Lectures on the Science of Language. F. Max Müller

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СКАЧАТЬ to have passed through the three stages, the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the childhood, the youth, and the manhood of every one of the natural sciences.

      [pg 087]

Lecture III. The Empirical Stage.

       Table of Contents

      We begin to-day to trace the historical progress of the science of language in its three stages, the Empirical, the Classificatory, 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 mysterious nature of speech, and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel without 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 addressed 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 Bráhmaņas, language is called the [pg 088] cow, breath the bull, and their young is said to be the mind of man.56 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 wonderful skill dissecting her sacred body. Their achievements in grammatical analysis, which date from the sixth century, b. c., are still unsurpassed in the grammatical literature of any nation. The idea of reducing a whole language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted before the sixteenth century by Henry Estienne,57 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 her, nevertheless, the greatest honors in their ancient schools of philosophy. There is hardly one of their representative philosophers 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 [pg 089] 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 recognized 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 language.

      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, between nouns and verbs, between articles and pronouns, 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 terms which form the nomenclature of empirical 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 of case, of number, and gender, were coined at a very early time for the purpose [pg 090] of entering into the nature of thought; not for the practical purpose of analyzing the forms of language. This, their practical application to the spoken language of Greece, was the work of a later generation. It was the teacher of languages 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 acceptation 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 compared 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 four physical elements, the names of a Thales and Anaximenes, we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language—the founders 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 grammarian [pg 091] 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 circumstances, 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 Alexandria on the ancient forms of their language as preserved in the Homeric poems. But rules of declension and conjugation, 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 modern invention. No ancient Greek ever thought of learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian neighbors. He considered it a privilege 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 language. The Poles called their neighbors, the Germans, Niemiec, niemy meaning dumb;58 just as the Greeks called the Barbarians [pg 092] Aglossoi, or speechless. The name which the Germans gave to their neighbors, the Celts, Walh in old High German, vealh in Anglo-Saxon, the modern Welsh, is supposed to be the same as the Sanskrit mlechha, and means a person who talks indistinctly.59

      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 language to be learnt as long as either party could only speak their own? The problem was almost as difficult 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 languages very much as children learn their own. The interpreters mentioned by ancient historians were probably children of parents speaking different languages. The son of a Scythian and a Greek would naturally learn the utterances both of his father and mother, and the lucrative nature of his services would not fail to increase the supply. We are told, though on rather mythical authority, that the Greeks were astonished at the multiplicity of languages which they encountered СКАЧАТЬ