The principles of comparative philology

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CORNELL

Preface To The Second Edition

The present edition will he found little more tlian a revision of the first. Two or three inaccuracies of statement have been corrected, as well as a few misprints, which I much regret. What additional matter there is has been thrown into footnotes and appendices. Appendix I. is added not only for the sake of the illustration it affords of the way in which the forgotten history of the past may be restored by the help of language, but also in support of the views I have propounded in regard to the Lykian inscriptions. The main part of the new matter is contained in chapters III., IV., and v., especially chapter IV. ; beyond this there is little that is fresh except the note on the story of the KyM6ps in' chapter VIII.

I need hardly say that the opinions contended for in the first edition have undergone no change or modification. I find, however, that what I have said on the subject of roots has given rise to tnisconceptions, and that my meaning has been obscured by the ambiguity of the terms " roots " and "root-period." I fancied that I had sufvi PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

ficiently guarded myself against being misunderstood ; but since this does not seem to have been the case, it is as well to state explicitly the precise doctrine on the matter which I hold. Roots, then, in the lexical or grammatical sense of the term, are those ultimate phonetic elements discovered by an analysis of groups of allied words, and they stand in the same relation to words or derivatives as letters and syllables do to them. Just as words are reduced into a limited number of letters or syllables, not in spoken language, but by the reflective labours of the grammarian, so roots also are the product of the lexicographer's study — rthe elements into which he chemically decomposes all

/ speech. Now if the philologist assume that the roots so arrived at ever constituted a real language^ he would make the same mistake as a chemist who held that his simple elements existed separately and independently — not before the existence of the compounds into which they entered, but — in those compounds themselves ; that oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, are distinguished by nature in the water itself, after it has been made. The chemist, however, must artificially analyse the material with which he has to deal ; and so too must the G-lottologist, and for scientific purposes he is perfectly justified in speaking of a "root-period," meaning thereby a period in the history of speech of which the roots he has extracted

.^from the dictionary may give us a faint idea. So far as the root-period is made synonymous with

PEEFACB TO SECOND EDITION. Vii

the results of his labours it is purely imaginary, existing only in the reflective brain of a modern scholar ; but since this #oot-period is the best representative that we can get of an early synthetic stage in the development of language it may also be used to signify the latter. In this case the root will be a sentence-word, summing up in one whole what a later stage of language would break up into separate words or forms, the name of an individual object implying and including subject or object and " verb " as well. Hence there would be as many sentence-words as momentary impressions made upon the senses by a particular object ; and if language rests upon onomatopoeia or the like, sentence-words applying to the same object might be expected to resemble one another, and in this resemblance allow the philologist to discover those types of sound which he calls roots. Each class of languages will have its own roots, and there is no more reason for assuming that the roots of all languages are the same than there is that the languages themselves are the same. Of. course, in so far as roots are constituted merely by resemblance of allied sentence-words, that is in so far as they are the results of lexical analysis, they will be similar all the world over; but if we use "roots" in the sense of the sentence-words which lie at the bottom of all developed speech, our only knowledge of the characteristics of them will be derived from the phenomena of each known language, and the roots will differ

Vlll PKEFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

one from the other in exactly the same way as the known languages do. The characteristics of a Chinese or Aryan root (when considered as part of a spoken language) are the characteristics of a Chinese or Aryan word; and the Aryan root of the grammarian is as unlike a Chinese word as is the grammarian's Chinese root itself. / It will be seen that what I believe to be the true doctrine of roots depends upon the axiom that language starts with the sentence not with the ^isolated word. When my book was published last year I imagined that the axiom was formally enunciated for the first time, and had no idea that any clear statement of it was to be found elsewhere. Since then, however, I have come across the highly instructive passage in Waltz's " Anthropologie " which is quoted in a footnote to chapter IV. of the present edition, as well as a remarkable but long-forgotten work published in 1831 by an anonymous author, and entitled " An outline of Sematology ; or an Essay towards establishing a new Theory of Grammar, Logic, and Ehetoric." The philological ideas of the writer are naturally extremely crude; but the theory upon which the whole work is based, though arrived at, it would seem, from an a priori point of view, is substantially the same as my ,own, and is worked out with great clearness and vigour. He lays down that language has originated out of natural cries, each cry comprehending what we should now call a sentence, the several parts of

Preface To Second Edition. IX

which came in time to be limited and determined by one another and so passed into words. In this way, it is argued, perceptions became knowledge ; and the wtiter adds with great truth (p. 39) : — "It is not what a word signifies that determines it to be this or that part of speech, but horn it assists other words in making up the sentence.'^ (The italics are his own.) Further on he observes (p. 55) that : " The (separate) words of a sentence are significant only as the instrumental means for, getting at the meaning of the whole sentence or the whole discourse. Till that sentence or oration is completed, the word is unsaid which represents the speaker's thoughts." And he afterwards points out that the separate syllables of a word (like un, mis, con, ness, or fy), may be as significant as separate words.

As soon as we admit that language begins with the sentence and that the synthetic is prior to the analytic, an admission which the^ac^s of philology seem to me to force upon us, we are driven to the conclusion that, from one point of view, at any fate, the agglutinative languages which analyse the primitive sentence and distinguish its parts one from the other, are in advance of the inflectional, so that were the development-theory true, the inflectional would have developed into the agglutinative, and not the converse. We ijiight then go on . to infer that the civilisation of the agglutinative races is higher than that of the inflectional races, a position, indeed, which could be defended

X PEEFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

on the ground that the oldest civilisations of which we know were those of Turanian Accad, of China and of Egypt, and that the beginning of culture implies a higher mental effort than the perpetuation of it. At all events, civilisation and the development of language are so intimately connected as to be practically inseparable. Language is the reflection of society, creating and created by it, as well as the outward expression of thought ; there can be no progress therefore in language without a corresponding progress in the society which moulds it and the thought which underlies it. The great masters of philological science saw of what vital consequence to the development-theory was the relation between the several stages of language and the civilisations which were supposed to answer to them ; and it is on this account that I have devoted somuch space to the endeavour to show that this relation cannot be maintained. If the parent- Aryan or the inflectional Hottentot had previously been isolating and agglutinative, the society which they represented would have already passed through two stages of civilisation analogous to the civilisations of China and Accad. Professor Max Miiller, in his highly-important and suggestive lecture on " Chronology as applied to the Development of Language," has laid down (1) that only where a sound and rational analysis of flection has been made can it be asserted that flection has arisen out of agglutination ; and (2) that all the three classes of language, isolating,

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agglutinating, and inflectional, trespass occasionally on one another's ground, and partake in some measure of the characteristics which distinguish each. Thus Chinese exhibits inflectional as well as agglutinative phenomena, and' a sentence like je fe"^^ousJ donne^ though divided artificially in writing, can scarcely be said to differ from a form of the Basque verb. Here, as elsewhere in nature, one species or family passes insensibly into another, and the boundary line between ' them cannot be sharply defined. But this does not afiect the general character of the language, although those who look to the individual word — the product of the later age of reflection, analysis or literature — instead of to the sentence may be puzzled how to distinguish between the three' great classes of speech. The existence of these three great classes, however, is a fact, but it is equally a fact that in each of these phenomena occur which characterise the other two. The advocates of the development-theory would do well to consider this ; and explain how it is that in spite of the occurrence of inflectional phenomena the agglutinative family has always remained agglutinative, the isolating family isolating. Chinese possesses forms which may be classed as agglutinative, and yet throughout the whole course of its long historical existence it has continued as true to its primitive type as the isolating dialects qf barbarous Taic tribes. The Finnic verb may be called inflectional, but for all that the Finnic group is not less agglutinative

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than the Accadian of 4000 years ago. Aryaa has always^been inflectional, so far back as our verifiable facts allow us to go, and to postulate for it a preceding era of agglutination is an hypothesis which has all history against it. The cases of the Semitic noun were formed, not by juxta-position, not by agglutination, but by the adaptation of vowel-differences ; in the Aryan family itself certain instances of flection can be proved to have originated in mere euphonic distinctions of sound; and as "Westphal remarks (" Vergleichende Grrammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen," p. xvii.), we ought not to ask " Can agglutination become flection ? " but, " Why has it not become so ? " If the gradual growth of the preposition to the verb in composition or the history of the augment show that our family of speech was originally agglutinative, what explanation can be given of the fact that the Finnic idioms are still agglutinative though the verbal forms are inflectional ? A language remains true to its type and makes the new products of speech conform to it by the power of analogy, but analogy is powerless where there is no type to which to conform. The development-theory is an hypothesis, unproved and unprovable; as a merely working hypothesis it has no doubt done good service ; but it is time we should awake to the discovery that though it explains some facts, there are other facts which it not only does not explain but which are wholly incompatible with it. Perhaps the truth which it has shadowed

PEEFACB TO SECOND EDITION. xiii

forth, with exclusive regard to the outward material of speech, would be better expressed by keeping the eyes fixed on the inward and mental, and holding that whereas in the first stage of language thought was, as it were, absorbed in its expression, the two factors being equally balanced in the second stage, in the third stage expression has to g'ive way to thought, and we are conscious of the meaning rather than the phonetic sound of our utterances.

There is one point more to be noticed. The convenient distinction between derivative and Sectional suffixes is as much the work of a reflective grammarian as is the so-called root. To convert the logical into the historical, and declare that the difference which analysis has drawn between the two kinds of- suffixes was once an historical fact, is quite unwarranted. It hangs together with the attempt to transmute all the Case-endings from the very first into pronominal or, at any rate, independent words. So far as I can see, many of the flections were formative suffixes before they were turned to their later use. The objective, the oldest case of the noun, still shows traces of its origin even in Aryan, and the case-endings of the Semitic languages bear their purely euphonic descent upon their face. The distinction between the formative and flectional part of a word was worked out gradually by the developing thought which found phonetic machinery in plenty already existing for its expression. One of the earliest

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contrivances of language for elaborating the relations of grammar out of the sentence was the combination of a class-word with some other that served to define it. Such determinatives are still employed largely in the Taic languages of further India, and out of the 44,500 words in the Chinese Imperial Dictionary of Kang-hi, 1097 begin with (or are formed upon) sin " the heart." Even in Accadian, words may be lengthened by a final vowel like babbara by the side of babbar without any necessary change of signification.

A. H. SAYCE.

March 1875.

PREFACE TOr THE FIRST EDITION.

The substance of the first eight of the following chapters was originally delivered in the form of lectures at Oxford in the early part of 1873. The last chapter is a subsequent addition which should strictly be regarded as an appendix of the first. The, detailed treatment of a single philological principle in it is so disproportionate to the general plan of the book, that its introduction can only be defended on the double ground of the great and farreaching influence of analogy, and the scant attention it has hitherto received. In tracing its action, I have had to review all the various parts of the science of language ; and practical illustrations of this kind may be more efficacious than pages of abstract argument, in showing clearly what I believe to be comprehended within the limits of Glottology, and in summing up the results I have tried to make good in the preceding chapters.

For the sphere and subject-matter of Comparative Philology are very liable to be unduly narrowed. The danger lies not so much with the followers of

XVI PEEFACB TO TIBST EDITION.

, Steintlial, who consider language too exclusively from the psychological and a priori point of view, as with those who, treading in the footsteps of Schleicher, would assimilate its study to the fashionable physical sciences, and demand a place for it by the side of chemistry or physiology. The belief that philology is etymology has passed away, only to be succeeded by the belief that it is phonology. But this belief, whether consciously or unconsciously held, cannot be too strenuously resisted. Etymology and phonology are parts of Comparative Philology, but they do not constitute Comparative Philology. This is a science of far more comprehensive reach ; a science, too, which takes its start not from matter, but from mind. Glottology is an historic, as opposed to a physical science ; and its object is to trace the development of the human intelligence as expressed m the outward and enduring monuments of speech. Language is at once the creator and the mirror of society; and it is in and through society that the human mind has attained its present level of civilisation. Our science, therefore, by comparing the linguistic relics of social change and thought, by classifying sounds and words and sentences, by tracing out the history of forms and syntax, and determining the laws which govern speech, will work back to the progressive intelligence that produced them, and will tell us with the certainty of scientific knowledge, better than all the flints of Abbeville or the skulls of Bruniquel, how "man,

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. xvii

the speaker," first raised himself above the level of the brute, how society progressed from an hive-like communism to the republics of Greece and the kingdoms of modern Europe, and how the fairy world of mythology, the instincts of an unrevealed religion, the philosophic systems of East and West, have grown out of the manifold imaginings of the mind as it struggled to express itself in language. To understand the present, and to provide for the future, we must know the past ; and the key to this is given us by scientific philology. The very problems which face the logicians of our day as they once faced Aristotle and Bacon, will never be solved until it is recognised that, instead of building up a so-called science on a narrow basis of empiric observation like the great Stagirite, or determining like Hegel the laws of being from the standpoint of modern European, speech, we must begin at the opposite end, and lea,ra from Glottology how the framework and character of our thought originated, and wherein it differs from that of other races in the past and present.

Phonology 'and letter-change, comparative grammar and comparative mythology, the history of words and their meanings, the origin of flection and the nature of roots, — such are the subjects with which scientific philology has to deal; and the construction ' of an universal language is the practical object towards which it aims. Under

b xviii PEEFACE TO FIEST EDITION.

the head of Comparative Grammar is included comparative syntax, a most important branch of study, but one which is only beginning to be worked. A thorough-going investigation of it may throw light on the 'difficult question as to the possibility of a mixed grammar; and Mr Edkins already believes that he can detect the influence of Semitic idiom upon the doctrine of the relative and the definite article in Greek The origin of language itself must be left to other sciences to reveal, but there is no reason to despair of our eventually determining this problem of problems. Glottology, however, has to postulate the existence of conscious and articulate speech ; all that it can do is to point the way to the true solution of the riddle, to show what is the conclusion towards which its body of facts and evidence is tending. But this does not prevent the solution of the riddle being of the utmost importance to it ; on the contrary, like the law of gravitation in astronomy, a knowledge of the genesis of speech will bind together the empirical generalisations of language, and give the reason for their special character. We cannot properly be said to know a subject, or to trace the course of its development, until we are able to resolve it into its original elements, and to discover how and out of what it arose.

The following pages,' it will be seen, are rather critical than constructive. New theories have indeed been put forward in regard to mythology, and such points as gender and number; but the

PEEFACE TO FIRST EDITION. XlX

chief feature of the first seven chapters of the book is a criticism of certain generally-received hypotheses which underlie a good deal of current philological reasoning, but which do not stand, as it seems to me, the test of facts. These hypotheses may be reduced to three axiomatic assumptions, against which the ])resent rough-hewn work, however devoid of the graces of style, and bristling with uncouth words, is intended to be a protest. The belief that the Aryan languages are the standard of all others, and that the generalisations gathered from their exceptional phenomena are laws of universal validity ; the substitution of the mechanical and the outward for the intellectual and the inward ; the confusion between the convenient classifications of science and actual divisions into natural " families," — these are the three assumptions which, though maintained unconsciously, and rejected by most students when presented in their crude form, are yet the real causes of certain fashionable theories which have even been elevated into "the most unquestionable results of modern philology." First and foremost among these is the doctrine of a graduated evolution of speech through an isolating and agglutinative into an inflectional stage — a doctrine which rests upon the second assumption, and explains the forms of grammar by the accidents of phonetic decay. When will it be recognised that the growth of most of our present flections out of independent words indicates not a primitive agglutination, but a pre-existing inflectional instinct or analogy, which they

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could but follow, and that the near approach of certain members of the agglutinative group — the Finnic idioms, for example — to some of the phenomena of inflection, only proves the fixed character of their mental point of view, which remained true to its agglutinative type although the outward crust of language, the phonetic expression of the inward thought, had done its utmost to bring about a change ?

Had it been remembered in what language really consists, we should have heard less of letters and more of sounds, less of outward form and more of inward meaning, less of phonetic decay and more of analogy ; the philologist would have betaken himself to the study of living speech rather than of dead literature, and have learned that, instead of startins with the written crystallised word, he should have begun with the only actual whole of which language* knows — the sentence. Had the sentence been made the basis of research, little would have been said of an agglutinative background to Aryan speech, or of a time when men talked with one another in roots. But, in fact, the larger part of the strange hypotheses which the discovery of roots has called forth, are mostly dependent on the first assumption. I feel confident that the world would never have heard of "pronominal roots" had the Turanian tongues been the primary subject of inquiry, nor would the supposed necessity of finding biliteral radicals have made such wild havoc in the Semitic family. Even the term "family" itself calls up erroneous ideas.

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The days are passed indeed when philological and ethnological unity were imagined to be identical, but we still picture to ourselves a " family of languages " like a family in social life, except that it springs riot from two ancestors, but from one. Such pictures, however, are but the convenient symbols of working science, and, if pressed too literally, lead to conclusions the reverse of the truth. Simplicity and unification are the latest result of time, and instead of forcing all the known dialects of the world under a few neatly labelled classes or " families," we should rather wonder that more waifs and strays have not come down to us out of the infinite essays of early speech.

The arguments with which I have endeavoured to combat these and similar views are founded upon three or four postulates. Language is social, not individual, interpreting the society of the past, and interpreted by the society of the present ; it starts with the sentence, not with the word ; it is the expression of thought, so that all explanations of its I^heuomena which rest contented with its outward form alone must be inadequate or erroneous ; and its study, if carried on by the light of the comparative method, ought to embrace all the manifold operations and products of thought which are embodied in spoken utterance. These are the principles which underlie the following pages, and will furnish the key to what I hav6 written. Throughout, I have presupposed an acquaintance with Piofessor Max Miiller's

"Lectures on tlie Science of Language," to whose world-wide popularity Comparative Philology owes its present position and its present charin. My indebtedness to their wealth of illustration will be apparent to every reader, and the familiar character of the work has relieved me of the necessity of encumbering my book with frequent references to it.

A. H. SAYCE.

Queen's College, Oxford, May 1874.

Contents

CHAP. piGS

I. THE BPHEEB OP COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY, AND ITS

11. THE IDOLA OP GLOTTOLOGT— THE LAWS OP THE

Chapter I

THE SPHERE QF COMPARATIVE, PHILOLOGY AND ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER SCIENCES.

Among the many new departments of study which have been called into existence by the extension of the scientific method, there is none that possesses greater interest than Comparative Philology. It is, on the one hand, so closely bound up with the history of mankind in general, while, on the other, it enters so largely into the life of the private individual, that there are none whose attention it ought not to excite. We have no need, as in ethnology or botany, to collect from outside the preliminary facts upon which the science is built : the facts of Comparative Philology are literally in the mouths of every one ; they are the words which we speak, the thoughts which we clothe in

A articulate language, the indispensable links of union which bind together a civilised society. While we are thus favourably placed in regard to the materials of our study, the study itself appeals at once to our reason, our imagination, and our curiosity. Language peculiarly belongs to manj it is the most characteristic mark of distinction between him and the brute ; and the careful examination of it seems therefore especially appropriate to him. The object of all science, it may be presumed, is twofold : to obtain such a know- , ledge of nature and its laws as shall enable us to combine and control them practically for our future use and benefit. , Years have not deprived the old Delphic oracle of its truth, and a knowledge of ourselves is still the most important that we can acquire. The improvement of the species, the amelioration of society, the wellbeing and happiness of the individual, are the most pressing questions of our age. But to answer these satisfactorily, we must know the laws which govern the race and the individual, and the way in which we have arrived at our present condition. Every new discovery confirms the theory of progressive development : man was not once what he now is ; and the long series of centuries that lie behind us have seen him slowly changing with changing circumstances, and gra-

KELATION TO THE OTHER SCIENCES. 3

dually moulded by the experiences and habits of former generations. It is not the outward form of man that concerns us now ; that, indeed, may have altered, and the long ape-like jaw of the primitive savage have contracted into the mouth of a Cleopatra or a Mary Queen of Scots. But the change of external shape has little interest for the politician and philanthropist ; it is rather an index of deeper spiritual changes than the cause of them ; and with these more secret and subtle changes the student of society has alone to do. It is the development of the moral and intellectual life of mankind a knowledge of which is so necessary if we would understand the present state of society, and rightly set about its improvement. But over the first beginnings of this moral and intellectual life — the very foundations of it, without which all the superstructure is but half intelligible — there is drawn, as it were, the veil of Isis, and the veil can only be lifted by the interpreter of the symbol. Such an interpreter is language, the mediator between the spiritual and the physical, which records the varying phases of human thought in enduring symbol and sensuous metaphor, like the rocks which, bear witness to the climate and zoology of remote geological eras. If we are to look anywhere for the solution of some of the highest problems connected with the history of our species, it must he, above all, to the science of language. Already much has been done by it ; not the least good being the clearance of many old prepossessions and beliefs that blocked up the path of inquiry, and distorted all the evidence that might be presented to the mind.

But it must be remembered that the science is still in its infancy, and more has been expected from it than its present stage of advancement would legitimately allow us to demand. Many causes have combined to give an impetus in the present day to the investigation of the historical sciences — those, namely, which deal with man and his works, and to the study of social phenomena. Eeady conclusions and rapid generalisations are wanted ; answers to the many questions which are starting up on all sides cannot be waited for; and the Comparative Philologist is accordingly called upon to furnish the key or suggest the solution of numerous difficulties. His situation is a tempting one. Knowing, as he does, how much certain ground has already been won, and acquainted with a further range of data from which he is only too well disposed to draw hasty inferences, he is ready to take his seat on the tripod, and deliver dogmatic statements which are received by the general public as so many ascertained facts. If put forward as provisional hypotheses only, intended to represent the sum total of the evidence upon some particular suhject which the inquirer had at his disposal, such statements would have great value ; but the mischief done is immense when they are made and received as of equal authority with the ground-principles of the science, and become so many propositions which may not be contradicted. It is, indeed, the lot of all new sciences ; but none the less necessary on that account to be foreseen and guarded against.