Lectures on the Science of Language. F. Max Müller

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СКАЧАТЬ Iranic, and Indic classes constitute the great Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. In the English dictionary the student of the science of language [pg 081] 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 English 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 useful to recapitulate before we proceed further. We saw that whereas philology treats language only as a means, comparative philology 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 accomplished 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 [pg 082] 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 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 analyzed 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 possibility 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. Turkish is a Turanian dialect; its grammar is purely Tataric or Turanian. The Turks, however, possessed [pg 083] but a small literature and narrow civilization before they were converted to Mohammedanism. Now, the language of Mohammed was Arabic, a branch of the Semitic family, closely allied to Hebrew and Syriac. Together with the Koran, and their law and religion, the Turks learned from the Arabs, their conquerors, many of the arts and sciences connected with a more advanced stage of civilization. Arabic became to the Turks what Latin was to the Germans during the Middle Ages; and there is hardly a word in the higher intellectual terminology of Arabic, that might not be used, more or less naturally, by a writer in Turkish. But the Arabs, again, at the very outset of their career of conquest and conversion, had been, in science, art, literature, and polite manners, the pupils of the Persians, whom they had conquered; they stood to them in the same relation as the Romans stood to the Greeks. Now, the Persians speak a language which is neither Semitic, like Arabic, nor Turanian, like Turkish; it is a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech. A large infusion of Persian words thus found its way into Arabic, and through Arabic into Turkish; and the result is that at the present moment the Turkish language, as spoken by the higher ranks at Constantinople, is so entirely overgrown with Persian and Arabic words, that a common clod from the country understands but little of the so-called Osmanli, though its grammar is exactly the same as the grammar which he uses in his Tataric utterance.

      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 intellectual market of [pg 084] England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German—nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese 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 elements in English, that the latter have a decided majority over the home-grown Saxon terms. This may seem incredible; 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 dictionary 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 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.54 On the [pg 085] 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 grammar. 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.55 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 sentences in English consisting entirely of Latin or Romance words; yet whatever there is left of grammar in English bears unmistakable traces of Teutonic workmanship. What may now be called grammar in English is little more than the terminations 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 evidence that in a scientific classification of languages, English, though it did not retain a single word of Saxon origin, would have [pg 086] 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 accustomed 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 will 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 genealogical relationship.

      I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objections which threatened to deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the circle 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, СКАЧАТЬ