Lectures on the Science of Language. F. Max Müller

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СКАЧАТЬ Argonautic expedition, and that they were much inconvenienced by the want of skilful interpreters.60 We need not wonder at this, for the [pg 093] 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 encouragement 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 interpreters, speaking seven different languages. These must have comprised Slavonic, 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 familiarized the Greeks with the idea that other nations also possessed real languages. Themistocles studied Persian, and is said to have spoken it fluently. The expedition of Alexander contributed still more powerfully to a knowledge of other nations and languages. But when Alexander went to converse with the Brahmans, 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 remarked, they must become like water that had passed through many impure channels.61 We hear, indeed, of more ancient [pg 094] 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.62 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 Aristocrates, who lived about 100 b. c. The travels of Pythagoras are equally mythical; they are inventions of Alexandrian writers, who believed that all wisdom must have flowed from the East. There is better authority for believing that Democritus went to Egypt 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 Romans. Soon after the Macedonian conquest, we find63 Berosus in Babylon, Menander in Tyre, and Manetho in Egypt, compiling, from original sources, the annals of their countries.64 Their works [pg 095] 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 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 there can be little doubt that the work of Berosus would have been an invaluable guide to the student of the cuneiform 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 almost 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 [pg 096] learning or employing any but his own tongue for literary purposes. We hear of no intellectual intercourse between Greeks and barbarians before the days of Alexander and Alexandria. At Alexandria, various nations, speaking 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 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 laws, the faith of the Persians in the writings 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 patronized at Alexandria by the Ptolemies.65 The writings of Zoroaster also, the Zend-Avesta, would seem to have been rendered 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,66 the Peripatetic philosopher, the pupil of Callimachus, [pg 097] one of the most learned scholars at Alexandria.

      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.67 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 corresponded to these forms of thought, nor had they any inducement to reduce them to any practical rules. With Aristotle the verb or rhēmha is hardly more than predicate, and in sentences such as “the snow is white,” he would have called white a [pg 098] verb. The first who reduced the actual forms of language to something like order were the scholars of Alexandria. Their chief occupation was to publish correct texts of the Greek classics, and particularly of Homer. They were forced, therefore, to pay attention to the exact forms of Greek grammar. The MSS. sent to Alexandria and Pergamus from different parts of Greece varied considerably, and it could only be determined by careful observation which forms were to be tolerated in Homer and which were not. Their editions of Homer were not only ekdoseis, a Greek word literally rendered in Latin by editio, i.e. issues of books, but diorthōseis, 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 recognized, 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 sentence 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, [pg 099] and the relative pronoun who, the second socket;68 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 speech, 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 restored 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 terminology—we see that the first idea of numbers, of a singular and a plural, was fixed and defined by the philosopher. СКАЧАТЬ