Language and the Study of Language

Front matter

LANGUAGE

AND

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE:

front matter

WORKS UPON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE,

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.

MARSH'S Lectures on the English Language | 1 Vol. | $3.00

Preface

PREFACE.

The main argument of the following work was first drawn out in the form of six lectures "On the Principles of Linguistic Science," delivered at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, during the month of March, 1864. Of these, a brief abstract was printed in the Annual Report of the Institution published in the same year. In the following winter (December, 1864, and January, 1865) they were again delivered as one of the regular courses before the Lowell Institute, in Boston, having been expanded into a series of twelve lectures. They are now laid before a wider public, essentially in their form as there presented. But they have been in the mean time carefully rewritten, and have suffered a not inconsiderable further expansion, as the removal of the enforced Procrustean limit, of sixty minutes to a lecture, has given opportunity to discuss with greater fulness important points in the general argument which had before come off with insufficient treatment. The chief matter of theory upon which my opinion has undergone any noteworthy modification is the part to be attributed to the onomatopoetic principle in the first steps of language-making (see the eleventh lecture). To this principle, at each revision of my views, I have been led to assign a higher and higher efficiency, partly by the natural effect of a deeper study and clearer appreciation of the necessary conditions of the case, partly under the influence of valuable works upon the subject, recently issued. In the general style of presentation I have not thought it worth while to make any change—not even to cast out those recapitulations and repetitions which are well-nigh indispensable in a course of lectures meant for oral delivery, though they may and should be avoided in a work intended from the outset for continuous reading and study.

More than one of the topics here treated have been from time to time worked up separately, as communications to the American Oriental Society, and are concisely reported in its Proceedings; also, within no long time past, I have furnished, by request, to one or two of our leading literary periodicals, papers upon special themes in linguistic science which were, to no small extent, virtual extracts from this work.

The principal facts upon which my reasonings are founded have been for some time past the commonplaces of comparative philology, and it was needless to refer for them to any particular authorities: where I have consciously taken results recently won by an individual, and to be regarded as his property, I have been careful to acknowledge it. It is, however, my duty and my pleasure here to confess my special obligations to those eminent masters in linguistic science, Professors Heinrich Steinthal of Berlin and August Schleicher of Jena, whose works I have had constantly upon my table, and have freely consulted, deriving from them great instruction and enlightenment, even when I have been obliged to differ most strongly from some of their theoretical views. Upon them I have been dependent, above all, in preparing my eighth and ninth lectures; my independent acquaintance with the languages of various type throughout the world being far from sufficient to enable me to describe them at first hand. I have also borrowed here and there an illustration from the "Lectures on the Science of Language" of Professor Max Müller, which are especially rich in such material.

To my friend Professor Fitz-Edward Hall, Librarian of the East India Office in London, I have to return my thanks for his kindness in undertaking the burdensome task of reading the revise of the sheets, as they went through the press.

It can hardly admit of question that at least so much knowledge of the nature, history, and classifications of language as is here presented ought to be included in every scheme of higher education, even for those who do not intend to become special students in comparative philology. Much more necessary, of course, is it to those who cherish such an intention. It is, I am convinced, a mistake to commence at once upon a course of detailed comparative philology with pupils who have only enjoyed the ordinary training in the classical or the modern languages, or in both. They are liable either to fail of apprehending the value and interest of the infinity of particulars into which they are plunged, or else to become wholly absorbed in them, losing sight of the grand truths and principles which underlie and give significance to their work, and the recognition of which ought to govern its course throughout: perhaps even coming to combine with acuteness and erudition in etymological investigation views respecting the nature of language and the relations of languages of a wholly crude or fantastic character. I am not without hope that this book may be found a convenient and serviceable manual for use in our higher institutions of learning. I have made its substance the basis of my own instruction in the science of language, in Yale College, for some years past; and, as it appears to me, with gratifying success. In order to adapt it to such a purpose, I have endeavoured to combine a strictly logical and scientific plan with a popular mode of handling, and with such illustration of the topics treated as should be easily and universally apprehensible. If, however, the lecture style should be found too discursive and argumentative for a text-book of instruction, I may perhaps be led hereafter to prepare another work for that special use.

Yale College,

New Haven, Conn.,

August, 1867.

Notes

Lecture I

LANGUAGE

AND

THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

LECTURE I.

Introductory: history, material, objects of linguistic science; plan of these lectures. Fundamental inquiry. How we acquired our speech, and what it was; differences of individual speech. What is the English language; how kept in existence; its changes. Modes and causes of linguistic change.

Those who are engaged in the investigation of language have but recently begun to claim for their study the rank and title of a science. Its development as such has been wholly the work of the present century, although its germs go back to a much more ancient date. It has had a history, in fact, not unlike that of the other sciences of observation and induction—for example, geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics—which the intellectual activity of modern times has built up upon the scanty observations and crude inductions of other days. Men have always been learning languages, in greater or less measure; adding to their own mother-tongues the idioms of the races about them, for the practical end of communication with those races, of access to their thought and knowledge. There has, too, hardly been a time when some have not been led on from the acquisition of languages to the study of language. The interest of this precious and wonderful possession of man, at once the sign and the means of his superiority to the rest of the animal creation, has in all ages strongly impressed the reflecting and philosophical, and impelled them to speculate respecting its nature, its history, and its origin. Researches into the genealogies and affinities of words have exercised the ingenuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring minds. Moreover, the historical results attainable by such researches, the light cast by them upon the derivation and connection of races, have never wholly escaped recognition. The general objects and methods of linguistic study are far too obviously suggested, and of far too engaging interest, not to have won a certain share of regard, from the time when men first began to inquire into things and their causes.

Nothing, however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older investigations in the domain of language, any more than in those of chemistry and astronomy. Hasty generalizations, baseless hypotheses, inconclusive deductions, were as rife in the former department of study as they were in the two latter while yet passing through the preliminary stages of alchemy and astrology. The difficulty was in all the cases nearly the same; it lay in the paucity of observed facts, and in the faulty position which the inquirer assumed toward them. There had been no sufficient collection and classification of phenomena, to serve as the basis of inductive reasoning, for the establishment of sound methods and the elaboration of true results; and along with this, and partly in consequence of it, prejudice and assumption had usurped the place of induction. National self-sufficiency and inherited prepossession long helped to narrow the limits imposed by unfavourable circumstances upon the extent of linguistic knowledge, restraining that liberality of inquiry which is indispensable to the growth of a science. Ancient peoples were accustomed to think each its own dialect the only true language; other tongues were to them mere barbarous jargons, unworthy of study. Modern nations, in virtue of their history, their higher culture, and their Christianity, have been much less uncharitably exclusive; and their reverence for the two classical idioms, the Greek and Latin, and for the language of the Old Testament, the He , so widened their linguistic horizon as gradually to prepare the way for juster and more comprehensive views of the character and history of human speech. The restless and penetrating spirit of investigation, finally, of the nineteenth century, with its insatiable appetite for facts, its tendency to induction, and its practical recognition of the unity of human interests, and of the absolute value of all means of knowledge respecting human conditions and history, has brought about as rapid a development in linguistic study as in the kindred branches of physical study to which we have already referred. The truth being once recognized that no dialect, however rude and humble, is without worth, or without a bearing upon the understanding of even the most polished and cultivated tongues, all that followed was a matter of course. Linguistic material was gathered in from every quarter, literary, commercial, and philanthropic activity combining to facilitate its collection and thorough examination. Ancient records were brought to light and deciphered; new languages were dragged from obscurity and made accessible to study.

The recognition, not long to be deferred when once attention was turned in the right direction, of the special relationship of the principal languages of Europe with one another and with the languages of south-western Asia—the establishment of the Indo-European family of languages—was the turning-point in this history, the true beginning of linguistic science. The great mass of dialects of the family, descendants of a common parent, covering a period of four thousand years with their converging lines of development, supplied just the ground which the science needed to grow up upon, working out its methods, getting fully into view its ends, and devising the means of their attainment. The true mode of fruitful investigation was discovered; it appeared that a wide and searching comparison of kindred idioms was the way in which to trace out their history, and arrive at a real comprehension of the life and growth of language. Comparative philology, then, became the handmaid of ethnology and history, the forerunner and founder of the science of human speech.

No single circumstance more powerfully aided the onward movement than the introduction to Western scholars of the Sanskrit, the ancient and sacred dialect of India. Its exceeding age, its remarkable conservation of primitive material and forms, its unequalled transparency of structure, give it an indisputable right to the first place among the tongues of the Indo-European family. Upon their comparison, already fruitfully begun, it cast a new and welcome light, displaying clearly their hitherto obscure relations, rectifying their doubtful etymologies, illustrating the laws of research which must be followed in their study, and in that of all other languages. What linguistic science might have become without such a basis as was afforded it in the Indo-European dialects, what Indo-European philology might have become without the help of the Sanskrit, it were idle to speculate: certain it is that they could not have grown so rapidly, or reached for a long time to come the state of advancement in which we now already behold them. As a historical fact, the scientific study of human speech is founded upon the comparative philology of the Indo-European languages, and this acknowledges the Sanskrit as its most valuable means and aid.

But to draw out in detail the history of growth of linguistic science down to the present time, with particular notice of its successive stages, and with due mention of the scholars who have helped it on, does not lie within the plan of these lectures. Interesting as the task might be found, its execution would require more time than we can spare from topics of more essential consequence. A brief word or two is all we can afford to the subject. Germany is, far more than any other country, the birthplace and home of the study of language. There was produced, at the beginning of this century, the most extensive and important of the preliminary collections of material, specimens of dialects with rude attempt at their classification—the "Mithridates" of Adelung and Vater. There Jacob Grimm gave the first exemplification on a grand scale of the value and power of the comparative method of investigation in language, in his grammar of the Germanic dialects, a work of gigantic labour, in which each dialect was made to explain the history and character of all, and all of each. There—what was of yet greater consequence—Bopp laid, in 1816, the foundation of Indo-European comparative philology, by his "Conjugation-system of the Sanskrit Language, as compared with the Greek, Latin, Persian, and German;" following it later with his Comparative Grammar of all the principal languages of the Indo-European family—a work which, more than any other, gave shape and substance to the science. There, too, the labours of such men as the Schlegels, Pott, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, especially of the last-named, extended its view and generalized its principles, making it no longer an investigation of the history of a single department of human speech, but a systematic and philosophical treatment of the phenomena of universal language and their causes. The names of Rask, too, the Danish scholar and traveller, and of Burnouf, the eminent French savant, must not be passed unnoticed among those of the founders of linguistic science. Indeed, how ripe the age was for the birth of this new branch of human knowledge, how natural an outgrowth it was of the circumstances amid which it arose, is shown by the fact that its most important methods were worked out and applied, more or less fully, at nearly the same time, by several independent scholars, of different countries—by Rask, Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Burnouf.

A host of worthy rivals and followers of the men whose names we have noted have arisen in all parts of Europe, and even in America, to continue the work which these had begun; and by their aid the science has already attained a degree of advancement that is truly astonishing, considering its so recent origin. Though still in its young and rapidly growing stage, with its domain but just surveyed and only partially occupied, its basis is yet laid broadly and deeply enough, its methods and laws are sure enough, the objects it aims at and the results it is yielding are sufficiently important, in themselves and in their bearing upon other branches of human knowledge, to warrant it in challenging a place among the sciences, as not the least worthy, though one of the youngest, of their sisterhood, and to give it a claim which may not be disregarded to the attention of every scholar, and of every well-educated person.

The material and subject of linguistic science is language, in its entirety; all the accessible forms of human speech, in their infinite variety, whether still living in the minds and mouths of men, or preserved only in written documents, or carved on the scantier but more imperishable records of brass and stone. It has a field and scope limited to no age, and to no portion of mankind. The dialects of the obscurest and most humbly endowed races are its care, as well as those of the leaders in the world's history. Whenever and wherever a sound has dropped from the lips of a human being, to signalize to others the movements of his spirit, this science would fain take it up and study it, as having a character and office worthy of attentive examination. Every fact of every language, in the view of the linguistic student, calls for his investigation, since only in the light of all can any be completely understood. To assemble, arrange, and explain the whole body of linguistic phenomena, so as thoroughly to comprehend them, in each separate part and under all aspects, is his endeavour. His province, while touching, on the one hand, upon that of the philologist, or student of human thought and knowledge as deposited in literary records, and, on the other hand, upon that of the mere linguist, or learner of languages for their practical use, and while exchanging friendly aid with both of these, is yet distinct from either. He deals with language as the instrument of thought, its means of expression, not its record; he deals with simple words and phrases, not with sentences and texts. He aims to trace out the inner life of language, to discover its origin, to follow its successive steps of growth, and to deduce the laws that govern its mutations, the recognition of which shall account to him for both the unity and the variety of its present manifested phases; and, along with this, to apprehend the nature of language as a human endowment, its relation to thought, its influence upon the development of in and the growth of knowledge, and the history of mind and of knowledge as reflected in it.

The exceeding interest of this whole class of inquiries is at first sight manifest, but it grows to our sense in measure as we reflect upon it. We are apt to take language, like so many other things of familiar daily use, as a thing of course, without appreciating the mystery and deep significance which belong to it. We clothe our thoughts without effort or reflection in words and phrases, having regard only to the practical ends of expression and communication, and the power conferred by them: we do not think of the long history, of changes of form and changes of signification, through which each individual vocable employed by us has passed, of the labour which its origination and gradual elaboration has cost to successive generations of thinkers and speakers. We do not meditate upon the importance to us of this capacity of expression, nor consider how entirely the history of man would have been changed had he possessed no such faculty; how little of that enlightenment which we boast would have been ours, if our ancestors had left no spoken memorial of their mental and spiritual acquisitions; how, in short, without speech, the noble endowments of our nature would have remained almost wholly undeveloped and useless. It is, indeed, neither to be expected nor desired that our minds should be continually penetrated with a realizing sense of the marvellous character of language; but we should be inexcusable if we neglected altogether to submit it to such an examination as should make us understand its nature and history, and should prepare our minds to grasp by reflection its whole significance.

These and such as these are the objects most directly aimed at by the scientific student of language. But there are others, of a different character, to which his investigations conduct him hardly less immediately, and which constitute an essential part of the interest which invests them. It is a truth now almost as familiar as, fifty years ago, it would have been deemed new and startling, that language furnishes the principal means of fruitful inquiry into the deeds and fates of mankind during the ages which precede direct historical record. It enables us to determine, in the main, both the fact and the degree of relationship subsisting among the different divisions of mankind, and thus to group them together into families, the members of which must have once set forth from a common home, with a common character and a common culture, however widely separated, and however unlike in manners and institutions, we may find them to be, when they first come forth into the light of written history. Upon the study of language is mainly founded the science of ethnology, the science which investigates the genealogy of nations. I say, mainly founded, without wishing to depreciate the claims of physical science in this regard: the relation between linguistic and physical science, and their joint and respective value to ethnology, will be made the subject of discussion at a point further on in our inquiries. But language is also pregnant with information respecting races which lies quite beyond the reach of physical science: it bears within itself plain evidences of mental and moral character and capacity, of degree of culture attained, of the history of knowledge, philosophy, and religious opinion, of intercourse among peoples, and even of the physical circumstances by which those who speak it have been surrounded. It is, in brief, a volume of the most varied historical information to those who know how to read it and to derive the lessons it teaches.

To survey the whole vast field of linguistic science, taking even a rapid view of all the facts it embraces and the results derived from their examination, is obviously beyond our power in a brief series of lectures like the present. I shall not, accordingly, attempt a formally systematic presentation of the subject, laying out its different departments and defining their limits and mutual relations. It will, I am persuaded, be more for our profit to discuss in a somewhat general and familiar way the fundamental facts in the life of language, those which exhibit most clearly its character, and determine the method of its study. We shall thus gain an insight into the nature of linguistic evidence, see how it is elicited from the material containing it, and what and how it has force to prove. We shall, in short, endeavour to arrive at an apprehension of the fundamental principles of the science. But we shall also find occasion to glance at the main results accomplished by its means, seeking to understand what language is and what is its value to man, and to recognize the great truths in human history which it has been instrumental in establishing.

In order to these ends, we shall first take up one or two preliminary questions, the discussion of which will show us how language lives and grows, and how it is to be investigated, and will guide us to an understanding of the place which its study occupies among the sciences. We shall then go on to a more detailed examination and illustration of the processes of linguistic growth, and of the manner in which they produce the incessant changes of form and content which language is everywhere and always undergoing. We shall note, further, the various causes which affect the kind and rate of linguistic change. The result of these processes of growth, in bringing about the separation of languages into dialects, will next engage our attention. This will prepare us for a construction of the group of dialects, and the family of more distantly related languages, of which our own English speech is a member, and for an examination and estimate of the evidence which proves them related. The extent and importance, historical and linguistic, of this family will be set forth, and its course of development briefly sketched. We shall next pass in review the other great families into which the known forms of human speech are divided, noticing their most striking characteristics. Then will be taken up certain general questions, of prime interest and importance, suggested by such a review—as the relative value and authority of linguistic and of physical evidence of race, and the bearing of language upon the ultimate question of the unity or variety of the human species. Finally, we shall consider the origin of language, its relation to thought, and its value as an element in human progress. And a recognition of the aid which it receives in this last respect from written and recorded speech will lead us, by way of appendix, to take a cursory view of the historical development of the art of writing.

The method which we shall follow will be, as much as possible, the analytic rather than the synthetic, the inquiring rather than the dogmatic. We shall strive, above all things, after clearness, and shall proceed always from that which is well-known or obvious to that which is more recondite and obscure, establishing principles by induction from facts which lie within the cognizance of every well-educated person. For this reason, our examples, whether typical or illustrative, will be especially sought among the phenomena of our own familiar idiom; since every living and growing language has that within it which exemplifies the essential facts and principles belonging to all human speech. We shall also avoid, as far as is practicable, the use of figurative, metaphysical, or technical phraseology, endeavouring to talk the language of plain and homely fact. Not a little of the mystery and obscurity which, in the minds of many, invest the whole subject of language, is due to the common employment respecting it of terms founded on analogies instead of facts, and calling up the things they represent surrounded and dimmed by a halo of fancy, instead of presenting sharply cut outlines and distinct lineaments.

The whole subject of linguistic investigation may be conveniently summed up in the single inquiry, "Why do we speak as we do?" The essential character of the study of language, as distinguished from the study of languages, lies in this, that it seeks everywhere, not the facts, but the reasons of them; it asks, not how we speak, or should speak, but for what reason; pursuing its search for reasons back to the very ultimate facts of human history, and down into the very depths of human nature. To cover the whole ground of investigation by this inquiry, it needs to be proposed in more than one sense; as the most fitting introduction to our whole discussion, let us put it first in its plainest and most restricted meaning: namely, why do we ourselves speak the English as our mother-tongue, or native language, instead of any other of the thousand varying forms of speech current among men? It is indeed a simple question, but to answer it distinctly and truly will lay the best possible foundation for our further progress, clearing our way of more than one of the imperfect apprehensions, or the misapprehensions, which are apt to encumber the steps of students of language.

The general answer is so obvious as hardly to require to be pointed out: we speak English because we were taught it by those who surrounded us in our infancy and growing age. It is our mother-tongue, because we got it from the lips of our mother; it is our native language, inasmuch as we were born, not indeed into the possession of it, but into the company of those who already spoke it, having learned it in the same way before us. We were not left to our own devices, to work out for ourselves the great problem of how to talk. In our case, there was no development of language out of our own internal resources, by the reflection of phenomena in consciousness, or however else we may choose to describe it; by the action of a natural impulse, shaping ideas, and creating suitable expression for them. No sooner were our minds so far matured as to be capable of intelligently associating an idea and its sign, than we learned, first to recognize the persons and things about us, the most familiar acts and phenomena of our little world, by the names which others applied to them, and then to apply to them the same names ourselves. Thus, most of us learned first of all to stammer the childish words for 'father' and 'mother,' put, for our convenience, in the accents easiest for unpractised lips to frame. Then, as we grew on, we acquired daily more and more, partly by direct instruction, partly by imitation: those who had the care of us contracted their ideas and simplified their speech to suit our weak capacities; they watched with interest every new vocable which we mastered, corrected our numberless errors, explained what we but half understood, checked us when we used longer words and more ambitious phrases than we could employ correctly or wield adroitly, and drilled us in the utterance of sounds which come hard to the beginner. The kind and degree of the training thus given, indeed, varied greatly in different cases, as did the provision made for the necessary wants of childhood in respect to other matters; as, for instance, the food, the dress, the moral nurture. Just as some have to rough their way by the hardest through the scenes of early life, beaten, half-starved, clad in scanty rags, while yet some care and provision were wholly indispensable, and no child could have lived through infancy without them—so, as concerns language, some get but the coarsest and most meagre instruction, and yet instruction enough to help them through the first stages of learning how to speak. In the least favourable circumstances, there must have been constantly about every one of us in our earliest years an amount and style of speech surpassing our acquirements and beyond our reach, and our acquisition of language consisted in our appropriating more and more of this, as we were able. In proportion as our minds grew in activity and power of comprehension, and our knowledge increased, our notions and conceptions were brought into shapes mainly agreeing with those which they wore in the minds of those around us, and received in our usage the appellations to which the latter were accustomed. On making acquaintance with certain liquids, colourless or white, we had not to go through a process of observation and study of their properties, in order to devise suitable titles for them; we were taught that these were water and milk. The one of them, when standing stagnant in patches, or rippling between green banks, we learned to call, according to circumstances and the preference of our instructors, pool or puddle, and brook or river. An elevation rising blue in the distance, or towering nearer above us, attracted our attention, and drew from us the staple inquiry "What is that?"—the answer, "A mountain," or "A hill," brought to our vocabulary one of the innumerable additions which it gained in a like way. Along with the names of external sensible objects, we thus learned also that practical classification of them which our language recognizes; we learned to distinguish brook and river; hill and mountain; tree, bush, vine, shrub, and plant; and so on, in cases without number. In like manner, among the various acts which we were capable of performing, we were taught to designate certain ones by specific titles: much reproof, for instance, doubtless made us early understand what was meant by cry, strike, push, kick, bite, and other names for misdeeds incident to even the best-regulated childhood. How long our own mental states might have remained a confused and indistinct chaos to our unassisted reflection, we do not know; but we were soon helped to single out and recognize by appropriate appellations certain ones among them: for example, a warm feeling of gratification and attachment we were made to signify by the expression love; an inferior degree of the same feeling by like; and their opposite by hate. Long before any process of analysis and combination carried on within ourselves would have given us the distinct conceptions of true and false, of good and naughty, they were carefully set before us, and their due apprehension was enforced by faithful admonition, or by something yet more serious. And not only were we thus assisted to an intelligent recognition of ourselves and the world immediately about us, but knowledge began at once to be communicated to us respecting things beyond our reach. The appellations of hosts of objects, of places, of beings, which we had not seen, and perhaps have not even yet seen, we learned by hearing or by reading, and direct instruction enabled us to attach to them some characteristic idea, more or less complete and adequate. Thus, we had not to cross the ocean, and to coast about and traverse a certain island beyond it, in order to know that there is a country England, and to hold it apart, by specific attributes, from other countries of which we obtained like knowledge by like means.