred to 
 here because, to a former criticism to the efiFedt that 
 no such "terms" as these were to be found "used 
 by any Sanskrit grammarian," our author made 
 
yo Mutter's Science of Language. 
 
 wliat doubtless seemed to most of his readers a 
 triumphant answer, by merely pointing out where 
 the compounds were to be read, without at all ex- 
 plaining what they were ; possibly he again over- 
 looked his mistake and simply repeated it, instead of 
 ignoring and hiding it intentionally.* At any rate, 
 the two false synonyms are still to be read in his 
 pages. 
 
 KING FROM SANSKRIT JANAKA. 
 
 There are other weak points in our author's San- 
 skrit as exhibited in these volumes, which may be 
 passed without remark, inasmuch as it is fundamental 
 and important principles, and not minor details, that 
 are engaging our attention throughout this criticism. 
 One etymology, however, calls for brief notice, because 
 it involves more than a superficial error, and because 
 it is calculated to mislead ethnological inquirers. 
 It is (ii. 322-3) the explanation given of our word 
 king, as by origin identical with the alleged Sans- 
 krit janaka. The insuperable obstacle in the way of 
 this etymology is that in earlier Sanskrit not only is 
 there no such word 2^^ janaka "procreator, parent, 
 then king" (p. 322), but even there is no such mode 
 of formation as a word like this implies. In more 
 modern or classical Sanskrit are found a number of 
 ^■wajz-primary sufSxes, freely used to make derivatives 
 diredlly from roots, which nevertheless the history of 
 the language plainly shows to be composite, produced 
 by the recent addition of a secondary suffix to a pri- 
 
 * See further Proceedings of the American Oriental Society 
 for May, 1876 (fournal, vol. x. , p. cxxviii). 
 
King and Janaka. 7/ 
 
 mary ; conspicuous examples are the gerundive-mak- 
 ing suffixes tavya and aniya, of which the former is 
 tu+ya, and the latter awa + y/«.* Of this kind is also 
 the alleged primary suffix aka; it is a + ka; and a 
 word like janaka (itself only a later Sanskrit word) is 
 not produced by adding a primary and pre-historic aka 
 to a root jan, but, in the traceably historic period of the 
 Sanskrit itself, long subsequent to our first acquaint- 
 ance with it, by adding the secbndary adjective-suffix 
 ka to the really old noun jana. If our author had 
 taken the trouble to look at the indexes by final let- 
 ters and elements to the Rig- Veda and the Atharva- 
 Veda, he would have seen that they contain almost no 
 words in aka, and none at all having the character 
 postulated by him for janaka ; and this might have set 
 him upon the track of the true history of the appar- 
 ent suffix. His etymology of king is not simply false 
 (any scholar, even the best, is liable to make a false 
 etymology) ; it is also discreditable, since it involves 
 such a palpable anachronism as no sound scholar 
 should be guilty of. It is as if one were to take our 
 suffix ness as unitary and primeval, and attempt to 
 explain by it general Indo-European words. 
 
 THB TEANSLATION OP THE RIG-VEDA. 
 
 It may be well finally to glance at the laudatory 
 notice of his own fragment of a translation of the 
 Rig- Veda which our author has added (ii. 520) in 
 this last revision of his book on language. He does 
 not, indeed, repeat here his (considering his many pre- 
 
 * See further Transactions of the American Philological As- 
 sociation for 1884, p. 118 ff. 
 
J 2 Mailer's Science of Language. 
 
 decessors) preposterous and offensive claim, made in 
 the work itself, that this is the ' ' first translation of the 
 Rig- Veda ;" but he claims it as a "specimen of . . . 
 the only scientific method, " and asserts that "who- 
 ever means to produce a really satisfadlory translation 
 will have to follow my method. ' ' The method con- 
 sists in this : " we must coUedl all the passages in which 
 the same word occurs — this I have done in my Index 
 Verborum [he forgets to mention that it had been done 
 before him, and on a much better and more helpful 
 plan, by Grassmann] — and we must then try to discover 
 a meaning that will fit all the passages in which the 
 same word occurs." As if this were " my " method, 
 and not rather the method, either implicitly or ex- 
 plicitly followed, of every serious traiislator ! No 
 man can be saved merely by the adoption of this uni- 
 versal method, but only by the degree of skill and 
 insight with which it shall be applied. Our author 
 appears, too, to have forgotten that in his volume 
 itself the specific claim to being a " first translation" 
 was founded rather on the translation's being accom- 
 panied by notes which should make it plain just why 
 every word was translated as it was — whence the 
 exiguum of twelve hymns in a whole volume of appa- 
 ratus, or on the scale of seventy-five volumes for the 
 entire Veda. But to make this claim was to claim 
 an utter impossibility ; its fulfilment would have 
 called for a volume to a hymn instead. And it was 
 pointed out at the time * that, in the very first verse 
 of his translation, while he had squandered eleven 
 
 * See North American Review, vol. cxiii. (July, 1871), p. 177. 
 
Translation of the Rig- Veda. j^ 
 
 pages of useless notes on the adje(ftive ' red ' (after all, 
 too, probably mistranslating it, by supplying the wrong 
 noun for it to agree with), he had also assumed a gram- 
 matical solecism (the use as nom. pi. of a form which 
 could properly be only accus. pi. or gen. or abl. sing.) 
 without spending a word of explanation upon it, and 
 had made thereby an unacceptable version. When 
 this was brought to his attention, he asserted in his 
 defense,* with no little heat and indignation, that (in 
 this translation which was to be the "first " in virtue 
 of accounting for everything) he had of set purpose 
 left all grammatical points to be treated by Benfey, 
 who was known to have ' ' been for years preparing a 
 grammar of the Vedic dialedl. ' ' This plea can hardly 
 have appeared to any sensible reader as aught but 
 a subterfuge, since no mention had been anywhere 
 made of Benfey, or of a plan of leaving out to others 
 parts of the work which our author professed him- 
 self to have undertaken (he might, under such a 
 system, have left ' red ' to somebody's lexicon) ; and 
 also since a Vedic grammar could, at the utmost, 
 only have pointed out the solecism in question as not 
 entirely without analogies elsewhere, and could not 
 have required its assumption in this particular case. 
 But how treacherous a support to lean on Benfey 
 would have been will be best appreciated by noticing 
 that he had already (in his Orient und Occident, vol. i., 
 p. 13) translated the verse, and not in accordance with 
 our author, but understanding the disputed form as 
 normally used (as accus. pi. ; the critic had preferred 
 
 *"In Self-defense," Chips etc., vol. iv. 
 
7^ Midler's Science of Language. 
 
 to take it as abl. sing.)-* Our author has since shown 
 his hand as a translator of the Rig- Veda in his vol- 
 umes of Upanishads in the Sacred Books of the East, 
 where verses from it occur here and there ; and 'they 
 are rendered with an altogether reprehensible inac- 
 curacy, going so far in one case (Vol. i., p. 229 ; Rig- 
 Veda viii. 76. 12) as to treat as of the third person a 
 first singular verb-form which has its subjedl aham 
 ' I ' expressed in full beside it. He has yet to show 
 that he can translate the Rig- Veda in a manner cor- 
 responding with the present stage of advance of Vedic 
 scholarship. 
 
 GENERAI, CHARACTBR OF THE WORK. 
 
 It would not (as was pointed out at the beginning) 
 have been in the least worth while to submit this work 
 in its renewed form, and with its renewed lease of 
 life, to a renewed critical examination, but for its ex- 
 ceptional vogue and popularity. It is probably the 
 work which is most read, and oftenest quoted in dis- 
 cussions, whether anthropological or ethnographical, 
 into which language enters as an important element. 
 If, therefore, its fadts are untrustworthy and its reason- 
 ings wrong, its influence is in a high degree damaging 
 to the study of language and of everything concerned 
 with language. That such is indeed its charadler, 
 that it is unsound in every part, most of all in its fun- 
 damental dodtrines, but in varying degree from the 
 bottom to the top, has been abundantly demonstrated 
 
 * This point was first brought out by the late Dr. Ezra Abbot, 
 in the Bibliotheca Sacra (Andover, Mass.) for July, 1877, vol. 
 xxxiv., p. 560). 
 
General Character of the Work. y^ 
 
 in the foregoing pages, and miglit be further shown at 
 indefinite length, since there is nothing in the work 
 essentially different from what we have been review- 
 ing. It is, in fadl, no scientific work, and the name 
 of ' ' science " should not appear in connedtion with it ; 
 it ought to be called by some such name as "Fadts 
 and fancies in regard to language and other related 
 subjedls." Science implies some system of presenta- 
 tion, some consistency of views, some coherence of 
 reasoning ; and all these qualities are conspicuously 
 wanting here. The book is not science, but litera- 
 ture. Taken as literature, it is of high rank, as the 
 admiration of the public sufiiciently testifies ; its 
 author has a special gift for interesting statement and 
 illustration, for lending a charm to the subjedls he dis- 
 cusses ; and he carries captive the judgments of his 
 hearers and of many of his readers. He is a born littira- 
 teur; as to what he is toward science, that is suffi- 
 ciently shown by his ambition to see it governed by 
 the authority of the philosophers ; he has thought to 
 stop Darwinism by quoting Kant against it. With 
 what he is in other departments of anthropological 
 study we have nothing to do here ; as regards lan- 
 guage, he lacks the clearness of apprehension which 
 would enable him to maintain anything. To consis- 
 tency, indeed, he would doubtless make no pretense ; 
 in his genial way he approaches a subjedl from one 
 side, and presents one lively view of it ; then he ap- 
 proaches it from another side, and presents another 
 view ; how the two views stand related to one another 
 is no concern of his. But, more than that, he is most 
 curiously deficient in the logical faculty ; if he hap- 
 
y6 Midler's Science of Language. 
 
 pens to hold a right view, or to state a true fact, the 
 chance is small that he will give a right reason for the 
 one or draw a true inference from the other ; one can 
 never be certain that he will not declare two and two 
 to make three and a half, or five, or even six or more ; 
 and when he expressly sets out to place two things in 
 their corredl mutual relations, or to prove something 
 by a process of argument, then he makes his most 
 conspicuous failure, and produces what his readers 
 can only smile at. His volumes are valuable to one 
 who knows how to use them properly ; by the wide 
 interest which they have excited, and the numerous 
 readers they have found, they have done much to ini- 
 tiate a taste for language-study ; to many who were 
 wholly ignorant of the subjedts they dealt with they 
 have taught a great deal, and sometimes given the de- 
 sire to learn more ; the more than compensating dis- 
 advantage is that so many have accepted them as 
 authoritative. No man can do that with impunity ; no 
 investigator in any department of anthropology can 
 use their views as the basis of his reasonings and ar- 
 rive at any valuable results ; it would be easy to give 
 striking examples of failures thus brought about. 
 Their author must not be taken seriously by one who 
 would learn from him ; the incitement he brings must 
 be an incitement to challenge his fadts, compare and 
 corredl his reasonings, and question and refute his 
 conclusions. The more the work is handled as a stu- 
 dent in logic handles a collection of fallacies gathered 
 for him to corredl, the more profit will it yield. 
 
Personal. y? 
 
 PERSONAI,. 
 
 I have myself — to drop now the impersonal form of 
 statement — been constrained from the first publication 
 of the work lo treat it in the way here described. Any 
 one to whom the facets and principles of language- 
 study were in some measure known must have felt 
 sharply antagonized when, at the appearance of this 
 new and popular manual, he found that study declared, 
 on transparently false grounds, to be a physical science, 
 and language an existence which man had no part in 
 making and changing ; dialedlic growth misunder- 
 stood, families of language regarded as exceptional, 
 and a "Turanian" barathrum arranged to catch all 
 little-known varieties of speech ; antecedent unity of 
 dialedl taught in one case and denied in another ; a 
 word held to be killed by the least mispronunciation ; 
 conventional explained to mean 'voted by a conven- 
 tion ;' thought and its expression viewed as insepara- 
 ble, and even identical ; the origin of language seem- 
 ingly ascribed to an instindlive ding-dong of the tongue 
 — and so on ; to complete the list would be almost to 
 give a table of principal contents of the two volumes — 
 and a style of discussion used throughout which indi- 
 cated that the author was playing with his subject 
 rather than investigating it seriously. Then and 
 there, accordingly, began my opposition to the Miil- 
 lerian school of linguistics ; and he has never allowed 
 me to relax it, much as I have desired and sought to 
 find opportunity to ag^ee with and commend his doc- 
 trines. It is questionable whether I should myself 
 ever have written a work on the general subjedl of 
 language if I had not been driven to it by what 
 
y8 Mullet's Science of Language. 
 
 seemed to me the necessity of counteradling, as far as 
 possible, the influence of snch erroneous views. That 
 my criticisms, so far as he deigned to pay them any 
 attention (and he abundantly showed and shows that 
 he has not heeded them enough to derive any benefit 
 from them), were agreeable to him I never imagined ; 
 nor did I suppose that he would fail to resent them as 
 he was best able. To one living in such an atmos- 
 phere of adulation as has been his environment for the 
 past thirty years (fit to sap the vigor of a stronger 
 nature than his), and who has established so tyran- 
 nical a sway in British public opinion that even those 
 most opposed to him hardly dare to raise a voice in 
 public against him, * it may well enough have seemed 
 that I was playing Mordecai to his Haman ; and when 
 at length, in 1875-6 (in the articles ' ' My Answer to Mr. 
 Darwin" and " In Self-defense, " in Chipsetc, vol. iv.), 
 he turned upon me in a determined effort to crush me, 
 I had no reason to be surprised. Nor should I have 
 had any ground to complain of merely harsh and 
 unsparing treatment ; and I would have not only 
 accepted with gladness, but also done public penance 
 for, any injustice which he proved me to have com- 
 mitted by misrepresentation or unfounded criticism of 
 his views. Nothing of this kind that was worthy of 
 the name, however, was furnished, as may be sufS- 
 
 * It remains to be seen whether any literary paper in England 
 will let its readers learn of Bohtlingk's exposure (in F. Max 
 Muller als Mythendichter, St. Petersburg, 1891) of his astound- 
 ing misstatements respedling the Petersburg Academy and the 
 edition of the Rig- Veda, as made in his recent volume, Natural 
 Religion. 
 
Personal. 70 
 
 ciently gathered from the three specimens that are 
 reported above (the words for ' fir, ' ' oak, ' and ' beech, ' 
 p. 65 ff. ; vivarayvasaghoshaA etc., p. 69 ; and the first 
 verse of the Rig- Veda translation, p. 73) ; and I was 
 fully authorized to continue in the belief that he had 
 no real defense to make. A virulent counter-attack, 
 too, endeavoring to make points against me in return, 
 was to be expedled ; and I could only congratulate 
 myself on the utterly trifling charadler (even granting 
 their truth) of the pile of "principal bones of conten- 
 tion" between us, as he called them, which he man- 
 aged to rake together out of nooks and corners, and 
 solemnly proposed to allow an international tribunal 
 to sit upon. What I had more right to objedl to was 
 the uncandor and misrepresentation by which these 
 "bones" were in good part gathered, and the attri- 
 bution to me of the worst personal motives. Yet in 
 this also I did not suffer alone ; Miiller has never 
 been known either as a fair fighter or as an accurate 
 reporter of fadls, and I could only look to receive from 
 him the treatment which I saw others receive. And by 
 the public at large I shall doubtless be finally judged 
 according to the general charadler of what I have 
 done and written. At any rate, now as heretofore, I 
 rest my defense on not the just intent alone, but the 
 real substantial justice of my criticisms ; if they are 
 unfounded, I deserve reprehension for making them ; 
 if they are right, then there is nothing, either in the 
 degree of importance of the subjedls to which they 
 relate, or in the personality against whom they are 
 diredled, to call for their condemnation. 
 
^^^^Mi