CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Cornell University Library P 121.M94 1864 V.I C.2 Lectures on the science of ianguaoe, del 3 1924 026 120 901 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31 9240261 20901 THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. LONDON PEISTBD BY aPOTTISWOODE ASD 00. SEW-srnsET bqcabb LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE DELIVEBED AT THE EOYAL INSTITUTION OF GEEAT BRITAIN APKIL, MAY, & JUNE, 1861. BY MAX MULLER,. M.A. Correspondant de Tlnstitut de France ; Foreign Member of the Royal Bavarian Academy ; Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Royal Asiatic Society, of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and of the Soci6t6 d'Ethnographie de Prance ; Corresponding Member of the Royal Sardinian Academy, of the Royal Society of GOttingen, of the Royal Irish Academy, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the American Oriental Society ; Member of the Asiatic Society of Paris, and of the German Oriental Society ; Taylorian Professor in the University of Oxford, FeUnw of All Souls College, I &c. &c. ' Opera naturale 6 ck' uomfaveUa; Ma, caul o cos^^ natura lascia Poi fare a voi, secondo che v' abbella.' Dante, Paradiso, 26, 130. FOURTH EDITION. LONDON: LONGMAN, GEEEN, LONGMAN, EOBEETS, & GEEEN. 1864. !i I' i ■" ■ ' ' 1 ; ,' I ■> reserved. /CORNELL-^ j, yj I. J B ■-? k'-,.w -.VMS 3 u I DEDICATED TO THE MEMBEES OF THE UNIYEESlTY OF OXFOED, BOIfl RESIDENT AND NON-BESIDENT, TO WHOM I AM INDEBTED FOE NUMEROUS PEOOFS OF SYMPATHY AND KINDNESS DURING THE LAST TWELVE YEAES, IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THEIR GENEEOUS SUPPORT ON THE 7th of December 1860. PEE FACE. "11 TY LECTURES on tlie Science of Language are -"-'- here printed as I had prepared them in manu- script for the Eoyal Institution. When I came to deliver them, a considerable portion of what I had written had to be omitted, and, in now placing them before the public in a more complete form, I have gladly complied with a wish expressed by many of my hearers. As they are, they form only a short ab- stract of several Courses delivered from time to time in Oxford, and they do not pretend to be more than an introduction to a science far too comprehensive to be treated successfully in so small a compass. My object, however, wiU have been attained, if I should succeed in attracting the attention, not only of the scholar, but of the philosopher, the historian, and the theologian, to a science which concerns them all, a VIU PREFACE. and which, though it professes to treat of words only, teaches us that there is more in words than is dreamt of in our philosophy. I quote from Bacon : ' Men believe that their reason is lord over their Avords, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over our intellect.' ' Words, as a Tartar's bow, shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and imghtily entangle and pervert the judgement.' MAX MtJLLER. OSFOBD : Jmn 11, 1861. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. PAGE The Science of Language one of the Physical Sciences . 1 LEGTUEE II. The Growth of Language in Contbadistinction to the HisTOKT of Language , , , , .29 \' LEGTUEE III. The Empirical Stage in the Science of Language , 82 LEGTUEE IV. The Classificatort Stage in the Science of Language . 113 LEGTUEE V. The Genealogical Classification of Languages . ,170 LEGTUEE VI. Gompaf^tive Grammar , , . . . 222 X CONTENTS. LECTUEE VII. FA.GE The Constituent Elements of Language . . . 260 LECTUEE VIII. The Morphological Classification of Languages . . 286 LECTUEE IX. The Theoretical Stage in the Science of Language. Origin of Language ..... 356 APPENDIX. Genealogical Tables of Languages . . .411 Index ....... 415 LECTURES. LECTURE I. THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE ONE OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. WHEN I was asked some time ago to deliver a course of lectures on Comparative Philology iu this Institution, I at once expressed my readiness to do so. I had lived long enough in England to know that the peculiar difficulties arising from my imperfect knowledge of the language would be more than balanced by the forbearance of an English audience, and I had such perfect faith in my subject that I thought it might be trusted even in the hands of a less skilful expositor. I felt convinced that the re- searches into the history of languages and into the nature of human speech, which have been carried on during the last fifty years in England, France, and Germany, deserved a larger share of public sympathy than they had hitherto received ; and it seemed to me, as far as I could judge, that the discoveries in this newly-opened mine of scientific inquiry were not inferior, whether in novelty or importance, to the most brilliant discoveries of our age. B 2 INTEODTJCTION. It was not till I began to write my lectures that I became aware of the difficulties of the task I had undertaken. The dimensions of the science of lan- guage are so vast that it is impossible in a course of nine lectures to give more than a very general survey of it ; and as one of the greatest charms of this science consists in the minuteness of the analysis by which each language, each dialect, each word, each' grammatical foi'm is tested, I felt that it was almost impossible to do full justice to my subject, or to place the achievements of those who founded and fpstered the science of language in their true light! Another difficulty arises from the dryness of many of the problems which I shall have to discuss. De- clensions and conjugations cannot be made amusing, nor can I avail myself of the advantages possessed by most lecturers, who enliven their discussions by experiments and diagrams. If, with aU these diffi- culties and drawbacks, I do not shrink from opening to-day this course of lectures on mere words, on nouns and verbs and particles — if I venture to ad- dress an audience accustomed to listen, in this place, to the wonderful tales of the natural historian, the chemist, and geologist, and wont to see the novel results of inductive reasoning invested by native elo- quence with all the charms of poetry and romance — it is because, though mistrusting myself, I cannot mistrust my subject. The study of words may be tedious to the school-boy, as breaking of stones is to the wayside labourer, but to the thoughtful eye of the geologist these stones are full of interest — ^he sees miracles on the high road, and reads chronicles in every ditch. Language, too, has marvels of her own, which she unveils to the inquiring glance of the INTRODUCTION. 3 patient student. There are chronicles below her surface, there are sermons in every word. Language has been called sacred ground, because it is the deposit of thought. We cannot tell as yet what lan- guage is. It may be a production of nature, a work of human art, or a divine gift. But to whatever sphere it belongs, it would seem to stand unsui'passed — nay, unequalled in it — by anything else. If it be a produc- tion of nature, it is her last and crowning production, which she reserved for man alone. If it be a work of human art, it would seem to lift the human artist almost to the level of a divine creator. If it be the gift of God, it is God's greatest gift ; for through it God spake to man and man speaks to God in worship, prayer, and meditation. Although the way which is before us may be long and tedious, the point to which it tends will be full of interest; and I believe I may promise that the view opened before our eyes from the summit of our science, will fully repay the patient travellers, and perhaps secure a free pardon to their venturous guide. The Science oe Language is a science of very modern date. We cannot trace its lineage much beyond the beginning of our century, and it is scarcely received as yet on a footing of equality by the elder branches of learning. Its very name is still un- settled, and the various titles that have been given to it in England, France, and Germany are so vague and varying that they have led to the most confused ideas among the public at large as to the real objects of this new science. We hear it spoken of as Compara- tive Philology, Scientific Etymology, Phonology, and B 2 4 HISTORY OF THE INDUCTIVE SCIENCES, Glossology. In France it has received the convenient, but somewhat barbarous, name of Linguistique. If we must have a Greek title for our science, we might derive it either from mythos, word, or from logos^ speech. But the title of Mythology is already oc- cupied, and Logology would jar too much on classical ears. We need not waste our time in criticising these names, as none of them has as yet received that universal sanction which belongs to the titles of other modem sciences, such as Geology or Comparative Anatomy ; nor will there be much difficulty in chris- tening our young science after we have once ascer- tained its birth, its parentage, and its character. I myself prefer the simple designation of the Science of Language, though in these days of high-sounding titles, this plain name will hardly meet with general acceptance. From the name we now turn to the meaning of our science. But before we enter upon a definition of its subject-matter, and determine the method which ought to be followed in our researches, it wiU be useful to cast a glance at the history of the other sciences, among which the science of language now, for the first time, claims her place ; and examine their origin, their gradual progress, and definite settle- ment. The history of a science is, as it were, its biography, and as we buy experience cheapest in studying the lives of others, we may, perhaps, guard our young science from some of the follies and ex- travagances inherent in youth by learning a lesson for which other branches of human knowledge have had to pay more dearly. There is a certain uniformity in the history of most sciences. If we read such works as WheweH's THE EMPIRICAL STAGE. 5 History of the Inductive Sciences or Humboldt's Kosmos, we find that the origin, the progress, the causes of failure and success have been the same for almost every branch of human knowledge. There are three marked periods or stages in the history of every one of them, which we may call the Empirical, the Classijicatory, and the Theoretical. However humiliating it may sound, every one of our sciences, however grand their present titles, can be traced back to the most humble and homely occupations of half- savage tribes. It was not the true, the good, and the beautiful which spurred the early philosophers to deep researches and bold discoveries. The founda- tion-stone of the most glorious structures of human ingenuity in ages to come was supplied by the press- ing wants of a patriarchal and semi-barbarous society. The names of some of the most ancient departments of human knowledge tell their own tale. Geometry, which at present declares itself free from all sensuous impressions, and treats of its points and lines and planes as [purely ideal conceptions, not to be con- founded with the coarse and imperfect representa- tions as they appear on paper to the human eye, geometry, as its veiy name declares, began with measuring a garden or a field. It is derived from the Greek ge, land, ground, earth, and metron, mea- sure. Botany, the science of plants, was originally the science of botane, which in Greek does not mean a plant in general, but fodder, from boskein, to feed. The science of plants would have been called Phy- tology, from the Greek phyton, a plant.* The founders of AstrQnomy were not the poef or the philosopher, * See Jessen, WasTieisst Botanik? 1861. 6 EMPIRICAL STAGE. but the sailor and the farmer. The early poet may have admired the ' mazy dance of planets,' and the philosopher may have speculated on the heavenly harmonies; but it was to the sailor alone that a knowledge of the glittering guides of heaven became a question of life and death. It was he who calcu- lated their risings and settings with the accuracy of a merchant and the shrewdness of an adventurer; and the names that were given to single stars or constel- lations clearly show that they were invented by the ploughers of the sea and of the land. The moon, for instance, the golden hand on the dark dial of heaven, was called by them the Measurer — the measurer of time ; for time was measured by nights, and moons, and winters, long before it was reckoned by days, and suns, and years. Moon* is a very old word. It was mdna in Anglo-Saxon, and was used there, not as a feminine, but as a masculine ; for the moon was a masculine in all Teutonic languages, and it is only through the influence of classical models that in English moon has been changed into a feminine, and sun into a masculine. It was a most unlucky assertion which Mr. Harris made in his Hermes, that all na- tions ascribe to the sun a masculine, and to the moon a feminine gender.f In Gothic moon is mena, which is a masculine. For month we have in A.-S. mdnMh, in Gothic menoth, both masculine. In Greek we find mm, a masculine, for month, and mene, a femi- nine, for moon. In Latin we have the derivative * Kuhn's Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, b. ix. g. 104. A Bask name for moon is argi-izari, light-measure. See Dissertation Critique et Apologetique sur la langue Basque, p. 28. f Home Tooke, p. 27, note. EMPIRICAL STAGE. 7 mensis, month, and in Sanskrit we find mds for moon, and mdsa for month, both masculine.* This mds in Sanskrit is clearly derived from a I'oot md, to measure, to mete. In Sanskrit, I measure is md-mi; thou measurest, md-si; he measures, md-ti (or mimi-te). An instrument of measuring is called in Sanskrit md-tram, the Greek metron, our metre. Now if the moon was originally called by the farmer the measurer, the ruler of days and weeks and sea- sons, the regulator of the tides, the lord of their festivals, and the herald of their public assemblies, it is but natural that he should have been conceived as a man, and not as the love-sick maiden which our modern sentimental poetry has put in his place. It was the sailor who, before entrusting his life and goods to the winds and the waves of the ocean, watched for the rising of those stars which he called the Sailing- stars or Pleiades, from plein, to sail. Navigation in the Greek waters was considered safe after the return of the Pleiades ; and it closed when they disappeared. The Latin name for the Pleiades is Vergilice, from virga, a sprout or twig. This name was given to them by the Italian husbandmen, because in Italy, where they became visible about May, they marked the return of summer, f Another constellation, the seven stars in the head of Taurus, received the name of Eyades or Pluvioe in Latin, * See Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, s. 297. t Ideler, Handbuch der Chronologie, b. i. s. 241, 242. In the Oscan Inscription of Agnone a Jupiter Virgarius (djovei vere- hasioi, dat. sing.) occurs, a name whicli Professor Aufrecht compares with that of Jupiter Viminius, Jupiter who fosters the growth of twigs (Kuhn's Zeitschrift, i. s. 89). — See, however, on Jupiter Viminius and his altars near the Porta Viminalis, Hartung, Religion der Bomer, ii. 61. 8 EMPIRICAL STAGE. because at the time ■when they rose with the sun they were supposed to announce rain. The astro- nomer retains these and many other names; he still speaks of the pole of heaven, of- wandering and fixed stars,* but he is apt to forget that these terms were not the result of scientific observation and classifica- tion, but were borrowed from the. language of those who were themselves wanderers on the sea or in the desert, and to whom the fixed stars were in full reality what their name implies, stars driven in and fixed, by which they might hold fast on the deep", as by heavenly anchors. But although historically we are justified in saying that the first geometrician was a ploughman, the first botanist a gardener, the first mineralogist a miner, it may I'easonably be objected that in this early stage a science is hardly a science yet : that measur- ing a field is not geometry, that growing cabbages is veiy far fi-om botany, and that a butcher has no claim to the title of comparative anatomist. This is perfectly true, yet it is but right that each science should be reminded of these its more humble begin- nings, and of the practical requirements which it was originally intended to answer. A science, as Bacon says, should be a rich storehouse for the glory of God, and the relief of man's estate. Now, although it may seem as if in the present high state of our society students were enabled to devote their time * As early as the times of Anaximenes of the Ionic, and,. Alcmseon of the Pythagorean, schools, the stars had been divided ' into travelling (acrrpa TrXavaifieva or irXaj/jjra), and non -travelling y, . \ stars (uTrXai/eec atrriptg, or diTrXav^ aarpa). Aristotle first used i aiTTpa eyhhfieva, or fixed stars. (See Humboldt, JKosmos, \ ' \ vol. iii. p. 28.) nd\o£, the pivot, hinge, or the pole of heaven. EMPIRICAL STAGE. 9 to the investigation of the facts and laws of nature, or to the contemplation of the mysteries of the world of thought, without any side-glance at the practical results of their labours, no science and no art have long prospered and flourished among us, unless they were in some way subservient to the practical in- terests of society. It is true that a Lyell collects and arranges, a Faraday weighs and analyses, an Owen dissects and compares, a Herschel observes and calculates, without any thought of the immediate marketable results of their labours. But there is a general interest which supports and enlivens their researches, and that interest depends on the practical advantages which society at large derives from these scientific studies. Let it be known that the succes- sive strata of the geologist are a deception to the miner, that the astronomical tables are useless to the navigator, that chemistry is nothing but an expen- sive amusement, of no use to the manufacturer and the farmer — and astronomy, chemistry, and geology would soon share the fate of alchemy and astrology. As long as the Egyptian science excited the hopes of the invalid by mysterious prescriptions (I may ob- serve by the way that the hieroglyphic signs of our modern prescriptions have been traced back by Cham- pollion to the real hieroglyphics of Egypt*) — and as long as it instigated the avarice of its patrons by the promise of the discovery of gold, it enjoyed a liberal support at the courts of princes, and under the roofs of monasteries. Though alchemy did not lead to the discovery of gold, it prepared the way to discoveries more valuable. The same with astrology. Astrology * Bunsen's Egypt, vol. iv. p. 108. 10 EMPIRICAL STAGE. was not such, mere imposition as it is generally sup- posed to have been. It is counted a science by so sound and sober a scholar as Melancthon, and even Bacon allows it a place among the sciences, though admitting that ' it had better intelligence and con- federacy with the imagination of man than with his reason.' In spite of the strong condemnation which Luther pronounced against it, astrology continued to sway the destinies of Europe ; and a hundi-ed years after Luther, the astrologer was the counsellor of princes and generals, while the founder of modern astronomy died in poverty and despair. In our time the very rudiments of astrology are lost and forgotten.* Even real and useful arts, as soon as they cease to be useful, die away, and their secrets are sometimes lost beyond the hope of recovery. When after the Reformation our churches and chapels were divested of their artistic ornaments, ia order to re- store, in outward appearance also, the simplicity and purity of the Christian church, the colours of the painted windows began to fade away, and have never regained their former depth and harmony. The in- vention of printing gave the death-blow to the art of ornamental writing and of miniature-paiuting em- ployed in the illumination of manuscripts ; and the best artists of the present day despair of rivalling the * According to a writer in Notes and Queries (2nd Series, vol. X. p. 500), astrology is not so entirely extinct as we suppose. ' One of our principal writers,' he states, ' one of our leading barristers, and several members of the various antiquarian societies, are practised astrologers at this hour. But no one cares to let his studies be known, so great is the prejudice that confounds an art requiring the highest education with the jargon of the gipsy fortune-teller.' EMPIRICAL STAGE. U minuteness, softness, and brilliancy combined by the bumble manufacturer of the mediasval missal. I speak somewhat feelingly on the necessity that every science should answer some practical purpose, because I am aware that the Science of language has but little to offer to the utilitarian spirit of our age. It does not profess to help us in learning languages more expeditiously, nor does it hold out any hope of ever realising tbe dream of one univei'sal language. It simply professes to teach what language is, and this would hardly seem sufficient to secure for a new science the sympathy and support of the public at large. There are problems, however, which, though apparently of an abstruse and merely speculative character, have exercised a powerful influence for good or evil in the history of mankind. Men before now have fought for an idea, and have laid down their lives for a word; and many of the problems which have agitated the world from the earhest to our own times, belong properly to the science of language. Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A mythe means a word, but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence. Most of the Greek, the Roman, the Indian, and other heathen gods are nothing but poetical names, which were gradually allowed to as- sume a divine personality never contemplated by their original inventors. Eos was a name of the dawn before she became a goddess, the wife of Tithonos, or the dying day. Fatum, or fate, meant origin- ally what had been spoken; and before Fate be- came a power, even greater than Jupiter, it meant that which had once been spoken by Jupiter, and 12 EMPIRICAL STAGE.. could never be changed — not even by Jupiter himself. Zeus originally meant the bright heaven, in Sanskrit Dyaus ; and many of the stories told of him as the supreme god, had a meaning only as told originally of the bright heaven, whose rays, like golden rain, descend on the lap of the earth, the Danae of old, kept by her father in the dark prison of winter. No one doubts that Luna was simply a name of the moon; but so was likewise Lucina, both derived from lucere, to shine. Hecate, too, was an old name of the moon, the feminine of Hehatos and Eehatebolos, the far-dart- ing sun; and Pyrrha, the Eve of the Greeks, was nothing but a name of the red earth, and in parti- cular of Thessaly. This mythological disease, though less virulent in modem languages, is by no means extinct. During the middle ages the controversy between Nominalism and Realism, which agitated the church for centuries, and finally prepared the way for the Reformation, was again, as its veiy name shows, a controversy on names, on the nature of language, and on the relation of words to our conceptions on one side, and to the realities of the outer world on the other. Men were called heretics for believing that words such as justice or truth expressed only concep- tions of our mind, not real things walking about in broad daylight. In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing poli- tical and social questions. ' Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,' this is what has re- modelled, ..and will remodel stUl more, the map of Europe ; - and in America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of EMPIRICAL STAGE. 13 a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery .'\ Never do I remember to have seen science more degraded than on the title-page of an American publication in which, among the profiles of the different races of man, the profile of the ape was made to look more human than that of the negro. Lastly, the problem of the position of man on the threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit has of late assumed a very marked prominence among the problems of the physical and mental sciences. It has absorbed the thoughts of men who, after a long life spent in collecting, observing, and analysing, have brought to its solution qualifications unrivalled in any previous age; and if we may judge from the greater warmth displayed in dis- cussions ordinarily conducted with the calmness of judges and not with the passion of pleaders, it might seem, after aU, as if the great problems of our being, of the true nobility of our blood, of our descent from heaven or earth, though unconnected with anything that is commonly called practical, have still retained a charm of their own — a charm that will never lose its power on the mind and on the heart of man. Now, however much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed forward, so that at one time the line of demarcation between animal and man seemed to depend on a mere fold in the brain, there is one barrier which no one has yet ventured to touch — the barrier of language. Even those philosophers with -wlaom. penser c'est sentir* who * ' Man has t-wo faculties, or two passive powers, the existence of which is generally acknowledged : 1, the faculty of receiving the different impressions caused by external objects, physical 14 EMPIRICAL STAGE, reduce all thought to feeling, and maintain that we share the faculties which are the productive causes of thought in common with beasts, are bound to confess that as yet no race of animals has produced a language. Lord Monboddo, for instance, admits that as yet no animal has been discovered in the pos- session of language, 'not even the beaver, who of all the animals we know, that are not, like the orang-outangs, of our own species, comes nearest to us in sagacity.' Locke, who is generally classed together with these materialistic philosophers, and who certainly vindi- cated a large share of what had been claimed for the intellect as the property of the senses, recog- nized most fully the barrier which language, as such, placed between man and brutes. 'This I may be positive in,' he writes, ' that the power of abstract- ing is not at all in brutes, and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes. For it is evident we observe no footsteps in these of making use of ge- neral signs for universal ideas ; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs.' If, therefore, the science of language gives us an insight into that which, by common consent, dis- tinguishes man from all other living beings ; if it establishes a frontier between man and the brute, sensibility; and 2, tke faculty of preserving the impressions caused by these objects, called memoryj or weakened sensation. These faculties, the productive causes of thought, we have in common with beasts Everything is reducible to feeling.' CLASSIKICATORY STAGE. ]g which can never be removed, it would seem to pos- sess at the present moment peculiar claims on the attention of all who, while watching with sincere admiration the progress of comparative physiology, yet consider it their duty to enter their manly protest against a revival of the shallow theories of Lord Monboddo. But to return to our survey of the history of the physical sciences. We had examined the empirical stage through which every science has to pass. We saw that, for instance, in botany, a man who has travelled through distant countries, who has col- lected a vast number of plants, who knows their names, their peculiaiities, and their medicinal qua- lities, is not yet a botanist, but only a herbalist, a lover of plants, or what the Itahans call a dilettante, from dilettare, to delight. The real science of plants, like every other science, begins with the work of classification. An empirical acquaintance with facts rises to a scientific knowledge of facts as soon as the mind discovers beneath the multiplicity of single productions the unity of an organic system. This discovery is made by means of comparison and classification. We cease to study each flower for its own sake ; and by continually enlarging the sphere of our observation, we try to discover what is common to many and ofi'ers those essential points on which groups or natural classes may be esta- blished. These classes again, in their more general features, are mutually compared ; new points of difiference, or of similarity of a more general and higher character, spring to view, and enable us to discover classes of classes, or families. And when the whole kingdom of plants has thus been surveyed. 16 CLASSIFICATORY STAGE. and a simple tissue of names been thrown over the garden of nature; when we can lift it up, as it were, and view it iu our mind, as a whole, as a system well defined and complete, we then speak of the science of plants, or botany. We have entered into altogether a new sphere of knowledge where the individual is subject to the general, fact to law ; we discover thought, order, and purpose pervading the whole realm of nature, and we perceive the dark chaos of matter lighted up by the reflection of a divine mind. Such views may be right or wrong. Too hasty comparisons, or too narrow distinctions,, may have prevented the eye of the observer from discovering the broad outlines of nature's plan. Yet every system, however insufficient it may prove hereafter, is a step in advance, [li the mind of man is once impi^essed with the conviction that there must be order and law everywhere, it never rests again until all that seems irregular has been elimi- nated, untU the fall beauty and harmony of nature has been perceived, and the eye of man has caught the eye of God beaming out from the midst of all His works.*) The failures of the past prepare the triumphs of the future. Thus, to recur to our former illustration, the systematic arrangement of plants which bears the name of Linnseus, and which is founded on the number and character of the reproductive organs, failed to bring out the natural order which pervades all that grows and blossoms. Broad lines of de- marcation which unite or divide large tribes and families of plants were invisible from his point of view. But in spite of this, his work was not in vain. The fact that plants in every part of the world CLASSIEICATORY STAGE. 17 belonged to one great system was established once for all ; and even in later systems most of his classes and divisions have been preserved, because the con- formation of the reproductive organs of plants hap- pened to run parallel with other more characteristic marks of true affinity.* It is the same in the history of astronomy. Although the Ptolem^an system was a wrong one, yet even from its eccentric point of view, laws were discovered determining the true movements of the heavenly bodies. The con- viction that there remains something unexplained is sure to lead to the discovery of our eiTor. There can be no error in nature ; the error must be with us. This conviction lived in the heart of Aristotle when, in spite of his imperfect knowledge of nature, he declared ' that there is in nature nothing interpo- lated or without connection, as in a bad tragedy ; ' and from his time forward every new fact and every new system have confirmed his faith. The object of classification is clear. We under- stand things if we can comprehend them ; that is to say, if we can grasp and hold together single facts, connect isolated impressions, distinguish be- tween what is essential and what is merely acci- dental, and thus nredicate the general of the individual, and class the individual under the ge- neral. This is the secret of all scientific knowledge. Many sciences, while passing through this second or classificatory stage, assume the title of comparative. When the anatomist has finished the dissection of * 'The generative organs being those which are aiost remotely related to the habits and food of an animal, I have always regarded as affording very clear indications of its true affinities.' — Owen, as quoted by Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 414. C 18 THEORETICAL STAGE. numerous bodies, when he has given names to each organ, and discovered the distiuctive functions of each, he is led to perceive similarity where at first he saw dissimilarity only. He discovers in the lower animals rudimentary indications of the more perfect organisation of the higher; and he becomes impressed with the conviction that there is in the animal kingdom the same order and purpose which pervades the endless variety of plants or any other realm of nature. He learns, if he did not know it before, that things were not created at random or in a lump, but that there is a scale which leads, by imperceptible degrees, from the lowest infusoria to the crowning work of nature^ — man; that all is the manifestation of one and the same unbroken chain of creative thought, the work of one and the same aU-wise Creator. In this way the second or classificatory leads us naturally to the thkd or final stage — the theo- retical, or metaphysical. If the work of classifica- tion is properly carried out, it teaches us that nothing exists in nature by accident; that each indi- vidual belongs to a species, each species to a genus ; and that there are laws which underlie the apparent freedom and variety of all created things. These laws indicate to us the presence of a purpose in the mind of the Creator; and whereas the material world was looked upon by ancient philosophers as a mere illusion, as an agglomerate of atoms, or as the work of an evil principle, we now read and interpret its pages as the revelation of a divine power, and wisdom, and love. This has given to the study of nature a new character. After the observer has collected his facts, and after the classifier has placed THEORETICAL STAGE. 19 them in order, the student asks what is the origin and what is the meaning of all this ? and he tries to soar, by means of induction, or sometimes even of divination, into regions not accessible to the mere collector. In this attempt the mind of man no doubt has frequently met with the fate of Phaeton; but, undismayed by failure, he asks again and again for his father's steeds. It has been said that this so- called philosophy of nature has never achieved any- thiug ; that it has done nothing but prove that things must be exactly as they had been found to be by the observer and collector. Physical science, however, would never have been what it is without the im- pulses which it received from the philosopher, nay even from the poet. ' At the limits of exact know- ledge,' (I quote the words of Humboldt) 'as from a lofty island-shore, the eye loves to glance towards distant regions. The images which it sees may be illusive; but like the iUusive images which people imagined they had seen from the Canaries or the Azores, long before the time of Columbus, they may lead to the discovery of a new world.' "V Copernicus, in the dedication of his work to Pope Paul III. (it was commenced in 1517, finished 1530, published 1543), confesses that he was brought to the discovery of the sun's central position, and of the diurnal motion of the earth, not by observation or analysis, but by what he calls the feeling of a want of symmetry in the Ptolemaic system. But who had told him that there must be symmetry in aU the movements of the celestial bodies, or that complication was not more sublime than simplicity? Symmetry and simplicity, before they were disco- vered by the observer, were postulated by the phi- c 2 20 THEORETICAL STAGE. losopher. The first idea of revolutionising the heavens was suggested to Copernicus, as he tells us himself, by an ancient Greek philosopher, by PhUolaus, the Pythagorean, No doubt with PhUolaus the motion of the earth was only a guess, or, if you like, a happy intuition, not, as it was with Tycho de Brahe and his friend Kepler, the result of wearisome observa- tions of the orbits of the planet Mars. Nevertheless, if we may trust the words of Copernicus, it is quite possible that without that guess we should never have heard of the Copemican system. Truth is not found by addition and multiplication only. When speaking of Kepler, whose method of reasoning has been considered as unsafe and fantastic by his contem- poraries as well as by later astronomers, Sir David Brewster remarks very truly, 'that, as an instru- ment of research, the influence of imagination has been much overlooked by those who have ventured to give laws to philosophy.' The torch of imagi- nation is as necessary to him who looks for truth, as the lamp of study. Kepler held both, and more than that, he had the star of faith to guide him in all things from darkness to light. In the history of the physical sciences, the three stages which we have just described as the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, appear gene- rally in chronological order. I say, generally, for there have been instances, as in the case just quoted of PhUolaus, where the results properly belonging to the third have been anticipated in the first stage. To the quick eye of genius one case may be like a thousand, and one experiment, well chosen, may lead to the discovery of an absolute law. Besides, there are great chasms in the. history of science. COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 21 The tradition of generations is broken by political or ethnic earthquakes, and the work that was nearly finished has frequently had to be done again from the beginning, when a new surface had been formed for the growth of a new civilisation. The succession, however, of these three stages is no doubt the natural one, and it is very properly observed in the study of every science. The student of botany begins as a collector of plants. Taking each plant by itself, he observes its peculiar character, its habitat, its proper season, its popular or unscientific name. He learns to distinguish between the roots, the stem, the leaves, the flower, the calyx, the stamina, and pistils. He learns, so to say, the practical grammar of the plant before he can begin to compare, . to arrange, and classify. Again, no one can enter with advantage on the third stage of any physical science without having passed through the second. No one can study the plant, no one can understand the bearing of such a wOrk as, for instance. Professor Schleiden's Life of the Plant* who has not studied the life of plants in the wonderful variety, and in the stOl more wonderful order, of nature. These last and highest achievements of inductive philosophy are possible only after the way has been cleared by previous plassification. The philosopher must command his classes like regiments which obey the order of their general. Thus alone can the battle be fought and truth be conquered. After this rapid glance at the history of the other physical sciences, we now return to our own, * Die Pflanze und ihr Leben, von M. T. Schleiden, Leipzig, 1858. 22 COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. the science of language, in order to see whether it really is a science, and whether it can be brought back to the standard of the inductive sciences. We want to know whether it has passed, or is still pass- ing, through the three phases of physical research j whether its progress has been systematic or desul- tory, whether its method has been appropriate or not. But before we do this, we shall, I think, have to do something else. You may have observed that I always took it for granted that the science of language, which is best known in this country by the name of comparative philology, is one of the phy- sical sciences, and that therefore its method ought to be the same as that which has been followed with so niuch success in botany, geology, anatomy, and other branches of the study of nature. In the history of the physical sciences, however, we look in vain for a place assigned to comparative philology, and its very name would seem to show that it belongs to quite a different sphere of human know- ledge. There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which, according to their subject-matter, may be called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man.* Now if we were to judge by its name, comparative philology, like classical philology, would seem to take rank, not as a physical, but as an historical science, and the proper method to be applied to it would be that which is followed in the * ' Thus the science of optics, including all the laws of light and colour, is a physical science, whereas the science of painting, with all its laws of manipulation and colouring, being that of a man-created art, is a purely historical science.' — Intellectual Repositary, June 2, 1862, p. 247. COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 23 history of art, of law, of politics, and religion. However, the title of comparative philology must not be allowed to mislead us. It is difficult to say by whom that title was invented ; but all that can be said in defence of it is, that the founders of the science of language were chiefly scholars or philo- logists, and that they based their inquiries into the nature and laws of language on a comparison of as many facts as they could collect within their own special spheres of study. Neither in Germany, which may well be called the bu'th-place of this science, nor ia France, where it has been cultivated with brilliant success, has that title been adopted. It will not be difficult to show that, although the science of language owes much to the classical yscholar, and though ia return it has proved of great use to him, yet comparative philology has really nothing whatever in common with philology in the usual meaning of the word. Philology, whether classical or oriental, whether treating of ancient or modem, of cultivated or barbarous languages, is an historical science. Language is here treated simply as a means. The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, or any other language, as a key to an understanding of the literary monuments which bygone ages have bequeathed to us, as a spell to raise from the tomb of time the thoughts of great men in different ages and different countries, and as a means ultimately to trace the social, moral, intellectual, and religious progress of the human race. In the same manner, if we study living languages, it is not for their own sake that we acquire grammars and vocabularies. We do so on account of their practical usefulness. ^r- 24 COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. We use them as letters of introduction to the best society or to the best literature of the leading nations of Europe. In comparative philology the case is totally different. In the science of language, languages are not treated as a means j language itself becomes the sole object of scientific inquiry. Dialects which have never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo- Chinese are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know languages, we want to know language ; what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought ; we want to know its origin, ita nature, its laws ; and it is only in order to arrive at that knowledge that we collect, arrange, and classify all the facts of language that are within our reach. And here I must protest, at the very outset of these lectures, against the supposition that the stu- dent of language must necessarily be a great linguist. I shall have to speak to you in the course of these lectures of hundreds of languages, some of which, perhaps, you may never have heard mentioned even by name. Do not suppose that I know these lan- guages as you know Greek or Latin, French or German. In that sense I know indeed very few languages, and I never aspired to the fame of a Mithridates or a Mezzofanti. It is impossible for a student of language to acquire a practical knowledge of all the tongues'jWith which he has to deal. He does not wish to speak the Kachikal language, of which a professorship was lately founded in the University of COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 25 Guatemala,* or to acquire the elegancies of the idiom of the Tcheremissians ; nor is it his ambition to ex- plore the literature of the Samoyedes, or the New- Zealanders. It is the grammar and the dictionary which form the subject of his inquiries. These he consults and subjects to a careful analysis, but he does not encumber his memory with paradigms of nouns and verbs, or with long Hsts of words which have never been used iu any work of literature. It is true, no doubt, that no language wiU unveil the whole of its wonderful structure except to the scholar who has studied it thoroughly and criti- cally in a number of literary works representing the various periods of its growth. Nevertheless, short lists of vocables, and imperfect sketches of a gram- mar, are in many instances aL. that the student can expect to obtain, or can hope to master and to use for the purposes he has in view. He must learn to make the best of this fragmentary information, like the comparative anatomist, who frequently learns his lessons from the smallest fragments of fossil bones, or the vague pictures of animals brought home by unscientific travellers. If it were necessary for the comparative philologist to acquire a critical or prac- tical acquaintance with all the languages which form the subject of his inquiries, the science of language would simply be an impossibility. But we do not expect the botanist to be an experienced gardener, or the geologist a miner, or the ichthyologist a practical fisherman. Nor would it be reasonable to object in the science of language to the same division of labour which is necessaiy for the successful cultivation of * Sir J. Stoddart, Glossology, p. 22. 26 THE REALM OF LANGUAGE. subjects much less comprehensive. Though much of what we might call the realm of language is lost to us for ever, though whole periods in the history of language are by necessity withdrawn from our obser- vation, yet the mass of human speech that lies before us, whether in the petrified strata of ancient litera- ture or in the countless variety of living languages and dialects, offers a field as large, if not larger, than any other branch of physical reseax'ch. It is impossible to fix the exact number of known lan- guages, but their number can hardly be less than nine hundred.* That this vast field should never have excited the curiosity of the natural philosopher before the beginning of our century may seem sur- prising, more surprising even than the indifference with which former generations treated the lessons which even the stones seemed to teach of the life still throbbing in the veins and on the very surface of the earth. The saying that ' familiarity breeds con- tempt ' would seem applicable to the subjects of both these sciences. The gravel of our walks hardly seemed to deserve a scientific treatment, and the language which every ploughboy can speak could not be raised without an effort to the dignity of a scientific problem. Man had studied every part of nature, the mineral treasures in the bowels of the earth, the flowers of each season, the animals of every continent, the laws of storms, and the movements of the heavenly bodies ; he had analysed every substance, dissected every organism, he knew every bone and muscle, every nerve and fibre of his own body to the ultimate elements which'compose his flesh and blood; * Balbi in his Atlas counts 860. Cf. Pott, Rassen, p. 230 ; Etymologische Forschungen, ii. 83. (Second Edition.) THE REALM OP LANGUAGE, 27 he had meditated on the nature of his soul, on the laws of his mind, and tried to penetrate into the last causes of all being — and yet language, without the aid of which not even the first step in this glorious career could have been made, remained unnoticed. Like a veil that hung too close over the eye of the human mind, it was hardly perceived. In an age when the study of antiquity attracted the most ener- getic minds, when the ashes of Pompeii were sifted for the playthings of Eoman life ; when parchments were made to disclose, by chemical means, the erased thoughts of Grecian thinkers ; when the tombs of Egypt were ransacked for their sacred contents, and the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh forced to sur- render the clay diaries of Nebuchadnezzar ; when everything, in fact, that seemed to contain a vestige of the early life of man was anxiously searched for and carefully preserved in our libraries and museums . — language, which iu itself carries us back far beyond the cuneiform literature of Assyria and Babylonia and the hieroglyphic documents of Egypt ; which connects ourselves, through an unbroken chain of speech, with the veiy ancestors of our race, and stiU draws its life fi'om the first utterances of the human mind — language, the living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race, was never cross- examined by the student of history, was never made to disclose its secrets until questioned, and, so to say, brought back to itself within the last fifty years, by the genius of a Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm, Bunsen, and others. If you consider that, whatever view we take of the origin and dispersion of language, nothing new has ever been added to the substance of language,* * Pott, Etym. Forseh., ii. 230. 28 THE' REALM OE LANGUAGE. that all its changes have been changes of form, that no new root or radical has ever been invented by later generations, as little as one single element has ever been added to the material world in which we live ; if you bear in mind that in one sense, and in a very just sense, we may be said to handle the ver}'- words which issued from the mouth of the son of God, when he gave names to ' all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field,' you wiU see, I believe, that the science of language has claims on your attention, such as few sciences can rival or excel. Having thus explained the manner in which I intend to treat the science of language, I hope in my next lecture to examine the objections of those philosophers who see in language nothing but a con- trivance devised by human skill for the more expedi- tious communication of our thoughts, and who would wish to see it treated, not as a production of nature, but as a work of human art. .29 LECTURE II. THE GEOWTH OF LANGUAGE IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE. IN claiming for the science of language a place among the physical sciences, I was prepared to meet with many objections. The circle of the physical sciences seemed closed, and it was not likely that a new claimant should at once be welcomed among the established branches and scions of the ancient aristo- cracy of learning.* * Dr. Whewell classes the science of language as one of the palaitiological sciences ; but he makes a distinction between palaitiological sciences treating of material things, for instance, geology, and others respecting the products which result from man's imaginative and social endowments, for instance, compara- tive philology. He excludes the latter from the circle of the physical sciences, properly so called, but he adds : ' We began our inquiry with the trust that any sound views which we should be able to obtain respecting the nature of truth in the physical sciences, and the mode of discovering it, must also tend to throw light upon the nature and prospects of knowledge of all other kinds — must be useful to us in moral, political, and philological researches. We stated this as a confident anticipation ; and the evidence of the justice of our belief already begins to appear. We have seen that biology leads us to psychology, if we choose to follow the path ; and thus the passage from the material to the immaterial has already unfolded itself at one point ; and we now perceive that there are several large provinces of speculation which concern subjects belonging to man's immaterial nature, and which are governed by the same laws as sciences altogether physical. It is not our business to dwell on the prospects which our philosophy thus opens to our contemplation ; but we may 30 LANOUAGE INVENTED BY MAN. The first objection wHch was sure to be raised on the part of such sciences as botany, geology, or phy- siology is this: — Language is the work of man; it was invented by man as a means of communicating his thoughts, when mere looks and gestures proved inefficient; and it was gradually, by the combined efforts of succeeding generations, brought to that perfection which we admire in the idiom of the Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, and in the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Now it is perfectly true that if language be the work of man, in the same sense in which a statue, or a temple, or a poem, or a law are properly called the works of man, the science of language would have to be classed as an historical science. We should have a history of lan- guage as we have a history of art, of poetry, and of jurisprudence, but we could not claim for it a place side by side with the various branches of Natural History. It is true, also, that if you consult the works of the most distinguished modern philosophers you wiU find that whenever they speak of language, they take it for granted that language is a human in- vention, that words are artificial signs, and that the varieties of human speech arose from different nations agreeing on different sounds as the most appropriate signs of their different ideas. This view of the origin of language was so powerfully advocated by the lead- ing philosophers of the last century, that it has re- tained an undisputed currency even among those who, allow ourselves, in this last stage of our pilgrimage among the foundations of the physical sciences, to be cheered and animated by the ray that thus beams upon us, however dimly, from a higher and brighter region.' — Indications of the Creator, p, 146. LANGUAGE REVEALED. 31 on almost every other point, are strongly opposed to the teaching of that school. A few voices, indeed, have been raised to protest against the theory of language being originally invented by man. But they, in their zeal to vindicate the divine origin of lan- guage, seem to have been carried away so far as to run counter to the express statements of the Bible. For in the Bible it is not the Creator who gives names to all thiags, but Adam. ' Out of the ground,' we read, ' the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them : and whatso- ever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof.'* But with the exception of this small class of philosophers, more orthodox even than the Bible,t the generally received opinion on the origin of language is that which was held by Lofcke, which was powerfully advocated by Adam Smith in his Essay on the Origin of Language, appended to his Treatise on Moral Sentiments, and which was adopted * Gen. ii. 19. f St. Basil was accused by Eunomius of denying Divine Pro- vidence, because lie would not admit that God had created the names of all things, but ascribed the invention of language to the faculties which God had implanted in man. St. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia (331-396), defended St. Basil. ' Though God has given to human nature its faculties,' he writes, ' it does not follow that therefore He produces all the actions which we perform. He has given us the faculty of building a house and doing any other work ; but we, surely, are the builders, and not He. In the same manner our faculty of speaking is the work of Him who has so framed our nature ; but the invention of words for naming each object is the work of our mind.' See Ladevi-Eoche, De VOrigine du Langage, Bor- deaux, 1860, p. 14 ; Also Home Tooke, Diversions of Purley, p. 19. 32 HISTORY OF LAIfGUAGE. "with slight modifications by Dugald Stewart. Ac- cording to them, man must have lived for a time in a state of mutism, his only means of commumcation consisting in gestures of the body, and in the changes of countenance, till at last, when ideas multiplied that could no longer be pointed at with the fingers, ' they found it necessary to invent artificial signs of which the meaning was fixed by mutual agreement.' We need not dwell on minor dififerences of opinion as to the exact process by which this artificial language is supposed to have been formed. Adam Smith would wish us to believe that the first artificial words were verbs. Nouns, he thinks, were of less urgent necessity because things could be pointed at or imi- tated, whereas mere actions, such as are expressed by verbs, could not. He therefore supposes that when people saw a_,wolf coming, they pointed at him, and simply cried out, ' He comes.' Dugald Stewart, on the contrary, thinks that the first artificial words were nouns, and that the verbs were supplied by gesture ; that, therefore, when people saw a wolf coming, they did not cry ' He comes,' but ' Wolf, Wolf,' leaving the rest to be imagined.* But whether the verb or the noun was the first to be invented is of little importance ; nor is it possible for us, at the very beginning of our inquiry into the nature of language, to enter upon a minute examina- tion of a theory which represents language as a work of human art, and as established by mutual agree- ment as a medium of communication. While fullv admitting that if this theory were true, the science of language would not come within the pale of the physical sciences, I must content myself for the pre- * D. Stewart, Works, vol. iii. p. 27. HISTORY OF LANGUAGE. 83 sent with pointing out that no one has yet explained how, without language, a discussion on the merits of each word, such as must necessarily have preceded a mutual agreement, could have been carried on. But as it is the object of these lectures to prove that language is not a work of human art, in the same sense as painting, or building, or writing, or printing, I must ask to be allowed, ia this preliminary stage, simply to enter my protest against a theory, which, though still taught in the schools, is, nevertheless, I believe, without a single fact to support its truth. But there are other objections besides this which would seem to bar the admission of the science of language to the circle of the physical sciences. What- ever the origin of language may have been, it has been remarked with a strong appearance of truth, that language has a history of its own, like art, like law, like religion; and that, therefore, the science of language belongs to the cu'cle of the historical, or, as they used to be called, the moral, in contradistinction to the physical sciences. (It is a well-known fact, ^ which recent researches have not shaken, that nature is incapable of progress or improvement.N The flower which the botanist observes to-day was as perfect from the beginning. Animals which are endowed with what is called an artistic instinct, have never brought that instinct to a higher degree of perfection. The hexagonal cells of the bee are not more regular in the 19th century than at any earlier period, and the gift of song has never, as far as we know, been brought to a higher p^a-fection by our nightingale than by the PhUomele of the Greeks. 'Natural History,' to quote Dr. Whewell's words,* 'when * History of Indtictive 5'ciewces, vol, iii. p. 531. D '' \ 34 HISTORY OF LANGUAGE. systematically treated, excludes all that is Mstorical, for it classes objects by their permanent and universal properties, and has nothing to do with the narration of particular or casual facts.' Now, if we consider the large number of tongues spoken in different parts of the world with all their dialectic and provincial varieties, if we observe the great changes which each of these tongues has undergone in the course of centuries, how Latin was changed into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Provengal, French, Wallachian, and Roumansch ; how Latin again, together with Greek, and the Celtic, the Teutonic, and Slavonic languages, together likewise with the ancient dialects of India and Persia, must have sprung from an earlier language, the mother of the whole Indo- European or Aryan family of speech ; if we see how Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, with several miuor dialects, are but different impressions of one and the same common type, and must aU have flowed from the same source, the original language of the Semitic race ; and if we add to these two, the Aryan and Semitic, at least one more well-established class of languages, the Turanian, comprising the dialects of the nomad races scattered over Central and Northern Asia, the Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic,* Samoyedic, and Finnic, aU. radii from one common centre of speech : if we watch this str'eam of language roUiug on through centuries in these three mighty arms, which, before they disappear from our sight in the far distance, clearly show a convergence towards one common source : it would seem, indeed, as if there were an historical life inherent ia language, * Names in ic are names of classes as distinct from the names of single languages. HISTORY OF LANGUAGE. 35 and as if both the will of man and the power of time could tell, if not on its substance, at least on its form. And even if the mere local varieties of speech were not considered sufficient ground for excluding language from the domain of natural science, there would still remain the greater difficulty of reconciling with the recognised principles of physical science the historical changes affecting every one of these varieties. Every part of natui'e, whether mineral, plant, or animal, is the same in kind from the begin- ning to the end of its existence, whereas few lan- guages could be recognised as the same after the lapse of but a thousand years. The language of Alfred is so different fi'om the English of the present day that we have to study it in the same manner as we study Greek and Latin. We can read Milton and Bacon, Shakespeare and Hooker; we can make out Wycliffe and Chaucer ; but when we come to the English of the thkteenth century, we can but guess its meaning, and we fail even in this with works pre- vious to the Ormulum and Layamon. The historical changes of language may be more or less rapid, but they take place at all times and in all countries. They have reduced the rich and powei'ful idiom of the poets of the Yeda to the meagre and impure jargon of the modern Sepoy. They have trans- formed the language of the Zend-Avesta and of the mountain records of Behistiin into that of Firdusi and the modern Persians; the language of Virgil into that of Dante, the language of Ulfilas into that of Charlemagne, the language of Charlemagne into that of Goethe. We have reason to believe that the same changes take place with even greater violence and rapidity in the dialects of savage tribes, although, D 2 36 CHANGES IN ENGLISH. in the absence of a written literatui'e, it is extremely- difficult to obtain trustworthy information. But in the few instances where careful observations have been made on this interesting subject, it has been found that among the wild and illiterate tribes of Siberia, Africa, and Siam, two or three generations are sufficient to change the whole aspect of their dialects. The languages of highly civilised nations, on the contrary, become more and more stationary, and sometimes seem almost to lose their power of change. Where there is a classical literature, and where its language has spread to every town and village, it seems almost impossible that any further changes should take place. Nevertheless, the lan- guage of Eome, for so many centuries the queen of the whole civilised world, was deposed by the modem Romance dialects, and the ancient -Greek was supplanted in the end by the modern Romaic. And though the art of printing and the wide diffusion of Bibles and Prayer-books and newspapers have acted as still more powerful barriers to arrest the constant flow of human speech, we may see that the language of the authorised version of the Bible, though per- fectly intelligible, is no longer the spoken language of England. In Booker's Scripture and Prayer- look Glossary* the number of words or senses of words which have become obsolete since 1611, amount to 388, or nearly one fifteenth part of the * Lectures on the English Language, by G-. P. Marsh : New York, 1860, pp. 263 and 630. These lectures embody the result of much careful research, and are full of valuable observations. They have lately been published in England, with useful omissions and additions by Dr. Smith, under the title of Handbook of the English Language. CHANGES IN ENGLISH. 37 whole number of words used in the Bible. Smaller changes, changes of accent and meaning, the recep- tion of new, and the dropping of old words, we may watch as taking place under our own eyes. Rogers* said that '■ cdntemplate is bad enough, but balcony makes me sick,' whereas at present no one is startled by cdntemplate instead of contemplate^ and hdlcony has become more usual than lalcSny. Thus JRoome and chaney, layloc and goold, have but lately been driven from the stage by Rome^ china, lilac and gold, and some courteous gentlemen of the old school still continue to be ohleeged instead of being obliged.^ Force,^ in the sense of a waterfall, and gill, in the sense of a rocky ravine, were not used in classical English before Wordsworth. Handbook,^ though an old Anglo-Saxon word, has but lately taken the place of manual, and a number of words such as cab for cabriolet, buss for omnibus, and even a verb such as to shunt tremble stiU on the boimdary line between the vulgar and the literary idioms. Though the grammatical changes that have taken place since the. publication of the authorised version are yet fewer in number, stiU we may point out some. The termination of the third person singular in th is now entirely replaced by s. No one now says he liveth, but only he lives. Several of the irregular imperfects and participles have assumed a new form. No one now uses he spake, and he drave, instead of he spoke, and he drove; holpen is replaced * Marsh, p. 532, note. t Trench, English Past and Present, p. 210, mentions great, which was pronounced ^'/•eci in Johnson's time, and tea, which Pope rhymes with obey. X Marsh, p. 589. § Sir J. Stoddart, Glossology, p. 60. 38 GROWTH OP LANGUAGE. by helped; holden by held; shapen by shaped. The distinction between ye and you^ the former being reserved for the nominative, the latter for all the other cases, is given up in modem English; and what is apparently a new grammatical form, the possessive pronoun ^fe, has sprung into life since the beginning of the seventeenth century. It never occurs in the Bible ; and though it is used three or four times by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson does not recognise it as yet in his English Grammar.* It is argued, therefore, that as language, differing thereby from aU other productions of nature, is liable to historical alterations, it is not fit to be treated in the same manner as the subject-matter of all the other physical sciences. There is something very plausible in this objection, but if we examine it more carefiiUy, we shall find that it rests entirely on a confusion of terms. We must distinguish between historical change and natural growth. Art, science, philosophy, and religion aU have a history; language, or any other production of nature, admits only of growth. Let us consider, first, that although there is a continuous change in language, it is not in the power of man either to produce or to prevent it. We might think as well of changing the laws which control the circulation of our blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of speech, or inventing new words according to our own plea- sure. As man is the lord of nature only if he knows her laws and submits to them, the poet and the philosopher become the lords of language only if they know its laws and obey them. * Trench, English Past and Present, p, 114 ; Marsh, p. 397, GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. 39 When the Emperor Tiberius had made a mistake and was reproved for it by Marcellus, another grammarian of the name of Capito, who happened to be present, remarked that what the emperor said was good Latin, or, if it were not, it would soon be so. Marcellus, more of a grammarian than a cour- tier, replied, ' Capito is a liar ; for, Caesar, thou canst give the Eoman citizenship to men, but not to words.' A similar anecdote is told of the German Emperor Sigismund. When presiding at the Council of Constance, he addressed the assembly in a Latin speech, exhorting them to eradicate the schism of the Hussites. ' Yidete Patres,' he said, ' ut era- dicetis schismam Hussitarum.' He was very un- ceremoniously called to order by a monk, who called out, ' Serenissime Rex, schisma est generis neutri.'* The emperor, however, without losing his presence of mind, asked the impertinent monk, ' How do you know it?' The old Bohemian schoolmaster replied, ' Alexander GaJlus says so.' ' And who is Alex- ander Gallus?' the emperor rejoined. The monk replied, ' He was a monk.' ' Well,' said the emperor, ' and I am emperor of Rome ; and my word, I trust, will be as good as the word of any monk.' No doubt the laughers were with the emperor ; but for aU that, schisma remained a neuter, and not even an emperor could change its gender or termination. The idea that language can be changed and * As several of my reviewers have found fault with the monk for using the genitive neutri, instead of neutrius, I beg to refer to PriscianuSj 1. vi. c. i. and c. vii. The expression generis neutrius, though frequently used by modern editors, has no authoi-ity, I believe, in ancient Latin. 40 GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. improved by man is by no means a new one. We know that Protagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher, after laying down some laws on gender, actually began to find fault with the text of Homer, because it did not agree with his rules. But here, as in every other instance, the attempt proved unavailing. Try to alter the smallest rule of English, and you wiU find -that it is physically impossible. There is apparently a very small difference between much and very^ but you can hardly ever put one in the place of the other. You can say, ' I am very happy,' but not, ' I am much happy,' though you may say ' I am most happy.' On the contrary, you can say ' I am much misunderstood,' but not ' I am very misun- derstood.' Thus the western Eomance dialects, Spanish and Portuguese, together with WaUachian, can only employ the Latin word magis for forming comparatives : — ■■ Sp. mas dulce ; Port, mais doce ; Wall, mai dulce : while French, Provengal, and Italian only allow of plus for the same purpose : Ital. piu dolce ; Prov. plu^ dous ; Pr. plus douse. It is by no means impossible, however, that this distinction between very^ which is now used with adjectives only, and much^ which precedes parti- ciples, should disappear in time. In fact, ' very pleased ' and ' very delighted ' are expressions which may be heard in many drawing-rooms. But if that change take place, it will not be by the will of any individual, nor by ike mutual agreement of any large number of men, but rather in spite of the exertions of grammarians and academies. And here you perceive the first difference between history and growth. An emperor may change the laws of society, the forms of religion, the rules of art: it GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. 41 is in the power of one generation, or even of one individual, to raise an art to the highest pitch of perfection, while the next may allow it to lapse, tUl a new genius takes it up again with renewed ardour. In all this we have to deal with the conscious and intentional acts of individuals, and we therefore move on historical ground. If we compare the creations of Michael Angelo or Eaphael with the statues and frescoes of ancient Rome, we can speak of a history of art. We can connect two periods separated by thousands of years through the works of those who handed on the traditions of art from century to cen- tury; but we shall never meet here with the same continuous and unconscious growth which connects the language of Plautus with that of Dante. The process through which language is settled and unset- tled combines in one the two opposite elements of necessity and free wiU. Though the individual seems to be the prime agent in producing new words and new grammatical forms, he is so only after his indivi- duality has been merged in the common action of the femily, tribe or nation to which he belongs. He can do nothing by himself, and the first impulse to a new formation in language, though given by an indi- vidual, is mostly, if not always, given without preme- ditation, nay, unconsciously. The individual, as such, is powerless, and the results apparently pro- duced by him depend on laws beyond his control, and on the co-operation of all those who form together with him one class, one body, or one organic whole. But, though it is easy to show, as we have just done, that language cannot be changed or moulded by the taste, the fancy, or genius of man, it is very difficult to explain what causes the growth of Ian- 42 PHONETIC DECAY. guage. Ever since Horace it has been usual to compare the growth of languages with the growth of trees. But comparisons are treacherous things. What do we know of the real causes of the growth of a tree, and what can we gain by comparing things which we do not quite understand with things which we understand even less ? Many people speak, for instance, of the terminations of the verb, as if they sprouted out from the root as from their parent stock.* But what ideas can they connect with such expressions ? If we must compare lan- guage with a tree, there is one point which may be illustrated by this comparison, and this is that neither language nor the tree can exist or grow by itself. Without the soil, without air and light, the tree could not live ; it could not even be conceived to live. It is the same with language. Language cannot exist by itself ; it requires a soU on which to grow, and that soU is the human soul. To speak of language as a thing by itself, as Hviag a life of its own, as growiag to maturity, producing offspring, and dying away, is sheer mythology; and though we cannot help using metaphorical expressions, we should always be on our guard, when engaged in inquiries like the present, agaiast being carried away by the very words which we are using. Now, what we call the growth of language com- prises two processes which should be carefully distin- guished, though they may be at work simultaneously. These two processes I call 1. Dialectic Regeneration. 2. Phonetic Decay. * Castelvetro, in Home Tooke, p. 629, note. PHONETIC DECAY. 43 I begin with the second as the more obvious, though in reality its operations are mostly subsequent to the operations of dialectic regeneration, I must ask you at present to take it for granted that everything in language had origiuaUy a meaning. As language can have no other object but to express our meaning, it might seem to foUow almost by necessity that language should contaLa neither more nor less than what is required for that purpose. It would also seem to foUow that if language contains no more than what is necessary for conveying a certain meaning, it would be impossible to modify- any part of it without defeating its very purpose. This is reaUy the case in some languages. In Chinese, for instance, ten is expressed by shi. It would be impossible to change sM, in the slightest way without making it unfit to express ten. If instead of sM we pronounced t'si^ this would mean seven^ but not ten. But now, suppose we wished to express double the quantity of ten, twice ten, or twenty. We should in Chinese take eul, which is two, put it before shi^ and say eul-sM, twenty. The same caution which applied to shi, applies again to eul-sM. As soon as you change it, by adding or dropping a single letter, it is no longer twenty, but either some- thing else or nothing. We find exactly the same in other languages which, like Chinese, are called monosyllabic. In Tibetan, chu is ten, nyi two; nyi-chu, twenty. In Burmese she is ten, nhit two ; nhit-she, twenty. But how is it in English, or in Gothic, or in Greek and Latin, or in Sanskrit ? We do not say two-ten in English, nor duo-decem in Latin, nor dvi-da'sa in Sanskrit. 44 PHONETIC DECAY. We find* in Sanskrit Greek Latin English vinsati eikati viginti twenty. Now here we see, first, that the Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, are only local modifications of one and the same original word ; whereas the English twenty is a new compound, the Gothic tvai tigjus (two decads), the Anglo-Saxon tuSntig, fi'amed from Teutonic ma- terials ; a product, as we shall see, of dialectic rege- neration. We next observe that the first part of the Latin viginti and of the Sanskrit vinsati contains the same number, which fi'om dvi has been reduced to vi. This is not very extraordinary; for the Latin bisj twice, which you still hear at concerts, likewise stands for an original dvis, the English twice, the Greek dis. This dis appears again as a Latin preposition, meaning a-two ; so that, for in- stance, discussion means, originally, striking a-two, different from percussion, which means striking through and through. Discussion is, in fact, the cracking of a nut in order to get at its kernel. Well, the same word, dvi or vi, we have in the Latin word for twenty, which is vi-ginti, the Sanskrit It can likewise be proved that the second part of viginti is a corruption of the old. word for ten. Ten, in Sanskrit, is damn ; from it is derived dasati, a decad ; and this dasati was again reduced to sati; thus giving us with vi for dvi, two, the Sanskrit visati or vinsati, twenty. The Latin viginti, the Greek eikati, owe their origin to the same process. * Bopp, Comparative Grammar, § 320. Schleicher, Deutsche Sprache, s. 233. PHONETIC DECAY. 45 Now consider the immense difference — I do not mean in sound, but in character — between two such words as the Chinese eul-sM, two-ten, or twenty, and those mere cripples of words which we meet with in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. In Chinese there is neither too much, nor too little. The word speaks for itself, and requires no commentary. In Sanskrit, on the contrary, the most essential parts of the two component elements are gone, and what remains is a kind of metamorphic agglomerate which cannot be understood without a most minute microscopic ana- lysis. Here, then, we have an instance of what is meant by phonetic corruption; and you will perceive how, not only the form, but the whole nature of language is destroyed by it. As soon as phonetic corruption shows itself in a language, that language has lost what we considered to be the most essential character of aU human speech, namely, that every part of it should have a meaning. The people who spoke Sanskrit were as little aware that vinAati meant twice ten as a Frenchman is that vingt contains the remains of deux and dim. Language, therefoi-e, has entered into a new stage as soon as it submits to the attacks of phonetic change. The life of language has become benumbed and extinct in those words or portions of words which show the first traces of this phonetic mould. Henceforth those words or portions of words can be kept up only artificially or by tradition; and, what is important, a distinction is henceforth established between what is substantial or radical, and what is merely formal or grammatical in words. For let us now take another instance, which will make it clearer how phonetic coiTuption leads to the 46 PHONETIC DECAY. first appearance of so-called grammatical forms. We are not in the habit of looking on twenty as the plural or dual of ten. But how was a plural origi- nally formed? In Chinese, which from the first has guarded most carefully against the taint of phonetic corruption, the plm'al is formed in the most sensible manner. Thus, man in Chinese is gin ; Mai means the whole or totality. This added to gin gives gin- Mai, which is the plural of man. There are other words which are used for the same purpose in Chinese; for instance, pei, which means a class. Hence ?, a stranger, followed by pei, class, gives i-pei, strangers. We have similar plurals in English, but we do not reckon them as grammatical forms. Thus, man-Mnd is formed exactly like t-pei, stranger-kind; Christen- dom is the same as all Christians, and clergy is synonymous with clerici. The same process is fol- lowed in other cognate languages. In Tibetan the plural is formed by the addition of such words as kun, all, and t^sogs, multitude.* Even the numerals, nine and hundred, are used for the same purpose. And here again, as long as these words are fuUy understood and kept alive, they resist phonetic cor- ruption ; but the moment they lose, so to say, their presence of mind, phonetic corruption sets in, and as soon as phonetic corruption has commenced its ravages, those portions of a word which it afi'ects retain a merely artificial or conventional existence and dwindle down to grammatical terminations. I am afi-aid I should tax your patience too much were I to enter here on an analysis of the gramma- tical terminations in Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin, in order to show how these terminations arose out of * Foucaux, Grammaire Tibetaine, p. 27, and Preface, p. x. PHONETIC DECAY. 47 independent words which were slowly reduced to mere dust by the constant wear and tear of speech. But in order to explain how the principle of phonetic decay leads to the formation of grammatical termina- tions, let us look to languages with which we are more familiar. Let us take the French adverb. We are told by French grammarians* that in order to form adverbs we have to add the termination ment. Thus from hon, good, we form bonnement, from vrai, true, vraiment. This termination does not exist in Latin. But we meet in Latinf with expressions such as bond mente, in good faith. We read in Ovid, 'Insistam forti mente,' I shall insist with a strong mind or will, I shall insist strongly; in French, 'J'insisterai fortement.' Therefore, what has hap- pened in the growth of Latin, or in the change of Latin into French, is simply this : in phrases such as forti mente, the last word was no longer felt as a distinct word, and it lost at the same time its dis- tinct pronunciation. Mente, the ablative of mens, was changed into ment, and was preserved as a merely formal element, as the termination of adverbs, even in cases where a recollection of the original meaning of mente (with a mind), would have ren- dered its employment perfectly impossible. If we say in French that a hammer falls lourdement, we little suspect that we ascribe to a piece of iron a heavy mind. In Italian, though the adverbial ter- mination mente in chiaramente is no longer felt as a distinct word, it has not as yet been affected by phonetic corruption; and in Spanish it is sometimes * Fuchs, Romanische Sprachen, s. 355. t Quint., V. 10, 52. ' Bona mente factum, ideo palam; maia, ideo ex insidiis.' 48 PHONETIC DECAY. used as a distinct word, though, even, then it cannot be said to have retained its distinct meaning. Thus, instead of saying, ' claramente, concisamente y elegan- temente,' it is more elegant to say in Spanish, ' clara, concisa y elegante mente.' It is difficult to form any conception of the extent to which the whole surface of a language may be altered by what we have just described as phonetic change. Think that in the French vingt you have the same elements as in deux and dix ; that the second part of the French douze, twelve, represents the Latin decim in duodecim ; that the final te of trente was originally the Latin ginta in triginta, which ginta was again a derivation and abbreviation of the Sanskrit da'sa or da'sati, ten. Then consider how early this phonetic disease must have broken out. For in the same manner as vingt in French, veinte in Spanish, and venti in Italian presuppose the more primitive viginti which we find in Latin, so this Latin viginti^ together with the Greek eikaii, and the Sanskrit vin'sati presuppose an earlier lan- guage from which they are in turn derived, and in which, previous to viginti, there must have been a more primitive form dvi-ginti, and previous to this again, another compound as clear and intelligible as the Chinese eM-shi, consisting of the ancient Aryan names for two, dvi, and ten, dasati. Such is the virulence of this phonetic change, that it will some- times eat away the whole body of a word, and leave nothing behind but decayed fragments. Thus, sister^ which in Sanskrit is svasar,* appears in Pehlvi and * Sanskrit « = Persian h ; therefore svasar = hvahar. This becomes chohar, chor, and cho. Zend, qanha, ace. qanharem, Persian, khdher. Bopp, Comp. Gram., § 35. DIALECTIC EEGENEEATION. 49 in Ossetian as cho. Daughter^ which in Sanskrit is duhitar, has dwindled down in Bohemian to dci (pronounced tsi).* Who would believe that tear and larme are derived from the same source; that the French mime contains the Latin semetipsissimus ; that in aujourdlhui we have the Latin word dies twice ?f Who would recognise the Latin pater in the Armenian hayr? Yet we make no difficulty about identifying pere and pater ; and as several initial h's in Armenian correspond to an original p (Jiet^ pes, pedis ; king = Greek pente, five ; hour = Greek pyr, fire), it follows that hayr is pater. "l We are accustomed to call these changes the growth of language, but it would be more appro- priate to call this process of phonetic change decay, and thus to distinguish it from the second, or dia- lectic process, which we must now examine, and which involves, as you will see, a more real principle of growth. In order to undei'stand the meaning of dialectic regeneration we must first see clearly what we mean by dialect. We saw before that language has no independent substantial existence. Language exists in man, it lives in being spoken, it dies with each word that is pronounced, and is no longer heard. It is a mere accident that language should ever have been reduced to writing, and have been made the vehicle of a written literature. Even now * Schleicher, Beitrage, b. ii. s. 392 : dci = dugte ; gen. dcere = dugtere. t Hui = hodie, Ital. oggi and oggidi; jour — diurnum, from X See M. M.'s Letter to Chevalier Bunsen, On the Turanian Languages, p. 67. E 50 DIALECTIC REGENERATION. the largest number of languages are unwritten, and have produced no literature. Among the numerous tribes of Central Asia, Africa, America, and Polynesia, language stUl lives in its natural state, in a state of continual combustion ; and it is there that we must go if we wish to gain an insight into the growth of human speech previous to its being arrested by any literary interference. What we are accustomed to call languages, the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and Spain, must be con- sidered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of speech. The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, and in spite of the tyranny exercised by the classical or literary idioms, the day is stiU very far off which is to see the dialects, even of such classical languages as Italian and French, entirely eradicated. About twenty of the Italian dialects have been reduced to writing, and made known by the press.* Champollion-Figeac reckons the most distinguishable dialects of France at fourteen, f The number of modern Greek dialects J is carried by some as high as seventy, and though many of these are hardly more than local varieties, yet some, like the Tza- conic, differ from the literary language as much as Doric differed from Attic. In the island of Lesbos, villages distant from each other riot more than two or three hours have frequently peculiar words of their own, and their own peculiar pronunciation. § But let us take a language which, though not with- * See Marsh, p. 678; Sir Jolm Stoddart's Glossology, s. 31. t Glossology, p. 33. X Ibid. p. 29. § Nea Pandora, 1859, Nos. 227, 229; Zeitschrift fiir verglei- ckende Sprachforschung, x. s. 190. •DIALECTIC REGENERATION. 51 out a literature, has been less under the influence of classical writers than Italian or French, and we shall then see at once how abundant the growth of dialects. The Friesian, which is spoken on a small area on the north-western coast of Germany, between the Scheldt and Jutland, and on the islands near the shore, which has been spoken there for at least two thousand years,* and which possesses literary documents as old as the twelfth century, is broken up into endless local dialects. I quote from Kohl's Travels. ' The commonest things,' he writes, 'which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different names in the different Friesian Islands. Thus, in Amrum,, father is called aatj ; on the Halligs, haha or hahe ; in Sylt, foder or vaar ; in many districts on the mainland, tdte ; in the eastern pai't of Fohr, oti or ohi^. Although these people live within a couple of German miles from each other, these words differ more than the Italian padre and the English father. Even the names of their districts and islands are totally different in different dialects. The island of Sylt is called Sol., Sol., and Sal.' Each of these dialects, though it might be made out by a Friesian scholar, is unintelligible except to the peasants of each narrow district iu which it prevails. What is therefore generally called the Friesian language, and described as such in Friesian grammars, is in reality but one out of many dialects, though, no doubt, the most important ; and the same holds good with regard to all so-called literary languages. It is a mistake to imagine that dialects are every- * Grimm, Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache, s. 668 ; Marsh, p. 379. E 2 52 DIALECTIC REGENERATION. where corruptions of the literary language. Even in England,* the local patois have many forms which are more primitive than the language of Shakespeare, and the richness of their vocabulary surpasses, on many points, that of the classical writers of any period. Dialects have always beea the feeders rather than the channels of a literary language ; anyhow, they are parallel streams which existed long before one of them was raised to that tempoi"ary eminence which is the result of literary cultivation. -^ What Grimm says of the oi-igin of dialects in general applies only to such as are produced by phonetic corruption. ' Dialects,' he writes,f ' de- velop themselves progressively, and the more we look backward in the history of language the smaller is their number, and the less definite their features. All multiplicity arises gradually from an original unity.' So it seems, indeed, if we build our theories of language exclusively on the materials supplied by literary idioms, such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. No doubt these are the royal heads in the history of language. But as political history ought * ' Some people, who may have been taught to consider the Dorset dialect as having originated from corruption of the written English, may not be prepared to hear that it is not only a separate offspring from the Anglo-Saxon tongue, but purer, and in some cases richer, than the dialect which is chosen as the national speech.' — Barnes, Poems in Dorset Dialect, Preface, p. xiv. ' En general, I'hebreu a beaucoup plus de rapports avec I'arabe vulgaire qu'avec I'arabe litteral, comme j'aurai peut-etre I'occasion de le montrer ailleurs, et il en resulte que ce que nous appellons I'arabe vulgaire est 6galement un dialecte fort ancien.* Munk, Journal Asiatique, 1850, p. 229, note. t Geschichte der Deutschen Spraehe, s. 833. DIALECTIC EEGBNEEATION. 53 to be more than a chronicle of royal dynasties, so the historian of language ought never to lose sight of those lower and popular strata of speech from which these- dynasties originally sprang, and by which alone they are supported. Here, however, lies the difficulty. How are we to trace the histoiy of dialects? In the ancient history of language, literary dialects alone supply us with materials, whereas the very existence of spoken dialects is hardly noticed by ancient writers. We are told, indeed, by Pliuy,* that in. Colchis there were more than three hundred tribes speaking different dialects ; and that the Romans, in order to carry on any intercourse with the natives, had to employ a hundred and thirty interpreters. This is probably an exaggeration ; but we have no reason to doubt the statement of Strabo,f who speaks of seventy tribes living together in that country, which, even now, is called ' the mountain of lan- guages.' In modern times, again, when mission- aries have devoted themselves to the study of the languages of savage and illiterate tribes, they have seldom been, able to do more than to acquire one out of many dialects-; and, when their exertions have been at all successfml, that dialect which they had reduced to writing, and made the medium of their civilising influence, soon assumed a kind of literary supremacy, so as to leave the rest behind as bar- * Pliny,"vi. 5 ; Hervas, Catalogo, i. 118. •j" Pliny depends on Timosthenes, whom Strabo declares un- trustworthy (ii, p. 93, ed. Casaub.) Strabo himself says of Dioscurias, avvipxt-adat. kg ahr^v ejiSo/xriKOVTa, oi Se Kal rpiaKoaia edvTi (haa-tv olg ovStv twv ovt(ov fiiXei (x. p. 498). The last words refer probably to Timosthenes. S4 DIALECTIC EEGENEEATION, JDarous jargons. Yet, whatever is known of th6 dialects of savage tribes is chiefly or entirely due to missionaries ; and it is much to be desired that their attention should again and again be directed to this interesting problem of the dialectic life of lan- guage which they alone have the means of elu- cidating. Gabriel Sagard, who was sent as a missionary to the Hurons in 1626, and published his Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons^ at Paris, in 1631, states that among these North American tribes hardly one village speaks the same language as another ; ■' nay, that two families of the same village do not speak exactly the same language. And he adds what is important, that their language is changing eveiy day, and is already so much changed that the ancient Huron 'language is almost entirely different from the present. During the last two hundred years, on the contrary, the languages of the Hurons and Iroquois are said not to have changed at all.* We read of missionaries f in Central America * Du Ponceau, p. 110. ■(■ S. F. Waldeck, Lettre a M. Jomard des Environs de Palen- que, Amerique Centrale. ('II ne pouvait se servir, en 1833, d'un vocabulaire compose avec beaucoup de soin dix ans aupar- avant.') ' But such is the tendency of languages, amongst nations in the hunter state, rapidly to diverge from each other, that, apart from those primitive words, a much greater diversity is found in Indian languages, well known to have sprung from a common source, than in kindred European tongues. Thus, although the Minsi were only a tribe of the Delawares, and adjacent to them, even some of their numerals diifered.' ArehcBo- logia Americana, vol. ii. p. 160. ' Most men of mark have a style of their own. If the community be large, and there be many who have made language their study, it is only such innovations as have real merit that become perma- nent. If it be small, a single eminent man, especially where writing DIALECTIC REGENERATION. 55 who attempted to write down the language of savage tribes, and who compiled with great care a dictionary of all the words they could lay hold of. Returning to the same tribe after the lapse of only ten yearsj they found that this dictionary had become antiquated and useless. Old words had sunk to the ground, and new ones had risen to the surface; and to all outward appearance the language was completely changed. Nothing surprised the Jesuit missionaries so much as the immense number of languages spoken by the natives of America. But thisj far from being a proof of a high state of civilisation, rather showed that the various races of America had never sub- mitted, for any length of time, to a powerful political concentration, and that they had never succeeded in founding great national empires. Hervas reduces, is unknown, may make great changes. There being no one to chal- lenge the propriety of his innovations, they become first fashionable and then lasting. The old and better vocabulary drops. If, for instance, England had been a small country, and scarce a writer of distinction in it but Carlyle, he without doubt would have much altered the language. As it is, though he has his imitators, it is little probable that he will have a perceptible influence over the common diction. Hence, where writing is unknown, if the com- munity be broken up into small tribes, the language very rapidly changes, and for flie worse. An offset from an Indian tribe in a few generations has a language unintelligible to theparent stock. Hence the vast number of languages among the small hunting tribes of Indians in North and South America, which yet are all evidently of a common origin, for their'principles are identical. The larger, therefore, the community, the more permanent the language ; the smaller, the less it is permanent, and the greater the degeneracy. The smaller the community, the more confined the range of ideas, consequently the smaller the vocabulary necessary, and the falling into abeyance of many words.' — Dr. Rae, The Polynesian, No. 23. 1862. 56 DIALECTIC REGENERATION. indeed, all the dialects of America to eleven families* — four for the south, and seven for the north; but this could be done only by the same careful and minute comparison which enables us to class the idioms spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate dialects. For practical purposes the dialects of America ai'e distinct dialects, and the people who speak them are mutually unintelligible. We hear the same observations everywhere where the rank growth of dialects has been watched by intelligent observers. If we turn our eyes to Burmah, we find that there the Burmese has pro- duced a considerable literature, and is the recognised medium of communication not only in Burmah, but likewise in Pegu and Arakan. But the intricate mountain ranges of the peninsula of the Irawaddyf afford a safe refuge to many independent tribes, speaking their own independent dialects; and in the neighbourhood of Manipura alone Captain Gordon collected no less than twelve dialects. ' Some of them,' he says, ' are spoken by no more than thirty or forty families, yet so different from the rest as to be unintelligible to the nearest neighbourhood.' Brown, the excellent American missionary, who has spent his whole life in preaching the Gospel in that part of the world, teUs us that some tribes who left their native village to settle in another valley, became unintelligible to their forefathers in two or three generations.^ In the North of Asia the Ostiakes, as Messer- schmidt informs us, though really speaking the same * Catalogo, i. 393. ■f Turanian Languages, p. 114. X Ibid. p. 233. DIALECTIC EEGENEEATION. 57 language everywhei'e, have produced so many words and forms peculiar to each tribe, that even within the limits of twelve or twenty German miles, com- munication among them becomes extremely diffi- cult. Gastrin, the heroic explorer of the languages of northern and central Asia,* assures us that some of the Mongolian dialects are actually entering into a new phase of grammatical life; and that while the literary language of the Mongolians has no ter- minations for the persons of the verb, that charac- teristic feature of Turanian speech had lately broken out in the spoken dialects of the Buriates and in the Tungusic idioms near Njertschinsk in Siberia. One more observation of the same character from the pen of Eobert Moffat, in his Missionary Scenes and Labours in Southern Africa. ' The purity and harmony of language,' he writes, ' is kept up by their pitchos, or public meetings, by their festivals and ceremonies, as well as by their songs and their con- stant intercourse. With the isolated vUlfigers of the desert it is far otherwise; they have no such meetings; they are compelled to traverse the wilds, often to a great distance from their native village. On such occasions fathers and mothers, and aU who can bear a burden, often set out for weeks at a time, and leave their children to the care of two or three infirm old people. The infant progeny, some of whom are beginning to lisp, whUe others can just master a whole sentence, and those stUl further advanced, romping and playing together, the child- ren of nature, through their live-long day, become habituated to a language of their own. The more * Turanian Languages, p. 30. 58 DIALECTIC REGENERATIOST. voluble condescend to the less precocious ; and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without rule, and in the course of one generation the entire character of the language is changed. Such • is the life of language in a state of nature ; land in a similar manner, we have a right to conclude^ languages grew up which we only know after the bit and bridle of literature were thrown over their necks. It need not be a written or classical litera- ture to give an ascendency to one out of many dialects, and to impart to its peculiarities an undis^ puted legitimacy. Speeches at pitchos or public meetings, popular ballads, national laws, religious oracles, exercise, though to a smaller extent, the same influence. They will arrest the natural flow of language in the countless rivulets of its dialects, and give a permanency to certain formations of speech which, without these external influences, could have enjoyed but an ephemeral existence. Though we cannot fully enter, at present, on the problem of the origin of language, yet this we can clearly see, that whatever the origin of language, its first tendency must have been towards an unbounded variety. To this there was, however, a natural check, which prepared from the very beginning the growth of national and literary languages. The language of the father became the language of a family ; the language of a family that of a clan. In one and the same clan difi'erent families would preserve among themselves their own familiar forms and :expi'essions. They would add new words, some so fanciful and quaint as to be hardly intelligible to other members of the same clan. Such expressions MODERN LANGUAGES. 59 •would naturally be suppressed, as we suppress pro- vincial peculiarities and pet words of our own, at large assemblies where all clansmen meet and are expected to take pai't in general discussions. But they would be cherished all the more round the fire of each tent, in proportion as the general dialect of the clan assumed a more formal character. Class dialects, too, would spring up ; the dialects of ser- vants, grooms, shepherds, and soldiers. Women would have their own household words ; and the rising generation would not be long without a more racy phraseology of their own. Even we, in this literary age, and at a distance of thousands of years from those early fathers of language, do not speak at home as we speak in public. The same circum- stances which give rise to the formal language of a clan, as distinguished from the dialects of families, produce, on a larger scale, the languages of a confede- ration of clans, of nascent colonies, of rising nation- alities. Before there is a national language, there have always been hundreds of dialects in districts, towns, villages, clans, and famihes; and though the progress of civilisation and centralisation tends to re- duce their number and to soften their features, it has not as yet annihilated them, even in our own time. Let us now look again at what is commonly called the history, but what ought to be called, the natural growth, of language, and we shall easily see that it consists chiefly in the play of the two principles which we have just examined, phonetic decay smd dialectic regeneration or growth Let us take the six Romance languages. It is usual to call these the daughters of Latin. I do not object to the names of parent and daughter as applied to languages; only we must not 60 MODE^" LANGUAGES. allow such apparently clear and simple terms to cover obscure and vague conceptions. Now if we call Italian the daughter of Latin, we do not mean to ascribe to Italian a new vital principle. Not a single radical element was newly created for the formation of Italian. Italian is Latin in a new form. Italian is modern Latin, or Latin ancient Italian. The names mother and daughter only mark different periods in the growth of a language sub- stantially the same. To speak of Latin dying in giving birth to her offspring is again pure mytho- logy, and it would be easy to prove that Latin was a living language long after Italian had learnt to run alone. Only let us clearly see what we mean by Latin. The classical Latin is one out of many dialects spoken by the Aryan inhabitants of Italy. It was the dialect of Latium, in Latium the dialect of Rome, at Rome the dialect of the patricians. It was fixed by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Naevius, Cato, and Lucretius, polished by the Scipios, Hortensius, and Cicero. It was the language of a restricted class, of a political party, of a literary set. Before their time, the language of Rome must have changed and fluctuated considerably. Polybius tells us (iii. 22), that the best-informed Romans could not make out without difficulty the language of the ancient treaties between Rome and Carthage. Horace admits {Ep. ii. 1, 86), that he could not understand the old Salian poems, and he hints that no one else could. Quintilian (i. 6, 40) says that the Salian priests themselves could hardly understa,nd their sacred hymns. If the plebeians had obtained the upper- hand instead of the patricians, Latin would have been very different from what it is in Cicero, and we know that even Cicero, having been brought up at Arpinum, MODERN LANGUAGES. 61 had to give up some of his provincial peculiarities, such as the dropping of the final s, when he began to mix in fashionable society, and had to write for his new patrician friends.* After having been estab- lished as the language of legislation, religion, litera- ture, and general civilisation, the classical Latin dialect became stationaiy and stagnant. It could not grow, because it was not allowed to change or to deviate from its classical correctness. It was haunted by its own ghost. Literary dialects, or what are com- monly called classical languages, pay for their tem- porary greatness by inevitable decay. They are like stagnant lakes at the side of great rivers. ^ They form reservoirs of what was once living and running speech, but they are no longer carried on by the main current. At times it may seem as if the whole stream of lan- guage was absorbed by these lakes, and we can hardly trace the small rivulets which run on in the main bed. But if lower down, that is to say, later in history, we meet again with a new body of stationary language, forming or formed, we may be sure that its tributaries were those very rivulets which for a time were almost lost fi-om our sight. Or it may be more accurate to compare a classical or literary idiom with the frozen surface of a river, brilliant and smooth, but stiff and cold. It is mostly by political commotions that this surface of the more poHte and cultivated speech is broken and carried away by the waters rising underneath. It is during times when * Quintilian, ix. 4. ' Nam neque Lucilium putant uti eadem (s) ultima, cum dicit Serenu fuit, et Dignu loco. Quin etiam Cicero in Oratore plures antiquorum tradit sic locutos.' In some phrases the final s was omitted in conversation; e.g. abin for abisne, viden for videsne, opu'st for opus est, eonabere for cona- beris. 62 DIALECTS. the Mgher classes are either crushed in religious and social struggles, or mix again with the lower classes to repel foreign invasion ; when literary occupations are discouraged, palaces burnt, monasteries pillaged, and seats of learning destroyed — it is then that the popular, or, as they are called, the vulgar dialects, which had formed a kind of undercurrent, rise beneath the crystal surface of the literary language, and sweep away, like the waters in spring, the cum- brous formations of a bygone age. In more peaceful times, a new and popular literature springs up in a language which seems to have been formed by con- quests or revolutions, but which, in reality, had been growing up long before, and was only brought out, ready made, by historical events. From this point of view we can see that no literary language can ever be said to have been the mother of another language. As soon as a language loses its xm- bounded capability of change, its carelessness about what it throws away, and its readiness in always sup- plying instantaneously the wants of mind and heart, its natural life is changed into a merely artificial exist' ence. It may still live on for a long time, but while it seems to be the leading shoot, it is in reality but a broken and withering branch, slowly falling from the stock from which it sprang. The sources of Italian are not to be found in the classical literature of Rome, but in the popular dialects of Italy. English did not spring from the Anglo-Saxon of Wessex only, but from the dialects spoken in every part of Great Britain, distinguished by local pecu- liarities and modified at different times by the influence of Latin, Danish, Norman, French, and other foreign elements. Some of the local dialects DIAXECTS. 63 of English, as spoken at the present day, are of great importance for a critical study of English, and a French prince, now living in this country, deserves great credit for collecting what can still be saved of English dialects. Hindustani is not the daughter of Sanskrit as we find it in the Vedas, or in the later literature of the Brahmans: it is a branch of the living speech of India, springing from the same stem from which Sanskrit sprang, when it first assumed its literary independence. While thus endeavouring to place the character of dialects, as the feeders of language, in a clear light, I may appear to some of my hearers to have exag- gerated their importance. No doubt, if my object had been dififerent, I might easUy have shown that, without literary cultivation, language would never have acquired that settled character which is essen^ tial for the communication of thought ; that it would never have fulfilled its highest purpose, but have remained the mere jargon of shy troglodytes. But as the importance of literary languages is not hkely to be overlooked, whereas the importance of dialects, as far as they sustain the growth of language, had never been pointed out, I thought it better to dwell on the advantages which literary languages derive from dialects, I'ather than on the benefits which dialects owe to literary languages. Besides, our thief object to-day was to explain the growth of lan- guage, and for that purpose it is impossible to exag- gerate the importance of the constant undergrowth of dialects. Remove a language from its native soil, tear it away fi-om the dialects which are its feeders, and you arrest at once its natural growth. There will still be the progress of phonetic corrup- 64 LAWS OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE. tion, but no longer the restoring influence of dialectic regeneration. The language which the Norwegian refugees brought to Iceland has remained almost the same for seven centuries, whereas on its native soil, and surrounded by local dialects, it has grown into two distinct languages, the Swedish and Danish. In the eleventh century, the languages of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland are supposed* to have been identical, nor can we appeal to foreign conquest, or to the admixture of foreign with native blood, in order to account for the changes which the language underwent in Sweden and Denmark, but not in Iceland, f We can hardly form an idea of the unbounded resources of dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped one general term, their dialects will supply fifty, though each with its own special shade of meaning. If new combinations of thought are evolved in the progress of society, dialects will readily supply the required names from the store of their so-called superfluous words. Thei'e are not only local and provincial, but also class dialects. There is a dialect of shepherds, of sportsmen, of soldiers, of farmers. I suppose there are few persons here present who could tell the exact meaning of a horse's poll, crest, withers, dock, ham- string, cannon, pastern, coronet, arm, jowl, and muzzle. Where the literary language speaks of the young of aU sorts of animals, farmers, shepherds, and sportsmen would be ashamed to use so general a term. * Marsh, Lectures, pp. 133, 368. f ' There are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory (U.S.), than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain.' — Marsh, p. 667. LAWS OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE. 65 * The idiom of nomads,' as Grimm says, ' contains an abundant wealth of manifold expressions for sword and weapons, and for the different stages in the life of their cattle. In a more highly cultivated language these expressions become burfchensome and superfluous. But in a peasant's mouth, the bearing, calving, falling, and killing of almost every animal has its own peculiar term, as the sportsman delights in calling the gait and members of game by different names. The eye of these shephei'ds, who live in the free air, sees further, their ear hears more sharply — why should their speech not have gained that living truth and variety?'* Thus Juliana Bemers, lady prioress of the nunnery ■of Sopwell in the fifteenth century, the reputed author of the Book of St. Albans, informs us that we must , not use names of multitudes promiscuously, but we are to say, 'a congregacyon of people, a boost of men, a felyshyppynge of yomen, and a bevy of ladies ; we must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, a watche of nyghtyngales, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of fi-erys, a pontificality of prestys, a bomy- nable syght of monkes, and a superfluyte of nonnes,' and so of other human and brute assemblages. In * Many instances are given in Pott's Eti/m. Forsch., p. 128- 169. Grimm, Gesekichte der Dmtschen Sprache, p. 25. ' Wir sagen : die state fohlt, die kuh kalbt, das schaf lammt, die geiss zickelt, die sau frischt (von frisching, frischling), die hiindin welft (mhd. erwirfet das welf) ; nicht anders heisst es franzosisch la chevre chevrote, la brebis agnele, la truie porcele, la louve touvete, &c.' F 66 LAWS OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE. like mannex", in dividing game for the table, th6 animals were not carved, but 'a dere was broken, a gose reryd, chekyn frusshed, a cony unlaced, a ci'ane dysplayed, a curlewe unioynted, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfte, a lambe sholdered, a heron dysmembryd, a pecocke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd, and a breme splayed.'* What, however, I wanted particularly to point out in this lecture is this, that neither of the causes which produce the growth, or, according to others, constitute the history of language, is under the control of man. The phonetic decay of language is not the result of mere accident; it is governed by definite laws, as we shall see when we come to con- sider the principles of comparative grammar. But these laws were not made by man; on the contrary, man had to obey them without knowing of their existence. In the growth of the modern Eomance languages out of Latin, we can perceive not only a general tendency to simplification, not only a natural dis- position to avoid the exertion which the pronunciation of certain consonants, and still more, of groups of consonants, entails on the speaker: but we can see distirict laws for each of the Romance dialects, which enable us to say, that in French the Latin patrem would naturally grow into the modem phre. The final m is always dropped in the Romance dialects, and it was dropped even in Latin. Thus we get patre instead of patrem. Now, a Latin t between two vowels in such words as pater is invariably sup- * Marsh, Lectures, pp. 181, 590. > LAWS OP CHANGE IN LANGUAGE. 67 pressed in French. This is a law, and by means of it we can discover at once that catena must become chaine ; fata^ a later feminine representation of the old neuter /afe«?n,/e'e ; pratum a meadow, pre. From pratum we derive prataria, which in French becomes ■prairie ; from fatum^ fataria, the English fairy. Thus every Latin participle in atus, like amatus, loved, must end in French in e. The same law then changed paire (pronounced patere) into paere, or pere ; it changed matrem into mere, fratrem into frere. These changes take place gradually but irresistibly, and, what is most important, they are completely beyond the reach or control of the free will of man. Dialectical growth again is still more beyond the control of individuals. For although a' poet may knowingly and intentionally invent a new word, its acceptance depends on circumstances which defy individual interference. There are some changes in the grammar which at first sight might seem to be mainly attributable to the caprice of the speaker. Granted, for instance, that the loss of the Latin ter- jninations was the natural I'esult of a more careless pronunciation ; granted that the modem sign of the French genitive du is a natural corruption of the ■Latin de illo — yet the choice of de^ instead of any other word, to express the genitive, the choice of illo, instead of any other pronoun, to express the article, might seem to prove that man acted as a free agent in the formation of language. But it is jiot so. No single individual could deliberately have set to work in order to abolish the old Latin genitive, and to replace it by the periphrastic compound de illo. It was. necessary that the incon- ir 2 68 INFANTINE GRAMMAR. venience of having no distinct or distinguishable sign of the genitive should have been felt by the people who spoke a vulgar Latin dialect. It was necessary that the same people should have used the preposition de in such a manner as to lose sight of its original local meaning altogether (for instance, una de multis, in Horace, i. e. one out of many). It was necessary, again, that the same people should have felt the want of an article, and should have used illo in numerous expressions, where it seemed to have lost its original pronominal power. It was necessary that all these conditions should be given, before one individual, and after him another, and after him hundreds and thousands and millions, could use de illo as the exponent of the genitive; and change it into the Italian dello, del, and the French du. The attempts of single grammarians and purists to improve language are perfectly bootless; and we shaU probably hear no more of schemes to prune languages of their irregularities. It is very likely, however, that the gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in literary as well as in illiterate languages, to the dialect of chil- dren. The language of children is more regular than our own. I have heard children say hadder and baddest, instead of worse and worst. In Urdii the old sign of the possessive was rd^ re, ri. Now it is ka, he, M, except in hamdrd, my, our, twmhdrd, your, and a few other words, all pronouns. My learned friend, Dr. Fitz-Edward Hall, informs me that he heard children m. India use hamkd and tumkd. Chil- dren will say, / gaed, I coomd, I catched ; and it is this sense of grammatical justice, this generous feeling HISTORY AND GROWTH. 69 of what ought to be, which in the course of centuries has eliminated many so-called irregular forms. Thus the auxiliary verb in Latin was very irregular. If sumus is we are, and sunt, they are, the second person, you are, ought to have been, at least accord- ing to the strict logic of children, sutis. This, no doubt, sounds very barbarous to a classical ear accustomed to estis. And we see how French, for instance, has strictly preserved the Latin forms in nous sommes, vous etes, Us sont. But in Spanish we find somas, sois, son ; and this sois stands for sutis. We find similar traces of grammatical levelling in the Italian siamo, siete, sono, formed in analogy of regular verbs such as crediamo, credete, credono. The second person, set, instead of es, is likewise infantine grammar. So are the Wallachian suntemu, we are, si^nteti, you are, which owe their origin to the third person plural sunt, they are. And what shall we say of such monsters as essendo, a gerund derived on principles of strict justice from an infini- tive essere, like credendo fi-om crederel However, we need not be surprised, for we find similar bar- barisms in English. Even in Anglo-Saxon, the third person plural, sind, had by a false analogy been transferred to the first and second persons; and instead of the modem English, In Old Norse. In GotUe. * we are er-um sijum you are ■ we find er-udh sijuth they aref er-u. sind. * The Gothic forms sijum, sijuth, are not organic. They are either derived by false analogy from the third person plural sind, or a new base sij was derived from the subjunctive sijau, Sanskrit St/am. ■f The Scandinavian origin of these English forms has been 70 CONNECTION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND HISTOET. Dialectically we hear / he, instead oi I am; and if Chartism should ever gain the upper hand, we must be prepared for newspapers adopting such forms as I says, I knows. These various influences and conditions, under which language grows and changes, are like the waves and winds which carry deposits to the bottom' of the sea, where they accumulate and rise, and grow, and at last appear on the surface of the earth as a stratum, perfectly intelligible in all its com- ponent parts, not produced by an inward principle of growth, nor regulated by invariable laws of nature ; yet, on the other hand, by no means the result of mere accident, or the production of lawless and uncontrolled agencies. We cannot be careful enough in the use of our words. Strictly speaking, neither history nor growth is applicable to the changes of the shifting surface of the earth. History appHes to the actions of free agents ; growth to the^ natural unfolding of organic beings. "We speak, however, of the growth of the crust of the earth, and we know what we mean by it ; and it is in this sense, but not in the sense of growth as applied to a tree, that we have a right to speak of the growth of language. If that modification which takes place in time by continually new combinations of given elements, which withdraws itself from the well explained by Dr. Lottner, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1861,' p. 63. The third person plural aran is found in Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus JEvi Saxoniei, vol. i. p. 235 (a.i>. 805-831). It does not occur in Layamon. It is found in the Ormulum as arm ; but even in Chaucer it has been met with' twice only. See Gesenius, Be Ling. Chaucer, p. 72 ; Monicke, On the " Ormulum," p. 35. COMTECTIOlir BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND HISTORY. 71 control of free agents, and can in the end be recog- nised as the result of natural agencies, may be called growth ; and if, so defined, we may apply it to the growth of the crust of the earth ; the same word, in the same sense, will be applicable to lan- guage, and will justify us in removing the science of language from the pale of the historical to that of the physical sciences.. _l. There is another objection which we have to consider, and the consideration of which will again help us to understand more clearly the real character of language^ The great periods in the growth of the earth which have been established by geological research are brought to their close, or very nearly so, when we discover the first vestiges of human life, and when the history of man, in the widest sense of the word, begins. The periods in the growth of language, on the contrary, begin and run parallel with the history of man. It has been said, therefore, that although language may not be merely a work of art, it would, nevertheless, be impossible to understand the life and growth of any language without an historical knowledge of the times in which that language grew up. We ought to know, it is said, whether a language which is to be analysed under the microscope of comparative grammar, has been growing up wild, among wild tribes without a literature, oral or wintten, in poetry or in prose; or whether it has received the cultivation of poets, priests, and orators, and retained the impress of a classical age. Again, it is only from the annals of political history that we can learn whether one language, has come in contact with another, how long this contact has lasted, which of the two nations 72 LANGUAGE INDEPENDENT OF HISTOBICAL EVENTS. stood higher in civilisation, which was the conquering and which the conquered, which of the two esta- blished the laws, the religion, and the arts of the country, and which produced the greatest number of national teachers, popular poets, and successful demagogues. All these questions are of a purely historical character, and the science which has to borrow so much from historical sources, might well be considered an anomaly in the sphere of the physical sciences. Now, in answer to this, it cannot be denied that among the physical sciences none is so intimately connected with the history of man as the science of language. But a similar connection, though in a less degree, can be shown to exist between other branches of physical research and the history of man. In zoology, for instance, it is of some im- portance to know at what particular period of history, in what country, and for what purposes certain animals were tamed and domesticated. In ethnology, a science, we may I'emark in passing, quite distinct from the science of language, it would be difficult to account for the Caucasian stamp impressed on the Mongolian race in Hungary, or on the Tatar race in Turkey, unless we knew from written documents the migrations and settlements of the Mongolic and Tataric tribes in Europe. A botanist, again, comparing several specimens of rye, would find it difficult to account for their respective peculiarities, unless he knew that in some parts of the world this plant has been cultivated for centuries, whereas in other regions, as, for instance, in Mount Caucasus, it is still allowed to grow wild. Plants have their own countries, like races, and the pre- I/ANGXJAGE INDEPENDENT OE HISTORICAL EVENTS. 73 sence of the cucumber in Greece, the orange and cherry in Italy, the potato in England, and the vine at the Cape, can be fuUy explained by the historian only. The more intimate relation, there- fore, between the histoiy of language and the history of man is not sufficient to exclude the science of language from the circle of the physical sciences. Nay, it might be shown that, if strictly defined, the science of language can declare itself com- pletely independent of history. If we speak of the language of England, we ought, no doubt, to know something of the political history of the British Isles, in order to understand the present state of that language. Its history begins with the early Britons, who spoke a Celtic dialect; it carries us on to the Saxon conquest, to the Danish invasions, to the Norman conquest : and we see how each of these political events contributed to the formation of the character of the language. The language of England may be said to have been in succession Celtic, Saxon, Nonnan, and English. But if we speak of the history of the English language, we enter on totally different ground. The English language was never Celtic, the Celtic never grew into Saxon, nor the Saxon into Norman, nor the Norman into English. . The history of the Celtic language runs on to the present day. It matters not whether it be spoken by all the inhabitants of the British Isles, or only by a small minority in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, A language, as long as it is spoken by anybody, lives and has its substantive existence. The last old woman that spoke Cornish, and to whose memory it is now intended to raise a monument, re- presented by herself alone the ancient language of 74 LANGUAGE INDEPENDENT OE HISTORICAL EVENTS. Cornwall. A Celt may become an Englishman, Celtic and Englisli blood may be mixed; and who could tell at the present day the exact proportion of Celtic and Saxon blood in. the population of England? But languages are never mixed. It is indifferent by what name the language spoken in the British Islands be called, whether English or British or Saxon J to the student of language English is Teu- tonic, and nothing but Teutonic. The physiologist may protest, and point out that in many instances the skull, or the bodily habitat of the English lan- guage, is of a Celtic type ; the genealogist may protest and prove that the arms of many an English family are of Norman origin ; the student of language must follow his own way. Historical information as to an early substratum of Celtic inhabitants in Britain, as to Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions, may be useful to him. But though every record were burned, and every skull mouldered, the English language, as spoken by any ploughboy, would reveal its own history, if analysed according to the rules of comparative grammar. Without the help of history, we should see that English is Teutonic, that like Dutch and Friesian it belongs to the Low-German branch ; that this branch, together with the High- German, Gothic, and Scandinavian branches, consti- tute the Teutonic class; that this Teutonic class, together with the Celtic, Slavonic, the Hellenic, Italic, Iranic, and Indie classes, constitute the great Indo- European or Aryan family of speech. In the English dictionary the student of the science of language can detect, by his own tests, Celtic, Norman, Greek, and Latin ingredients, but not a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the Eng- NO MIXED. LANGUAGE. 75" lish language. The grammar, tHe blood and soul of the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was when spoken on the shores of the German ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Juts of the continent. In thus considering and refuting the objections which have been,, or might be, made against the admission of the science of language into the circle of the physical sciences, we have arrived at some results which it may be usefial to recapitulate before we proceed further. We saw that whereas phUology treats language only as a means, comparative philo- logy chooses language as the] object of scientific inquiry. It is not the study of one language, but of many, and in the end of all, which forms the aim of this new science. Nor is the language of Homer of greater interest, in the scientific treatment of human speech, than the dialect of the Hottentots. "We saw, secondly, that after the first practical acquisition and careful analysis of the facts and forms of any language, the next and most important step is the classification of all the varieties of human speech, and that only after this has been accom- plished would it be safe to venture on the great questions which underlie all physical research, the questions as to the what, the whence, and the why of language. We saw, thirdly, that there is a distinction between what is called history and growth. We determined the true meaning of growth, as applied to language, and perceived how it was independent of the caprice of man, and governed by laws that could be discovered by careful observation, and be traced back in the end to higher laws, which govern, the organs both of 76 NO MIXKD LANGUAGE. human thought, and of the human voice. Though admitting that the science of language was more intimately connected than any other physical science with what is called the political history of man, we found that, strictly speaking, our science might well dispense with this auxiliary, and that languages can be analysed and classified on their own evidence, particularly on the strength of their grammatical articulation, without any reference to the individuals, families, clans, tribes, nations or races by whom they are or have been spoken. In the course of these considerations, we had to lay down two axioms, to which we shall frequently have to appeal in the progress of our investigations. The first declares grammar to be the most essential element, and therefore the ground of classification in all languages which have produced a definite grammatical articulation ; the second denies the pos- sibility of a mixed language. These two axioms are, in reality, but one, as we shall see when we examine them more closely. There is hardly a language which in one sense may not be called a mixed language. No nation or tribe was ever so completely isolated as not to admit the importation of a certain number of foreign words. In some instances these imported words have changed the whole native aspect of the language, and have even acquired a majority over the native element. Thus Turkish is a Turanian dialect ; its grammar is- purely Tataric or Turanian; — yet at the present moment the Turkish language, as spoken by the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so entirely over-, grown with Persian and Arabic words, that a common clod from the country understands but little of the NO MIXED LANGUAGE. 77 so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is the same as the grammar which he uses in his Tataric utterance. The presence of these Persian and Arabic words in Turkish is to be accounted for by literary and political, even more than by religious influences. Persian civi- lisation began to tell on the Arabs from the first days of their religious and military conquests, and although the conquered and converted Persians had necessarily to accept a large number of religious and political terms of Arabic, i.e. Semitic, origin, itwould appear from a more careful examination of the several Persian words ad- mitted into Arabic, that the ancient Aryan civilisation of Persia, reinvigorated by the Sassanian princes, reacted powerfully, though more silently, on the primitive nomadism of Arabia.* The Koran itself is not fi.*ee from Persian expressions, and it contains even a denunciation of the Persian romances which circulated among the more educated followers of Mohammed. Now the Turks, though accepting a Semitic religion and with it necessarily a Semitic religious termi- nology, did not accept that religion till after it had passed through a Persian channel. Hence the large number of Persian words in Turkish, and the clear traces of Persian construction and idiom even in Arabic words as used in Turkish. Such Aryan words as din^ faith, gaur, an infidel, oruj^ a fast, namhz^ prayers, used by a Turanian race, worshipping accord- ing to the formularies of a Semitic religion, are more instructive as to the history of civilisation than coins, inscriptions, or chronicles.f * Eeinaud, Memoire sur Vlnde, p. 310. Eenan, Histoire des Langues Semitiques, pp. 292, 379, &c. I In the earlier editions of these Lectures the influence of Persian civilisation on the language of the Arabs had been much 78 GRAMMAR THE CRITERION OF RELATIONSHIP. There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the ititellectual market of England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German — -nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chiuese words — ^lie mixed together in the English dictionary. On the evidence of words alone it would be impossible to classify English with any other of the established stocks and stems of human speech. Leaving out of consideration the smaller ingredients, we find, on comparing the Teutonic with the Latin, or Neo-Latin or Norman-French elements in English, that the latter have a decided majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. This may seem in- credible ; and if we simply took a page of any English book, and counted therein the words of purely Saxon and Latin origin, the majority would be no doubt on the Saxon side. The articles, pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, all of which are of Saxon growth, occur over and over again in one and the same page. Thus, Hickes maintained that nine-tenths of the English dic- tionary were Saxon, because there were only three words of Latin origin in the Lord's prayer. Sharon Turner, who extended his observations over a larger field, came to the conclusion that the relation of Norman to Saxon was as four to six. Another writer, who estimates the whole number of English words at 38,000, assigns 23,000 to a Saxon, and * overstated, while its influence on the Turkish dictionary had not been estimated sufficiently high. I owe to Viscount Strangford the corrections here introduced. GRAMMAR THE CRITERION OF RELATIONSHIP, 79 15,000 to a classical source. On taking, however, a more accurate inventory, and counting every word in the dictionaries of Robertson and Webster, M. Thommerel has established the fact that of the sum total of 43,566 words, 29,853 came from classical, 13,230 from Teutonic, and the rest from miscellaneous sources.* On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore, and treating English as a mixed language, it would have to be classified, together with French, Italian, and Spanish, as one of the Romance or Neo-Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their gram- mar. Hervas was told by missionaries that in the middle of the eighteenth century the Araucans used hardly a single word which was not Spanish, though they preserved both the grammar and the syntax of their own native speech, f This is the reason why grammar is made the criterion of the relationship and the base of the classification in almost all languages; and it follows, therefore, as a matter of course, that in the classification and in the science of language, it is impossible to admit the existence of a mixed idiom. We may form whole * Some excellent statistics on the exact proportion of Saxon and Latin in various English writers, are to be found in Marsh's Lectures on the English Language, p. 120 seq. and 181 seq. f ' En este estado, que es el primer paso que las naciones dan para mudar de lengua, estaba quarenta anos ha la araucana en las islas de Chiloue (como he oido a los jesuitas sus misioneros), en donde los araucanos apenas proferian palabra que no fuese espanola ; mas la profferian con el artificio y drden de su lengua nativa, llamada araucana.' — Hervas, Catalago, t. i. p. 16. 'Este artificio ha sido en mi observacion el principal medio de que me he valido para conocer la afinidad 6 diferencia de las lenguas ^conocidas, y reducirlas a determinadas classes.' — Ibid. p. 23. 80 THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE A PHYSICAL SCIENCE. sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Eomance words ; yet whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called gi'ammar in English is little more than the ter- minations of the genitive singular, and nominative plural of nouns, the degrees of comparison, and a few of the persons, and tenses of the verb. Yet the single s, used as the exponent of the third person singular of the indicative present, is irrefragable evi- dence that in. a scientific classification of languages, English, though it did not retain a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be classed as Saxon, and as a branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech. In ancient and less matured languages, grammar, or the formal part of human speech, is far more abundantly developed than in English; and it is, therefore, a much safer guide for discovering a family likeness in scattered members of the same family. There are languages in which there is no trace of what we are accus- tomed to call grammar ; for instance, ancient Chinese ; there are others in which we can still watch the growth of grammar, or, more correctly, the gradual lapse of material into merely formal elements. In these languages new principles of classification wiU have to be applied, such as are suggested by the study of natural history; and we shall have to be satisfied with the criteria of a morphological affinity, instead of those of a genea- logical relationship. I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objec- tions which threatened to deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the circle THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE A PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 81 of the physical sciences. We shall see in our next lecture what the history of our science has been from its beginning to the present day, and how far it may be said to have passed through the three stages, the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the childhood, the youth, and the man- hood of every one of the natural. spiences. 6 82 LECTURE III. THE EMPIRICAL STAGE. WE begin to-day to trace the histmcal progress of the science of language in its three stages, the Empirical^ the Classijicatory^ and the Theoretical. As a general rule each physical science begins with analysis, proceeds to classification, and. ends with theory; but, as I pointed out in my first lecture, there are frequent exceptions to this rule, and it is by no means uncommon to find that philosophical speculations, which properly belong to the last or theoretical stage, were attempted in physical sciences long before the necessary evidence had been collected or arranged. Thus, we find that the science of language, in the only two countries where we can watch its origin and history — in India and Greece — ^rushes at once into theories about the mys- terious nature of speech, and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel with- out ever having seen the animal or the desert. The Brahmans, in the hymns of the Veda, raised language to the rank of a deity, as they did with all things of which they knew not what they were. They ad- dressed hymns to her in which she is said to have been with the gods from the beginning, achieving wondrous things, and never revealed to man except in part. In the Brdhmanas, language is called the cow, breath the bull, and their young is said to be SPECULATIONS ON LANGUAGE. 83 i the mind of man.* Brahman, the highest being, is said to be known through speech, nay, speech herself is called the Supreme Brahman. At a very early period, however, the Brahmans recovered from their raptures about language, and set to work with won- derful skill dissecting her sacred body. Their achieve- ments in grammatical analysis, which date from the 6th century, B.C., are still unsurpassed in the gram- matical literature of any nation. The idea of reduc- ing a whole language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted before the six- teenth century by Henry Estienne,f was perfectly familiar to the Brahmans at least 500 B.C. The Greeks, though they did not raise language to the rank of a deity, paid hei', nevertheless, the greatest honours in their ancient schools of philosophy. * Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, i. 32. The following verses are pronounced by Vach, the goddess of speech, in the I25th hymn of the 10th book of the Rig-Veda: 'Even I myself say this (what is) welcome to gods and to men : "Whom I love, him I make strong, him I make a Brahman, liim a great prophet, him I make wise. For Rudra (the god of thunder) I bend the bow, to slay the enemy, the hater of the Brahmans. For the people I make war ; I pervade heaven and earth. I bear the father on the summit of this world ; my origin is in the water in the sea ; from thence I go forth among all beings, and touch this heaven with my height. I myself breathe forth like the wind, embracing all beings ; above this heaven, beyond this earth, such am I in greatness." ' See also Atharva- Veda, iv. 30 ; xix. 9, 3. Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part iii. pp. 108, 150. f Sir John Stoddart, Glossology, p. 276. The first complete Hebrew Grammar and Dictionary of the Bible were the work of Rabbi Jona, or Abul Walid Merwan ibn Djanah, in the middle of the 11th century. The idea of Hebrew roots was explained even before him by Abu Zacariyya 'Hayyudj, who is called the First Grammarian by Ibn Ezra. Cf. Munk, Notice sur About Walid, Journal Asiaiique, 1850, Avril. G 2 84 ' EMPIRICAL STAGE. There is hardly one of their representative philoso- phers who has not left some saying on the nature of language. The world without, or nature, and the world within, or mind, did not excite more wonder and elicit deeper oracles of wisdom from the ancient sages of Greece than language, the image of both, of nature and of mind. ' What is language ? ' was a question asked quite as early as ' What am I ? ' and ' What is all this world around me ? ' The problem of language was in fact a recognised battle-field for the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, and we shall have to glance at their early guesses on the nature of human speech, when we come to consider the third or theoretical stage in the science of lan- guage. At present, we have to look for the early traces of the first or empirical stage. And here it might seem doubtful what was the real work to be assigned to this stage. What can be meant by the empirical treatment of language ? Who were the men that did for language what the sailor did for his stars, the miner for his minerals, the gardener for his flowers ? Who was the first to give any thought to language ? — to distinguish between its component parts, be- tween nouns and verbs, between articles and pro- nouns, between the nominative and accusative, the active and passive ? Who invented these terms, and for what purpose were they invented ? We must be careful in answering these questions, for, as I said before, the merely empirical analysis of language was preceded in Greece by more general inquiries into the nature of thought and language; and the result has been that many of the technical tei'ms which form the nomenclature of empirical EMPIRICAL STAGE. 85 grammar, existed in the schools of philosophy long before they were handed over, ready made, to the grammarian. The distinction of noun and verb, or more correctly, of subject and predicate, was the work of philosophers. Even the technical terms for case, number, and gender, were coined at a very early time for the purpose of entering into the nature of thought ; not for the practical purpose of analysing the forms of language. This, their practical applica- tion to the spoken language of Greece, was the work of a later generation. It was the teacher of lan- guages who first compared the categories of thought with the realities of the Greek language. It was he who transferred the terminology of Aristotle and the Stoics from thought to speech, from logic to grammar; and thus opened the first roads into the impervious wilderness of spoken speech. In doing this, the grammarian had to alter the strict accepta- tion of many of the terms which he borrowed from the philosopher, and he had to coin others before he could lay hold of all the facts of language even in the roughest manner. For, indeed, the distinction between noun and verb, between active and passive, between nominative and accusative, does not help us much towards a scientific analysis of language. It is no more than a first grasp, and it can only be com- pared with the most elementary terminology in other branches of human knowledge. Nevertheless, it was a beginning, a very important beginning ; and if we preserve in our histories of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the physical elements, the names of Thales and Anaximenes and Empedocles, we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language — the founders 86 STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. of one of the most useful and most successful branches of philosophy — the first Grammarians. -\- Grammar, then, in the usual sense of the word, or the merely formal and empirical analysis of language, owes its origin, like all other sciences, to a very natural and practical want. The first practical gram- marian was the first practical teacher of languages, and if we want to know the beginnings of the science of language we must try to find out at what time in the history of the world, and under what cir- cumstances, people first thought of learning any language besides their own. At that time we shall find the first practical grammar, and not till then. Much may have been ready at hand through the less interested researches of philosophers, and likewise through the' critical studies of the scholars of Alex- andria on the ancient forms of their language as - preserved in the Homeric poems. But rules of de- clension and conjunction, paradigms of regular and irregular nouns and verbs, observations on syntax, and the like, these are the work of the teachers of languages, and of no one else. Now, the teaching of languages^ though at present so large a profession, is comparatively a very mo- dern invention. No ancient Greek ever thought of learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians, and lie would have felt himself degraded by adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian neighbours. He considered it a privi- lege to speak Greek, and even dialects closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express oneself in any but one's own STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 87 "anguage. The Poles called their neighbours, the jermans, Niemiec, niemy meaning dumb;* just as the jreeks called the Barbarians Aglossoi, or speechless. The name which the Germans gave to their neigh- jours, the Celts, Walk in old High German, vealh in ^nglo- Saxon, the modern Welsh^ is supposed to be :he same as the Sanskrit mlechchha^ and means a person who talks indistinctly.f Even when the Greeks began to feel the necessity of communicating with foreign nations, when they felt a desire of learning their idioms, the problem was by no means solved. For how was a foreign lan- guage to be learnt as long as either party could only speak their own? The problem was almost as diffi- cult as when, as we are told by some persons, the first men, as yet speechless, came together in order to invent speech, and to discuss the most appropriate names that should be given to the perceptions of the senses and the abstractions of the mind. At first, it must be supposed that the Greek learned foreign lan- guages very much as children learn their own. The interpretei's mentioned by ancient historians were probably children of parents speaking different * The Turks applied the Polish name Niemiec to the Austrians. As early as Constantinus Porphyrogeneta, cap. 30, 'Nc/jiet^wi was used for the German race of the Bavarians (Pott, Indo-Germ. Sp.' s. 44; Leo, Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende 'Sprachforschung, b. ii. s. 258). Russian, njemez' ; Slovenian, nemec ; Bulgarian, nemec ; Polish, niemiec ; Lusatian, njem^, mean German ; Russian, njemo, indistinct ; njemyi, dumb ; Slovenian, nem, dumb ; Bul- garian, Tiem, dumb ; Polish, njemy, dumb ; Lusatian, njemy, dumb. \ Leo, Zeitschrift fiir vergl. Sprachf. b. ii. s. 252. Beluch, the name given to the tribes on the western borders of India, aouth of Afghanistan, has likewise been identified with the Sanskrit Mlechchha. 88 STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. languages. Cyaxares, the King of Media, on the arrival of a tribe of Scythians in his country, sent some children to them that they might learn their language and the art of archery.* The son of a barbarian and a Greek would naturally learn the utterances both of his father and mother, and the lucrative nature of his services would not faU to increase the supply. We are told, though on rather mythical authority, that the Greeks were astonished at the multiplicity of lan- guages which they encountered during the Argo- nautic expedition, and that they were much incon- venienced by the want of skilful interpreters.! We need not wonder at this, for the English army was hardly better off than the army of Jason; and such is the variety of dialects spoken in the Caucasian Isthmus, that it is still called by the inhabitants 'the Mountain of Languages.' If we turn our eyes from these mythical ages to the historical times of Greece, we find that trade gave the first encourage-; ment to the profession of interpreters. Herodotus tells us (iv. 24), that caravans of Greek merchants, following the course of the Volga upwards to the Oural mountains, were accompanied by seven inter- preters, speaking seven different languages. These must have comprised Sclavonic, Tataric and Finnic dialects, spoken in those countries in the time of Herodotus, as they are at the present day. The wars with Persia first familiarised the Greeks with the idea that other nations also possessed real lan- guages. Themistocles studied Persian, and is said to have spoken it fluently. The expedition of Alexander contributed still more powerfully to a * Herod. I. 73. f Humboldt's ^oswjos, vol. ii. p. 141. STUDY OP FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 89' knowledge of other nations and languages. But when Alexander went to converse with the Brah- mans, who were even then considered by the Greeks as the guardians of a most ancient and mysterious wisdom, their answers had to be translated by so many interpreters that one of the Brahmans re- marked, they must become like water that had passed through many impure channels.* We heai', indeed, of more ancient Greek travellers, and it is difficult to understand how, in those early times, anybody could have travelled without a certain knowledge of the language of the people through whose camps and villages and towns he had 'to pass. Many of these travels, however, particularly those which are said to have extended as far as India, are mere inventions of later writers.^ Lycurgus may have travelled to Spain and Africa, he certainly did not proceed to India, nor is there any mention of his intercourse with the Indian Gymnosophists before * This shows how difficult it would be to admit that any influ- ence was exercised by Indian on Greek philosophers. Pyrrhon, if we may believe Alexander Polyhistor, seems indeed to have accompanied Alexander on his expedition to India, and one feels tempted to connect the scepticism of Pyrrhon with the system of Buddhist philosophy then current in India. But the ignorance of the language on both sides must have been an almost insur- mountable barrier between the Greek and the Indian thinkers. {Fragmenta Histor-. Grcec, ed. Miiller, t. iii. p. 243, b ; Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, b, iii. s. 380.) •f On the supposed travels of Greek philosophers to India, see Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, b. iii. s. 379 : Brandis, Hand- buch der Geschichte der Philosophie, b. i. s. 425. The opinion of D. Stewart and Niebuhr that the Indian philosophers borrowed from the Greeks, and that of Gorres and others that the Greeks borrowed from the Brahmans, are examined in my Essay on Indian Logic, in Dr. Thomson's Laws of Thought. 90 STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. . Aristocrates, who lived about 100 B.C. The travels of Pythagoras are equally mythical; they are inven- tions of Alexandrian writers, who believed that all wisdom must have flowed from the East. There is better authority for believing that Democritus went to Egjrpt and Babylon, but his more distant travels to India are likewise legendary. Herodotus, though he travelled in Egypt and Persia, never gives us to understand that he was able to converse in any but his own language. As far as we can tell, the barbarians seem to have possessed a greater facility for acquiring languages than either Greeks or Komans. Soon after the Macedonian conquest we find* Berosus in Babylon, Menander in Tyre, and Manetho in Egypt, com- piling, from original sources, the annals of their countries, f Their works were written in Greek, and for the Greeks. The native language of Berosus was Babylonian, of Menander Phenician, of Manetho Egyptian. Berosus was able to read the cuneiform documents of Babylonia with the same ease with * See Niebuhr, Vorlesungen ilber alte Geschichte, b. i. s. 17. f The translation of Mago's work on agriculture belongs to a later time. There is no proof that Mago, who wrote twenty-eight books on agriculture in the Punic language, lived, as Humboldt supposes {Kosmos, vol. ii. p. 184), 500 b.c. Varro de R. R. i. 1. says : ' Hos nobilitate Mago Carthaginiensis prajteriit Poenica lingua, quod res dispersas comprehendit libris xxiix., quos Cassius Dionysius Uticensis vertit libris xx., Grseca lingua, ac Sextilio prsetori misit : in quae volumina de Grsecis libris eorum quos iixi adjecit non pauca, et de Magonis dempsit instar librorum 9\n. Hosce ipsos utiliter ad vi. libros redegit Diophanes in Bithynia, et misit Dejotaro regi.' This Cassius Dionysius Uticencis lived about 40 B.C. The translation into Latin was made at the command of the Senate, shortly after the third Punic war. STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 91 which Manetho read the papyri of Egypt. The almost contemporaneous appearance of three such men, barbarians by birth and language, who were anxious to save the histories of their countries from total oblivion, by entrusting them to the keeping of their conquerors, the Greeks, is highly significant. But what is likewise significant, and by no means creditable to the Greek or Macedonian conquerors, is the small value which they seem to have set on these works. They have all been lost, and are known to us by fragments only, though thei'e can be little doubt that the work of Berosus would have been an invaluable guide to the student of the cunei- form inscriptions and of Babylonian history, and that Manetho, if preserved complete, would have saved us volumes of controversy on Egyptian chronology. We learn, however, from the ahnost simultaneous appearance of these works, that soon after the epoch marked by Alexander's conquests in the East, the Greek language was studied and cultivated by literary men of barbarian origin, though we should look in vain for any Greek, learning or employing for literary purposes any but his own tongue. We hear of no intellectual intercourse between Greeks and barbarians before the days of Alexander and Alexandria. At Alexandria, various nations, speak- ing different languages, and believing in different gods, were brought together. Though primarily engaged in mercantile speculations, it was but natural that in their moments of leisure they should hold discourse on their native countries, their gods, their kings, their law-givers, and poets. Besides, there were Greeks at Alexandria who were engaged in the study of antiquity, and who knew how to ask 92 feTUDY OP ANCIENT • GEBBK. questions from men coming from any country of the world. The pretension of the Egyptians to a fabulous antiquity, the belief of the Jews in the sacred character of their law, the faith of the Persians in the writing of Zoroaster, all these were fit subjects for discussion in the halls and libraries of Alexandria. "We probably owe the translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, to this spirit of literary inquiry which was patronised at Alexandria by the Ptolemies.* The writings of Zoroaster also, the Zend-Avesta, would seem to have been I'endered into Greek about the same time. For Hermippus, who is said by Pliny to have translated the writings of Zoroaster, was in all probability Hermippus f the Peripatetic philosopher, the pupil of Callimachus, one of the most learned scholars at Alexandria. * PtolemEBus Philadelphus (287 — 246 B.C.), on the recom- mendation of his chief librarian (Demetrius Phalereus), is said to have sent a Jew of the name of Aristeas, to Jerusalem, to ask the high priest for a MS of the Bible, and for seventy inter- preters. Others maintain that the Hellenistic Jews who lived at Alexandria, and who hjad almost forgotten their native language, had this translation made for their own benefit. Certain it is, that about the beginning of the third century b.C. (285), we find large portions of the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek by difierent hands. •j^ Plin. XXX. 2. ' Sine dubio ilia orta in Perside a Zoroastre, ut inter auctores convenit. Sed unus hie fuerit, an postea et alius, non satis constat. Eudoxus qui inter sapientiae sectas clarissimam utilissimamque earn intelligi voluit, Zoroastrem hunc sex millibus annorum ante Platonis mortem fuisse prodidit. Sic et Aristoteles. Hermippus qui de tota ea arte diligentissime soripsit, et vicies centum millia versuum a Zoroastre eondita, in- dicibus quoque voluminum ejus positis explanavit, prseceptorem a quo institutum disceret, tradidit Azonacem, ipsum vero quinque millibus annorum ante Trojanum bellum fuisse.' See Bunsen's Egypten, Va, 101. STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK. 93 But although we find at Alexandria these and similar traces of a general interest having been excited by the literatures of other nations, there is no evidence which would lead us to suppose that their languages also had become the subject of scientific inquiry. It was not through the study of other languages, but through the study of the ancient dialects of their own language, that the Greeks at Alexandria were first led to what we should call critical and philological studies. The critical study of Greek took its origin at Alexandria, and it was chiefly based on the text of Homer. The general outline of grammar existed, as I remarked before, at an earlier period. It grew up in the schools of Greek philosophers.* Plato knew of noun and verb as the two component parts of speech. Aristotle added conjunctions and articles. He likewise observed the distinctions of number and case. But neither Plato nor Aristotle paid much attention to the forms of language which corre- sponded to these forms 'of thought, nor had they any inducement to reduce them to any practical rules. With Aristotle the verb or rhema is hardly more than predicate, and in sentences such as ' the snow is white,' he would have called white a verb. The first who reduced the actual forms ■ of language to something like order were the scholars of Alex- andria. Their chief occupation was to publish correct texts of the Greek classics, and particularly of Homer. They were forced, therefore, to pay atten- tion to the exact forms of Greek grammar. The MSS sent to Alexandria and Pergamus fpom difi'erent parts of Greece varied considerably, and it could only be * M. M.'s History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 163. 94 STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK. determined by careful observation which forms were X to be tolerated in Homer and which were notY Their editions of Homer were not only ekdoseis, a Greek word literally rendered in Latin by editio, i.e. issues of books, but diorthoseis, that is to say, critical editions. There were different schools, opposed to each other in their views of the language of Homer. Each reading that was adopted by Zenodotus or Aristarchus had to be defended, and this could only be done by establishing general rules on the grammar of the Homeric poems. Did Homer use the article? Did he use it before proper names? These and similar questions had to be settled, and as one or the other view was adopted by the editors, the text of these ancient poems was changed by more or less violent emendations. New technical terms were required for distinguishing, for instance, the article, if once recognised, from the demonstrative pronoun. Article is a literal translation of the Greek word arthron. Arthron (Lat. artus) means the socket of a joint. The word was first used by Aristotle, and with him it could only mean words which formed, as it were, the sockets in which the members of a sen- tence moved. In such a sentence as ' Whoever did it, he shall suffer for it,' Greek grammarians would have called the demonstrative pronoun he the first socket, and the relative pronoun who the second socket;* and before Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, 250 B.C., all pronouns were simply classed as sockets or articles of speech. He was the first to introduce a distinction between personal pronouns or antonymiai^ and the mere articles or articulations of * apOpov ItpoTaaaojXtvov, apdpov virorairaouEvov. STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK. 9i speedi, which henceforth retained the name of arthra. This distinction was very necessary, and it was, no doubt, suggested to him by his emendations of the text of Homer, Zenodotus being the first who re- stored the article before proper names in the Iliad and Odyssey. Who, in speaking now of the definite or indefinite article, thinks of the origin and original meaning of the word, and of the time which it took before it could become what it is now, a technical term familiar to every school-boy ? Again, to take another illustration of the influence which the critical study of Homer at Alexandria exercised on the development of grammatical termi- nology — we see that the first idea of numbers, of a singular and a plural, was fixed and defined by the philosopher. But Aristotle had no such technical terms as singular and plural; and he does not even allude to the dual. He only speaks of the cases which express one or many, though with him case or ptosis^ had a very difiFerent meaning from what it has in our grammars. The terms singular and plural were not invented till they were wanted, and they were first wanted by the grammarians. Zenodotus, the editor of Homei', was the first to observe the use of the dual in the Homeric poems, and, with the usual zeal of discoverers, he has altered many a plural into a dual when there was no necessity for it. The scholars of Alexandria, therefore, and of the rival academy of Pergamus, were the first who studied the Greek language critically, that is to say, who analysed the language, arranged it under general categories, distinguished the various parts of speech, invented proper technical terms for the 96 DIONYSIUS THRAX. various functions of words, observed the more (5!f less correct usage of certain poets, marked the difference between obsolete and classical forms, and -published long and learned treatises on all these subjects. Their works mark a great era in the history of the science of language. But there was still a step to be made before we can expect to meet with a real practical or elementary grammar of the Greek lan- guage. Now the first real Greek grammar was that of Dionysius Thrax. It is still in existence, and though its genuineness has been doubted, these doubts have been completely disposed of. But who was Dionysius Thrax ? His father, as we learn from his name, was a Thracian ; but Diony- sius himself lived at Alexandria, and was a pupil of the famous critic and editor of Homer, Aristar- chus.* Dionysius afterwards went to Rome, where he taught about the time of Pompey. Now here we see a new feature in the history of mankind. A Greek, a pupil of Aristarchus, settles at Rome, and writes a practical grammar of the Greek language — of course, for the benefit of his young Roman pupils. He was not the inventor of grammatical science. Nearly all the framework of grammar, as we saw, was supplied to him through the labours of his predecessors from Plato to Aristarchus. But he was the first who applied the results of foi-mer philosophers and critics to the practical purpose of teaching Greek; and, what is most important, of teaching Greek not to Greeks, who knew Greek and only wanted the theory of their language, but to * Suidas, S. v. Awvvaioe. AiovvawQ 'AXeS,avSpioe, Qpqi Se awo TTdTpOQ Toivofia xXrideis, 'Apiarapxav fiadrjrrle, ypaju/ioriKoe 0£ eao- ^ioTtvaEv kv 'Pii/xrj etti Hofiirritov tov MsyaXov. GREECE AND EOME. 97 Eomans who had to be taught the declensions and conjugations, regular and irregular. His work thus became one of the principal channels through which the grammatical terminology, which had been carried from Athens to Alexandria, flowed back to Eome, to spread from thence over the whole civUized world. Dionysius, however, though the author of the first practical grammar, was by no means the first '■professeur de langue^ who settled at Rome. At his time Greek was more generally spoken at Rome than French is now spoken in London. The children of gentlemen learnt Greek before they learnt Latin, ^ and though Quintilian in his work on education does not approve of a boy learning nothing but Greek for any length of time, ' as is now the fashion,' he says, ' with most people,' yet he too recommends' that a boy should be taught Greek first, and Latin afterwards.* This may seem strange, but the fact is that as long as we know anything of Italy, the Greek language was as much at home there as Latin. Italy owed almost everything to Greece, not only in later days when the setting sun of Greek civilisation mingled its rays with the dawn of Roman greatness ; but ever since the first Greek colonists started West- ward Ho ! in search of new homes. It was fi"om the Greeks that the Italians received their alphabet; it was by them they were taught to read and to write, f The * Quintilian, i. 1, 12. ■f See Mommsen, Romisehe Geschichte, b. i. s. 197- ' The Latin alphabet is the same as the modern alphabet of Sicily ; the Etruscan is the same as the old Attic alphabet. Epistola, letter, charta, paper, and stilus (?), are words borrowed from Greek.' — b. i. s. 184. H 98 GEEECB AND ROME. names for balance, for measuring-rod, for engines in general, for coined money,* many terms connected with sea-faring,f not excepting nausea or sea-sickness, are all borrowed from Greek, and show the extent to which the Italians were indebted to the Greeks for , the very rudiments of civilisation. The Italians, no doubt, had their own national gods, but they soon became converts to the mythology of the Greeks. Some of the Greek gods they identified with their own ; others they admitted as new deities. Thus Saturnus, originally an Italian harvest god, was identified with the Greek Kronos, and as Kronos was the son of Uranos, a new deity was invented, and Saturnus was fabled to be the son of Ccelus. Thus the Italian Herculus, the god of hurdles, enclosures, and walls, was merged in. the Greek Heracles. ^ Castor and Pollux, both of purely Greek origin, were readily believed in as nautical deities by the Italian sailors, and they were the first Greek gods to whom, after the battle on the Lake Regillus (485), a temple was erected at Rome.§ In 431 another temple was erected at Rome to ApoUo, whose oracle at Delphi had been consulted by Italians ever since Greek colonists had settled on their soil. The oracles of * Mommsen, Romische GescMchte, b. i. s. 186. Statera, the balance, the Greek oTarrip ; machina, an engine, fi-qyavi] ; numus, a silver coin, vofioQ, the Sicilian vovfi/xoc ; groma, measuring-rod, the Greek yrwjxijiv or yvuifia ; clathri, a trellis, a grate, the Greek KkriQpa, the native Italian word for lock being claustra. ■f Gubernare, to steer, from nvfi^iivdv ; anchora, anchor, from &yKvpa ; from, the forepart, from irpSipa. Navis, remus, velum, &c., are common Aryan words, not borrowed by the Eomans from the Greeks, and show that the Italians were acquainted with navigation before the discovery of Italy by the Phocseans. X Mommsen, i. 154. § Ibid. i. 408. GREECE AKD ROME. 99 the famous Sibylla of CumEe were written in Greek,* and the priests (duoviri sacris faciundis) were allowed to keep two Greek slaves for the purpose of trans- lating these oracles. f -^ When the Eomans, in 454 B.C., wanted to establish a code of laws, the first thing they did was to send commissioners to Greece to report on the laws of Solon at Athens and the laws of other Greek towns. J As Kome rose in political power, Greek manners, Greek art, Greek language and literature found ready admittance. § Before the beginning of the Punic wars, many of the RomgSi statesmen were able to under- stand, and even to speak Greek. Boys were not only taught the Roman letters by their masters, the literatores, but they had to learn at the same time the Greek alphabet. Those who taught Greek at Rome were then called grammatici, and they were mostly Greek slaves or liherti. Among the young men whom Cato saw growing ' up at Rome, to know Greek was the same as to be a gentleman. They read Greek books, they conversed in Greek, they even wrote in Greek, Tiberius Gracchus, consul in 177, made a speech in Greek at Rhodes, which he afterwards published. || Flaminius when addressed by the Greeks in Latin, returned * Mommsen, i. 165.^. f Sibylla, or Sihulla, is a diminutive of an Italian sabus or sabius, wise ; a word which, though not found in classical writers, must have existed in the Italian dialects. The French sage pre- supposes an Italian sabius, for it cannot be derived either from sapiens or from sapius. — Diez, Lexicon Etymologicum, p. 300. Sapius has been preserved in nesapius, foolish. Sibulla, there- fore, meant a wise old woman. J Mommsen, i. 256. § Ibid. i. 425, 444. ;| Ibid. i. 857. H 2 100 GEEECE AND ROME, the compliment by writing Greek verses in honour of their gods. The first history of Rome was written at Rome in Greek, by Fabias Pictor,* about 200 B. c. ; and it was probably in opposition to this work and to those of Liicius Cincius Ali- mentus, and Publius Scipio, that Cato wrote his own history of Rome in Latin. The example of the higher classes was eagerly followed by the lowest. The plays of Plautus are the best proof; for the affectation of using Greek woi'ds is as evident in some of his characters as the foolish display of French in the German writers of the eighteenth century. There was both loss and gain in the inheritance which Rome received from Greece; but what would Rome have been without her Greek masters? The very fathers of Roman literature were Greeks, private teachers, men who made a living by translating school-books and plays. Livius Andronicus, sent as prisoner of war from Tai'entum (272 B.C.), established himself at Rome as professor of Greek. His translation of the Odyssey into Latin verse, which marks the beginning of Roman literature, was evidently written by him for the use of his private classes. His style, though clumsy and wooden in the extreme, was looked upon as a model of perfection by the rising poets of the capital. Naevius and Plautus were his contempo- raries and immediate successors. All the plays of Plautus were translations and adaptations of Greek originals ; and Plautus was not even allowed to transfer the scene from Greece to Rome. The Roman public wanted to see Greek life and Greek * Moinmsen, i. 902. GREECE AND ROME. 101 depravity ; it would have punished the poet who had ventured to bring on the stage a Roman patrician or a Roman matron. Greek tragedies, also, were translated into Latin. Ennius, the contemporary of NsBAdus and Plautus, though somewhat younger (239-169), was the first to translate Euripides. Ennius, like Andronicus, was an Italian Greek, who settled at Rome as a teacher of languages and translator of Greek. He was patronised by the liberal party, by Publius Scipio, Titus Flaminius, and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior,* He became a Roman citizen. But Ennius was more than a poet, more than a teacher of languages. He has been called a neologian, and to a certain extent he deserved that name. Two works written in the most hostile spirit against the religion of Greece, and against the very existence of the Greek gods, were translated by him into Latin.f One was the philosophy of Epichar- mus (470 B.C., in Megara), who taught that Zeus was nothing but the air, and other gods but names of the powers of nature ; the other the work of Euhemerus of Messene (300 B.C.), who proved, in the form of a novel, that the Greek gods had never existed, and that those who were believed in as gods had been men. These two works were not translated without a purpose ; and though themselves shallow in the extreme, they proved destructive to the still shallower systems of Roman theology. Greek be- came synonymous with infidel; and Ennius would * Mommsen, i. 892. f Ibid. i. 843, 194. It has been doubted whether the work of Ennius was a translation of Epicharmus. See Ennius, ed. Vahlen, p. xciii. On Epicharmus, see Bernajs, Bheinisches Museum, viii. p. 280 (1853). 102 GREECE AST) ROME. hardly have escaped the punishment inflicted on Nsevius for his political satires, had he not enjoyed the patronage and esteem of the most influential statesmen at Rome. Even Cato, the stubborn enemy of Greek philosophy* and rhetoric, was a friend of the dangerous Ennius; and such was the growing in- fluence of Greek at Rome, that Cato himself had to learn it in his old age, in order to teach his boy what he considered, if not useful, at least harmless in Greek literature. It has been the custom to laugh at Cato for his dogged opposition to everything Greek; but there was much truth in his denun- ciations. We have heard much of young Bengdl — young Hindus who read Byron and Voltaire, play at billiards, drive tandems, laugh at their priests, pa- tronise missionaries, and believe nothing. The description which Cato gives of the young idlers at Rome reminds us very much of young Bengdl. When Rome took the torch of knowledge from the dying hands of Greece, that torch was not burning ivith its brightest light. Plato and Aristotle had been succeeded by Chrysippus and Carneades; Euripides and Menander had taken the place of iEschylus and Aristophanes. In becoming the guardian of the Promethean spark first lighted in Greece, and intended hereafter to illuminate not only Italy, but every country of Europe, Rome lost much of that native virtue to which she owed her greatness. Roman frugality and gravity, Roman citizenship and patriotism, Roman purity and piety, were driven away by Greek luxury and levity, Greek intriguing and self-seeking, Greek vice and infidelity. Re-, * Mommsen, i. 911. GREECE AND EOME. 103 strictions and anathemas were of no avail; and Greek ideas were never so attractive as after they had been reprobated by Cato and his friends. Every new generation became more and more impregnated with Greek. In 131* we hear of a consul (Publius Crassus) who, like another Mezzofanti, was able to converse in the various dialects of Greek. Sulla allowed foreign ambassadors to speak in Greek before the Eoman senate.f The Stoic philosopher Panse- tius J lived in the house of the Scipios, which was for a long time the rendezvous of all the literary celebiities at Rome. Here the Greek historian Polybius, and the philosopher CHtomachus, Lucilius the satu'ist, Terence the African poet (196-159), and the improvisatore Archias (102 B.C.), were welcome guests. § In this select circle the master- works of Greek literature were read and criticised; the problems of Greek philosophy were discussed; and the highest interests of human life became the subject of thoughtful conversation. Though no poet * Mommsen, ii. 407. f Ibid. ii. 410. Valerius Maximus, at the time of Tibe- rius, asks 'Quis ergo huic consuetudini, qua nunc Grsecis actionibus aures curiae exsurdantur, januam patefecit?' (lib. ii. cap. ii. 3.) Die Cassius (lib. Ivii. cap. 15) relates that Tiberius heard cases argued, and asked questions himself, in Greek. IloWac /utV Skag ev rfi SiaXeKTO) rauDj koj tKei Xcyofiivag aicovuiv, TroXXac Se icai aiirog iirepu)TS)v. Cf. Roberts, Discussions on the Gospels, p. 29. Suetonius remarks, however, of Tiberius : ' Sermone Graeco, quanquam alias promptus et facilis, non tamen usquequaque usus est, abstinuitque maxime in senatu, adeo quidem, ut "monopolium " nominaturus, prius veniam postularit, quod sibi verbo peregrino utendum esset.' ' Militem quoque Greece interrogatum, nisi Latine respondere vetuit.' — Suet. Tib., cap. 71. % Ibid. ii. 408. § Ibid. ii. 437, note; ii. 430. n 104 GREECE AND ROME. of original genius arose from this society, it exercised a most powerful influence on the progress of Eoman literature. It formed a tribunal of good taste ; and much of the correctness, simplicity, and manliness of the classical Latin is due to that ' Cosmopolitan Club,', which met under the hospitable roof of the Scipios. With every succeeding generation the knowledge of Greek became more general at Rome. Cicero spoke Greek in the senate- of Syracuse, Augustus in the town of Alexandria. Boys and gii'ls, as Ovid relates, used to read the plays of Menander — ' solet pueris virginibusque legi' — and Juvenal (Sat. vi. 186, seq.) exclaims : — ' Omnia Greece, Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine. Hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas, Hoc cuncta eiFundunt animi secreta.' The religious life of Roman society at the close of the Punic wars was more Greek than Roman. All who had learnt to think seriously on religious ques- tions were either Stoics or followers of Epicurus ; or they embraced the doctrines of the New Academy, denying the possibility of any knowledge of the In- finite, and putting opinion in the place of truth.* Though the doctrines of Epicurus and the New Academy were always considered dangerous and heretical, the philosophy of the Stoics was tolerated, and a kind of compromise effected between philosophy and religion. There was a state-philosophy as well as a state-religion. The Roman priesthood, though they had succeeded, in 161, in getting all Greek * Zeno died 263; Epicurus died 270; Arcesilaus died 241; Carneades died 129. GREEK' GB?1mMAR AT EOME. 105 rhetors and philosophers expelled from Rome, per- ceived that a compromise was necessary. It was openly avowed that in the enlightened classes* phi- losophy must take the place of religion, but that a belief in miracles and oracles was necessary for keep- ing the large masses in order. Even Cato,f the leader of the orthodox, national, and conservative party, expressed his surprise that a hai'uspex, when meeting a colleague, did not burst out laughing. Men like Scipio ^milianus and Laelius professed to believe in the popular gods ; but with them Jupiter was the soul of the universe, the statues of the gods mere works of art.J Their gods, as the people complained, had neither body, parts, nor passions. Peace, however, was preserved between the Stoic philosopher and the orthodox priest. Both parties professed to believe in the same gods, but they claimed the liberty to believe in them in their own way. I have dwelt at some length on the changes in the intellectual atmosphere of Rome at the end of the Pimic wars, and I have endeavoured to show how completely it was impregnated with Greek ideas, in order to explain, what otherwise would seem almost inexplicable, the zeal and earnestness with which the study of Greek grammar was taken up at Rome, not only by a few scholars and philosophers, but by the leading statesmen of the time. To our minds, dis- cussions on nouns and verbs, on cases and gender, on regular and irregular conjugation, retain always some- thing of the tedious character which these subjects * Mommsen, ii. 417, 418. f Ibid. i. 845. Cicero, De Divinatione, ii. 24: 'Mirari se ajebat (Cato) quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem cum vidisset.' X Ibid. ii. 415, 417. 106 GREEK GRAMMAR AT ROME. had at school, and we can hardly understand how at Rome, gi'ammar — pure and simple grammar — should have formed a subject of general interest, and a topic of fashionable conversation. Although the gramma- tical studies of the Romans may have been enlivened by illustrations from the classical authors of Greece,* yet their main object was language as such. When one of the first grammarians of the day, Crates of Pergamus, was sent to Rome as ambassador of King Attains, he was received with the greatest distinction by all the literary statesmen of the capital. It so happened that when walking one day on the Palatian hill, Crates caught his foot in the grating of a sewer, fell and broke his leg.f Being thereby detained at Rome longer than he intended, he was persuaded to give some public lectures, or akroaseis, on grammar; and from these lectures, says Suetonius, dates the study of grammar at Rome. This took place about 159 B.C., between the second and thii'd Punic wars, shortly after the death of Ennius, and two years after the famous expulsion of the Greek rhetors and philosophers (161). Four years later Carneades, likewise sent as ambassador to Rome, was prohibited from lecturing by Cato. After these lectures of Crates, grammatical and philological studies became extremely popular af Rome. We hear of Lucius ^lius Stilo,J who lectured on Latin as Crates had * Suetonius, De illustr. Gramm. cap. 2. t Scioppius, in the introduction to his Grammatica philoso- phica (1628), writes : ' Hac ergo ut legi, minime jam mirandum mihi visum est, tanti flagitii erroribus inquinatam esse veterem Grammaticam, qu« ex cloac£e foramine una cum claudo magistro emerserit.' X Mommsen, ii. 413, 426, 445, 457. Lucius ^lius Stilo wrote GREEK GRAMMAR AT ROME. 107 lectured on Greek. Among his pupils were Varro, Lucilius, and Cicero. Varro composed twenty-four books on the Latin language, four of which were dedicated to Cicero. Cicero, himself, is quoted as an authority on grammatical questions, though we know of no special work of his on grammar. Lucilius devoted the ninth book of his satires to the refonn of spelling.* But nothing shows more clearly the wide interest which grammatical studies had then excited in the foremost ranks of Roman society than Caesar's work on Latin grammar. It was composed by him during the Gallic war, and dedicated to Cicero, who might well be proud of the compliment thus paid him by the great general and statesman.f Most of these works are lost to us, and we can judge of them by means of casual quotations only. Thus we learn from a fragment of Csesar's work, De Analogia, that he was the inventor of the term ablative in Latin. The word never occurs before, and, of course, could not be borrowed, like the names of the other cases, from Greek grammarians, as no ablative had been .admitted in Greek grammar. To think of Cassar fighting the barbarians of Gaul and Germany, and watching from a distance the political complications at Rome, ready to grasp the sceptre of the world, and at the same time carrying on his philological and grammatical studies together with his secretary, the Greek Didymus,J gives us a new view both of that extraordinary man, and of the time in. which he lived. After Caesar had triumphed, one of his favourite plans a •work on etymology, and an index to Plautus. — ^Lersch, Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten, ii. 111. * Lersch, ii. 113, 114, 143. f Cicero, Brut. cap. 72. % Lersch, iii. 144. 108 GREEK GRAMMAR AT ROME. was to found a Greek and Latin library at Rome, and he offered the librarianship to the best scholar of the day, to Varro, though Varro had fought against him on the side of Pompey.* We have thus arrived at the. time when, as we saw in an earlier part of this lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first elementary grammar of Greek at Rome. Empirical grammar had thus been trans- planted to Rome, the Greek grammatical terminology was translated into Latin, and in this new Latia garb it has travelled for nearly two thousand years over the whole civilized world. Even in India, where a different terminology had grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some respects more perfect than that of Alex- andria and Rome, we may now hear such words as case^ and gender^ and active and passive^ explained by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination papers of the government schools in India, such questions as — ' What is the genitive case of Siva? ' seemed to reduce whole volumes of history into a single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term case, or ptosis, had a philosophical meaning ; at Rome, casus was merely a literal translation ; the original meaning oifall was lost, and the word had dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the miad. The * Mommsen, iii. 557. 48 B.C. GREEK GRAMMAR AT ROME, 109 terminology of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics was divided into two parts,* called rhetoric and dialectic, and the latter treated, first, ' On that which signifies, or language ; ' secondly, 'On that which is signified, or things.' In their philosophical language ptosis, which the Komans translated by casus, really meant fall ; that is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried on as to whether the name o{ ptosis, or fall, was appli- cable to the nominative ; and every true Stoic would have scouted the expression of casus rectus, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other woi'ds of a sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak of casfes. And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess the meaning of genitive? The Latin genitivus is a mere blunder, for the Greek word genike could never mean genitivus. Genitivus, if it is meant to express the case of oi'igin or birth, would in Greek have been called gennetike, not genike. Nor does the genitive express the relation of son to father. For though we may say, ' the son of the father,' we may likewise say, ' the father of the son.' Genike, in Greek, had a much wider, a much more philosophical meaning, f It meant casus generalis, the general case, or rather, * Lersch, ii. 25. Hepl arifiaivovrtov, or irtpt b)vrie; and ■Kepi orijiaivofiEviov, or irtpl irpayfxdrmv. \ Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Grammatik, von Dr. K. E. A. Schmidt, Halle, 1859. Ueber den Begriff der yevixri TzrwaiQ, S. 320. 110 GREEK GEAMMAE AT EOME. the case which expresses the genus or kind. This is the real power of the genitive. If I say, ' a bird of the watei',' ' of the water ' defines the genus to which a certain bird belongs ; it refers it to the genus of water-birds. ' Man of the mountains,' means a mountaineer. In phrases such as ' son of the father,' or ' father of the son,' the genitives have the same effect. They predicate something of the son or of the father ; and if we distinguished between the sons of the father, and the sons of the mother, the geni- tives would mark the class or genus to which the sons respectively belonged. They would answer the same purpose as the adjectives, paternal and maternal. It can be proved etymologically that the termination of the genitive is, in most cases, identical with those derivative sufl&xes by which substantives are changed into adjectives.* * In the Tibetan languages the rule is, 'Adjectives are formed from substantives by the addition of the genitive sign,' which might be inverted into, ' The genitive is formed from the nomi- native by the addition of the adjective sign.' For instance, shing, wood ; sJiing-gi, of wood, or wooden : ser, gold ; ser-gyi, of gold, or golden : mi, man ; mi-yi, of man, or human. The same in Garo, where the sign of the genitive is ni, we have : mdnde-ni jak, the hand of man, or the human hand ; ambal-ni kethdli, a wooden knife, or a knife of wood. In Hindustani the genitive is so clearly an adjective, that it actually takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers. But how is it in Sanskrit and Greek? In Sanskrit we may form adjectives by the addition of tya. {^Turanian Languages, p. 41 seq.; Essay on Bengali, p. 333.) For instance, dahshina, south; dahshina- tya, southern. This tya is clearly a demonstrative pronoun, the same as the Sanskrit syas, sya, tyad, this or that. Tya is a pro- nominal base, and therefoi-e such adjectives as dakshina-tya, southern, or ap-tya, aquatic, from ap, water, must have been con- ceived originally as ' water-there,' or ' south-there.' Followed by the terminations of the nominative singular, which was again SPREAD OF GREEK GRAMMAR. Ill It is hardly necessary to trace the histoiy of what I call the empirical study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With Dionysius Thrax the framework of gi'ammar was finished. Later writers have improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman writers. We find M.Yerrius Flaccus, the tutor of the grand- sons of Augustus, and Quintilian in the first century ; Scaurus, ApoUonius Dyscolus, and his son, Hero- dianus, in the second ; Probus and Donatus, the an original pronoun, aptyas would mean ap-tya-s, i.e. water- there-he. Now, it makes little difference whether I say an aquatic bird or a bird of the water. In Sanskrit the genitive of water would be, if we take udaka, udaka-sya. This sya is the same pronominal base as the adjective termination tya, only that the former does not, like the adjective, take any sign for the gender. The genitive wrfaAasya is therefore the same as an adjective with- out gender. Now let us look to Greek. We there form adjectives by o-ioc, which is the same as the Sanskrit tya or sya. For instance, from Eijfjioc, people, the Greeks formed Srjixdtnos, belonging to the people. Here oc, a, ov, mark the gender. Leave the gender out, and you get Srifioaio. Now, there is a rule in Greek that an e between two vowels, in grammatical terminations, is elided. Thus the genitive of yivog is not' yevetrog, but yevcos, or ylpove ; hence Srinoirw would necessarily become liijjioio (Cf. ^oo-ioc^^oios). And what is Srjuoio but the regular Homeric genitive of Sfj/iog, which in later Greek was replaced by S^i^ov ? Thus we see that the same principles which governed the formation of adjectives and geni- tives in Tibetan, in Garo, and Hindustani, were at work in the primitive stages of Sanskrit and Greek; and we perceive how accurately the real power of the genitive was determined by the ancient Greek grammarians, who called it the general or predi- cative case, whereas the Eomans spoiled the term by wrongly translating it into genitivus. 112 SPREAD OF GREEK GRAMMAR. teacher of St. Jerome, in the fourth. After Constan- tine had moved the seat of government from Eome, grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople. There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century, the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his work remained an authority during the middle ages to nearly our own times. We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome. 113 LECTURE lY. THE CLASSIFICATOKY STAGE. WE traced, in our last lecture, the origin and pro- gress of the empirical study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what cir- cumstances, the first grammatical analysis of lan- guage took place ; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a terminology, half philosophical and half empiri- cal, a system of teaching languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly intended. Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences between the grammatical ter- minology of the Greeks . and the Hindus, which would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation for the much-abused gram- matical system of the schools. The Hindiis are the I 114 SANSKRIT GRAMMAR. only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in San- skrit too the same system of cases, called vibhakti, or inflections, the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons, divided not exactly ,^ but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.* In Sanskrit, grammar is called vydkarana, which means analysis or taking to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The diflferences between the dialect of these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and preserved with a religious care. We still possess the first essays in the grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called pr&ti'sdkhyas. These works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same time with observa- tions of a grammatical character, and particularly with those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable, the Ganas. These sup- plied that solid basis on which successive genera- tions of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection in the grammar of Panini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of Panini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything in the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet * See M. M.'s History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 158. EMPIRICAL OR rORMAL GRAMMAR. 115 of the real nature, and natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing. What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar to our own tongue? We know certain forms of language which corre- spond to certain forms of thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative, the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form, may- be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas ia English the genitive is marked by a final s, or by the preposition of, it is in Greek ex- pressed by a final os, in Latin by is. But what this OS and is represent, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a distinction woiild seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages which have distinct forms for these two categories of thought. Even in Greek and Latin thei^e is no outward distinction between the nominative and accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, it is commonly said, has no grammar at all, that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and conjugation, in our sense of these words ; it makes no formal distinction of the various I 2 116 EMPIRICAL OR FORMAL GRAMMAR. j)arts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c. Yet there is no shade of thought that cannot be rendered in Chinese. The Chinese have no more diificulty in distinguishing between 'James beats John,' and 'John beats James,' than the Greeks and Romans or we ourselves. They have no termi- nation for the accusative, but they attain the same by always placing the subject before, and the object after' the verb, or by employing words, before or after the noun, which clearly indicate that it is to be taken as the object of the verb.* There are other * The following and some other notes were kindly sent to me by the first Chinese scholar in Europe, M. Stanislas Julien, Membre de I'lnstitut. The Chinese do not decline their substantives, but they indi- cate the cases distinctly — A. By means of particles. B. By means of position. 1. The nominative or the subject of a sentence is always placed at the beginning. 2. The genitive may be marked — (a) By the particle tchi placed between the two nouns, of which the first is in the genitive, the second in the nominative. Example, Jm tchi kiun (hominum princeps, literally, man, sign of the genitive, prince). (b) By position, placing the word which is in the genitive first, and the word which is in the nominative second. Ex. koue (kingdom) yiw (man), i.e. a man of the kingdom. 3. The dative may be expressed — (a) By the preposition yu, to. Ex. sse (to give) i/en (money) yu (to) jin (man). (6) By position, placing first the verb, then the word which stands in the dative, lastly, the word which stands in the accusative. Ex. yu (to give) jin (to a man) pe (white) i/u (jade), hoatig (yellow) kin (metal), i.e. gold. 4. The accusative is either left without any mark, for instance, pao (to protect) min (the people), or it is preceded by certain words which had originally a more tangible meaning, but gradu- EMPIKICAL OR FORMAL GRAMMAR. 117 languages which have more terminations even than Greek and Latin. In Finnish there are fifteen cases, ally dwindled away into mere signs of the accusative. [These ■were first discovered and correctly explained by M. Stanislas Julien in his Vindicice Philologicce in Litiguam Sinicam, Paris, 1830.] The particles most frequently used for this purpose by modern writers are pa and tsiang, to grasp, to take. Ex. pa (taking) tchoung-jin (crowd of men) feou (secretly) k'an (he looked), i.e. he looked secretly at the crowd of men (hominum turbam furtim aspiciebat). In the more ancient Chinese {Kou- wen) the words used for the same purpose are i (to employ, etc.), iu, iu, hou. Ex. i (employing) Jm (humanity) i'sw/* (he preserves) sin (in the heart), i.e. humanitatem conservat corde. / (taking) tchi (right) wei (to make) Kio (crooked), i.e. rectum facere cur- vum. Pao (to protect) hou (sign of accus.) min (the people). 5. The ablative is expressed — (a) By means of prepositions, such as thsong, yeou, tseu, hou. Ex. thsong, (ex) thien (coelo) lai (venire); te (obtinere) hou (ab) thien (coelo). (b) By means of position, so that the word in the ablative is placed before the verb. Ex. thien (heaven) ^jaw^-fcAi (descended, tchi being the relative particle or sign of the genitive) tsai (cala- mities), i.e. the calamities which Heaven sends to men. 6. The instrumental is expressed — (a) By the preposition yu, with. Ex. yu (with) Men (the sword) cha (to ]i\\\)jin (a man). (6) By position, the substantive which stands in the instru- mental case being placed before the verb, which is followed again by the noun in the accusative. Ex. i (by hanging) cha (he killed) tchi (him). 7. The locative may be expressed by simply placing the noun before the verb. Ex. si (in the East or East) yeou (there is) suo-tou-po (a sthupa) ; or by prepositions as described in the text. The adjective is always placed before the substantive to which it belongs. Ex. meijin, a beautiful woman. The adverb is generally followed by a particle which produces the same effect as e in bene, 'or ter in celeriter. Ex. cho-jen, in silence, silently; ngeou-jen, perchapce; kiu-jen, with fear. Sometimes an adjective becomes an adverb through position. Ex. chen, good ; but chen ho, to sing well. 118 ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL FORMS. expressive of every possible relation between the subject and the object; but there is no accusative, no purely objective case.* In English and French the distinctive terminations of the nominative and accusative have been worn off by phonetic corrup- tion, and these languages are obliged, like Chinese, to mark the subject and object by the collocation of words. What we learn therefore at school in being taught that rex in the nominative becomes regem in the accusative, is simply a practical rule. We know when to ?&jrex and when to say regem. But why the king as a subject should be called re^, and as an object regem^i remains entirely unexplained. In the same manner we learn that amo means I love, amavi I loved; but why that tragical .change from love to no love should be represented by the simple change of to avi^ or, in English, by the addition of a mere d^ is neither asked nor answered. Now if there is a science of language, these are the questions which it will have to answer. If they cannot be answered, if we must be content with paradigms and rules, if the terminations of nouns and verbs must be looked upon either as conventional contrivances or as mysterious excrescences, there is no such thing as a science of language, and we must be satisfied with what has been called the art (i"£';^»i]) of language or grammar. Before we either accept or decline the solution of any problem, it is right to determine what means * From a similar cause the North-Indians have innumerable verbs to express every shade of action ; they have different words for eating as applied to fish, flesh, animal or human, soup, vegetables, &c. But they cannot say either I am or I have. Cf. Du Ponceau, pp. 195, 200. ORIGIN or GRAMMATICAL FORMS. 119 there are for solving it. Beginning with English we should ask, what means have we for finding out why / love should mean I am actually loving, whereas / loved indicates that that feeling is past and gone? Or, if we look to languages richer in inflections than English, we should try to discover by what process, and under what circumstances, amo, I love, was changed in Latin, through the mere addition of an r, into amor^ expressing no longer / love^ but lam loved? Did declensions and conjugations bud forth like the blossoms of a tree? Were they imparted to man ready-made by some mysterious power? Or did some wise people invent them, assigning certain letters to certain phases of thought, as mathema- ticians express unknown quantities by freely chosen algebraic exponents? We are here brought at once face to face with the highest and most difficult problem of our science, the origin of language. But it will be well for the present to turn our eyes away from theories, and fix our attention at first entirely on facts. ~^ Let us keep to the English perfect, / loved, as compared with the present, I love. We cannot em- brace at once the whole English grammai', but if we can track one form to its true lair, we shall probably have no difficulty in digging out the rest of the brood. Now if we ask how the addition of a final d could express the momentous transition from being in love to being indifi'erent, the first thing we have to do, before attempting any explanation, would be to establish the earliest and most original form of I loved. This is a rule which even Plato x-ecognised in his philosophy of language, though, we must confess, he seldom obeyed it. We know 120 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. ■what havoc phonetic corruption may make both in the dictionary and the grammar of a language, and it would be a pity to waste our conjectures on formations which a mere reference to the history of language would suffice to explain. Now a very shght acquaintance with the history of the English language teaches us that the grammar of modem English is not the same as the grammar of Wycliffe. Wycliffe's English, again, may be traced back to what, with Sir Frederick Madden, we may call Middle English, from 1500 to 1330 ; Middle English to Early English, from 1330 to 1230; Early English to Semi-Saxon, from 1230 to 1100; and Semi-Saxon to Anglo-Saxon.* It is evident that if we are to discover the original intention of the syllable which changes / love into I loved^ we must consult the original form of that syllable wherever we can find it. We should never have known that priest meant originally an elder, unless we had traced it back to its original form presbyter, in which a Greek scholar at once recognises the comparative of presbys, old. If left to modern EngHsh alone, we might attempt to connect priest with praying or preaching, but we should not thus arrive at its true derivation. The modern word Gospel conveys no meaning at all. As soon as we trace it back to the original Goddspell, we see that it is a literal translation of Uvangelium, or good news, good tidings.f Lord would be nothing but an empty title in English, unless we could discover its original form and meaning in the Anglo-Saxon * See some criticisms on this division in Marsh's Lectures on the English Language, p. 48. ■f ' Goddspell onn Ennglissh nemmnedd iss God word, annd god tipennde, God errnde.' &c. — Ormulum, pref. 157. ' And beode fer godes goM-speV—Layamon, iii. 182, v. 29, 508. COLLATEEAL EVIDENCE. 121 hlcif-ord, meaning the source of bread, from hldf^ a loaf, and ord^ place.* But even after this is done, after we have traced a modern English word back to Anglo-Saxon, it foUows by no means that we should there find it in its original form, or that we should succeed in forcing it to disclose its original intention. Anglo- Saxon is not an original or aboriginal language. It points by its very name to the Saxons and Angles of the continent. We have, therefore, to follow our word from Ano^lo- Saxon through the various Saxon and Low-German dialects, till we arrive at last at the earliest stage of German which is within our reach, the Gothic of the fourth century after Christ. Even here we cannot rest. For, although we cannot trace Gothic back to any earlier Teutonic language, we see at once that Gothic, too, is a modern lan- guage, and that it must have passed through nume- rous phases of growth before it became what it is in the mouth of Bishop Ulfilas. What then are we to do? — We must try to do what is done when we have to deal with the modern Romance languages. If we could not trace a French word back to Latin, we . should look for its corresponding form in Italian, and endeavour to trace the Italian to its Latin source. If, for instance, we were doubtful about the origin of the French word for fire, /ew, we have but to look to the Italian fuoco^ in order to see at once that both fuoco and feu are derived from the Latin focus. We can do this because we know that French and Italian are cognate dialects, and because we have ascertained beforehand the exact degree of relationship in which * Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, i. p. 229. Lady in A.-S. hlaf- dige ; 1. c. ii. p. 405. 122 COLLATERAL EVIDENCE. they stand to each other. Had we, instead of look- ing to Italian, looked to German for an explanation of the French /ew, we should have missed the right track ; for the German feuer, though more like feu than the Italian /moco, could never have assumed in French the form/ew. Again, in the case of the preposition liors, which in French means without^ we can more easily deter- mine its origiij after we have found that hors corre- sponds with the Italian fuora, the Spanish fuera. The French fromage, cheese, derives no light from Latin. But as soon as we compare the Italian for- maggio* we see that formaggio and fromage are derived from /onna ; cheese being made in Italy by keeping the mUk in small baskets or forms. Feeble^ the French /a^We, is clearly derived from Latia; but it is not till we see the Italian fievole that we are reminded of the Latin flebilis, tearful. We should never have found the etymology, that is to say the origin, of the French payer, the English to pay, if we did not consult the dictionary of the cognate dialects, such as Italian and Spanish. Here we find that to pay is expressed in Italian by pagare, in Spanish by pagar, whereas in Provengal we actually find the two forms pagar and payar. Now pagar clearly points back to Latin pacare, which means to pacify, to appease. To appease a creditor meant to pay him; in the same manner as une quittance, a quittance or receipt, was originally quietantia, a quieting, from quietus, quiet. f * Diez, Lexicon Comparativum. Columella, vii. 8. f In mediaeval Latin fredum is ' compositio qua fisco exsoluta reus pacem a principe assequitur,' It is the German /j-irfw, peace, latinised. From it the French les frais, expense, and defrayer, to pay. Cf. Scheler, Dictionnaire d^ Etymologie frangaise, s. v. GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION. 123 If, therefore, we wish to follow up our researches — ^if, not satisfied with having traced an English word back to Gothic, we want to know what it was at a stiU earlier period of its growth — we must determine whether there are any languages that stand to Gothic in the same relation in which Italian and Spanish stand to French — we must restore, as far as possible, the genealogical tree of the various families of human speech. In doing this we enter on the second or classificatory stage of our science ; for . genealogy, where it is applicable, is the most perfect form of classification. Before we proceed to examine the results which have been obtained by the recent labours of Schlegel, Humboldt, Pritchard, Bopp, Burnouf, Grimm, Pott, Benfey, Kuhn, Curtius, Schleicher, and others in this branch of the science of language, it will be well to glance at what had been achieved before their time in the classification of the numberless dialects of mankind. The Greeks never thought of applying the prin- ciple of classification to the varieties of human speech. They only distinguished between Greek on one side, and all other languages on the other, comprehended under the convenient name of ' Barbarous.' They succeeded, indeed, in classifying four of their own dialects with tolerable correctness,* but they applied the term ' barbarous ' so promiscuously to the other * Strabo, viii. p. 833. Tijc /uec 'laoa rjj ?ra\a(^ 'Ar9/Si t^v avrrjv (pafiev, Tr\v Ik Ao)piSa Ty AloXiSi. The same -writer, at the commencement of the Christian era, has the following remark on the numerous spoken dialects of Greece : irx^^ov 2' kVi kuI vvv, Kara iroXeic, aWot aWmg SiaXiyourar SoKovai Se SwpiZciv Airayreg Std TTiv avixt,aaav e-KLKpareiav. See Romaic and Modern Greek, by James Clyde, 1855, p. 28. 124 GREEKS AND BARBAKIANS. more distant relatives of Greek (the dialects of the Pelasgians, Carians, Macedonians, Thracians, and lUyrians), that, for the purposes of scientific classi- fication, it is almost impossible to make any use of the statements of ancient wiiters about these so-caUed barbarous idioms.* * Herodotus (vii. 94, 509) gives Pelasgi as the old name of the JEolians and of the lonians in the Peloponnesus and the islands. Nevertheless he argues (i. 57) from the dialect spoken in his time by the Pelasgi of the towns of Kreston, Plakia, and Skylake, that the old Pelasgi spoke a barbarous tongue (flaptapov Triv ykSaaav Uvres). He has, therefore, to admit that the Attic race, being originally Pelasgic, unlearnt its language (to 'Attikov idvog eov lieXairyiicdv, a/xa t^ fiiTa€,6\r] rrj ie "EWijvac, Kui ri)v yXiiaaav fiErifiaBe). See Diefenbach, Origines EuropcBce, p. 59. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i. 17) avoids this difficulty by declaring the Pelasgi to have been from the beginning a Hellenic race. This, however, is merely his own theory. The Kariam are called flap€ap6ii>b)voi by Homer {II. v. 867) ; but Strabo (xiv. 662) takes particular care to show that they are not therefore to be considered as fidptapoi. He distinguishes between /3ap- €apo