Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin - Otto Jespersen

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“theory of letters” he gave fuller word lists than people had been accustomed to, and this opened the eyes of scholars to the great regularity reigning in this department of linguistic development. Though in his own etymological practice he was far from the strict idea of ‘phonetic law’ that played such a prominent rôle in later times, he thus paved the way for it. He speaks of law at any rate in connexion with the consonant shift, and there recognizes that it serves to curb wild etymologies and becomes a test for them (Gesch 291). The consonant shift thus became the law in linguistics, and because it affected a great many words known to everybody, and in a new and surprising way associated well-known Latin or Greek words with words of one’s own mother-tongue, it became popularly the keystone of a new wonderful science.

      Grimm coined several of the terms now generally used in linguistics; thus umlaut and ablaut, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ declensions and conjugations. As to the first, we have seen that it was Rask who first understood and who taught Grimm the cause of this phenomenon, which in English has often been designated by the German term, while Sweet calls it ‘mutation’ and others better ‘infection.’ With regard to ‘ablaut’ (Sweet: gradation, best perhaps in English apophony), Rask termed it ‘omlyd,’ a word which he never applied to Grimm’s ‘umlaut,’ thus keeping the two kinds of vowel change as strictly apart as Grimm does. Apophony was first discovered in that class of verbs which Grimm called ‘strong’; he was fascinated by the commutation of the vowels in springe, sprang, gesprungen, and sees in it, as in bimbambum, something mystic and admirable, characteristic of the old German spirit. He was thus blind to the correspondences found in other languages, and his theory led him astray in the second volume, in which he constructed imaginary verbal roots to explain apophony wherever it was found outside the verbs.

      

      Though Grimm, as we have seen, was by his principles and whole tendency averse to prescribing laws for a language, he is sometimes carried away by his love for mediæval German, as when he gives as the correct nominative form der boge, though everybody for centuries had said der bogen. In the same way many of his followers would apply the historical method to questions of correctness of speech, and would discard the forms evolved in later times in favour of previously existing forms which were looked upon as more ‘organic.’

      It will not be necessary here to speak of the imposing work done by Grimm in the rest of his long life, chiefly spent as a professor in Berlin. But in contrast to the ordinary view I must say that what appears to me as most likely to endure is his work on syntax, contained in the fourth volume of his grammar and in monographs. Here his enormous learning, his close power of observation, and his historical method stand him in good stead, and there is much good sense and freedom from that kind of metaphysical systematism which was triumphant in contemporaneous work on classical syntax. His services in this field are the more interesting because he did not himself seem to set much store by these studies and even said that syntax was half outside the scope of grammar. This utterance belongs to a later period than that of the birth of historical and comparative linguistics, and we shall have to revert to it after sketching the work of the third great founder of this science, to whom we shall now turn.

      II.—§ 6. Franz Bopp.

      The third, by some accounted the greatest, among the founders of modern linguistic science was Franz Bopp. His life was uneventful. At the age of twenty-one (he was born in 1791) he went to Paris to study Oriental languages, and soon concentrated his attention on Sanskrit. His first book, from which it is customary in Germany to date the birth of Comparative Philology, appeared in 1816, while he was still in Paris, under the title Ueber des conjugationssystem der sanskritsprache in vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen sprache, but the latter part of the small volume was taken up with translations from Sanskrit, and for a long time he was just as much a Sanskrit scholar, editing and translating Sanskrit texts, as a comparative grammarian. He showed himself in the latter character in several papers read before the Berlin Academy, after he had been made a professor there in 1822, and especially in his famous Vergleichende grammatik des sanskrit, ṣend, armenischen, griechischen, lateinischen, litauischen, altslawischen, gotischen und deutschen, the first edition of which was published between 1833 and 1849, the second in 1857, and the third in 1868. Bopp died in 1867.

      Of Bopp’s Conjugationssystem a revised, rearranged and greatly improved English translation came out in 1820 under the title Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages. This was reprinted with a good introduction by F. Techmer in his Internationale zeitschrift für allgem. sprachwissenschaft IV (1888), and in the following remarks I shall quote this (abbreviated AC) instead of, or alongside of, the German original (abbreviated C).

      Bopp’s chief aim (and in this he was characteristically different from Rask) was to find out the ultimate origin of grammatical forms. He follows his quest by the aid of Sanskrit forms, though he does not consider these as the ultimate forms themselves: “I do not believe that the Greek, Latin, and other European languages are to be considered as derived from the Sanskrit in the state in which we find it in Indian books; I feel rather inclined to consider them altogether as subsequent variations of one original tongue, which, however, the Sanskrit has preserved more perfect than its kindred dialects. But whilst therefore the language of the Brahmans more frequently enables us to conjecture the primitive form of the Greek and Latin languages than what we discover in the oldest authors and monuments, the latter on their side also may not unfrequently elucidate the Sanskrit grammar” (AC 3). Herein subsequent research has certainly borne out Bopp’s view.

      After finding out by a comparison of the grammatical forms of Sanskrit, Greek, etc., which of these forms were identical and what were their oldest shapes, he tries to investigate the ultimate origin of these forms. This he takes to be a comparatively easy consequence of the first task, but he was here too much under the influence of the philosophical grammar then in vogue. Gottfried Hermann (De emendanda ratione Græcæ grammaticæ, 1801), on purely logical grounds, distinguishes three things as necessary elements of each sentence, the subject, the predicate, and the copula joining the first two elements together; as the power of the verb is to attribute the predicate to the subject, there is really only one verb, namely the verb to be. Bopp’s teacher in Paris, Silvestre de Sacy, says the same thing, and Bopp repeats: “A verb, in the most restricted meaning of the term, is that part of speech by which a subject is connected with its attribute. According to this definition it would appear that there can exist only one verb, namely, the substantive verb, in Latin esse; in English, to be. … Languages of a structure similar to that of the Greek, Latin, etc., can express by one verb of this kind a whole logical proposition, in which, however, that part of speech which expresses the connexion of the subject with its attribute, which is the characteristic function of the verb, is generally entirely omitted or understood. The Latin verb dat expresses the proposition ‘he gives,’ or ‘he is giving’: the letter t, indicating the third person, is the subject, da expresses the attribute of giving, and the grammatical copula is understood. In the verb potest, the latter is expressed, and potest unites in itself the three essential parts of speech, t being the subject, es the copula, and pot the attribute.”

      Starting from this logical conception of grammar, Bopp is inclined to find everywhere the ‘substantive verb’ to be in its two Sanskrit forms as and bhu as an integral part of verbal forms. He is not the first to think that terminations, which are now inseparable parts of a verb, were originally independent words; thus Horne Tooke (in Epea pteroenta, 1786, ii. 429) expressly says that “All those common terminations in any language … are themselves separate words with distinct meanings,” and explains, for instance, Latin ibo from i, ‘go’ + b, ‘will,’ from Greek boúl(omai) + o ‘I,’ from ego. Bopp’s explanations are similar to this, though they do not imply such violent shortenings as that of boúl(omai) to b. He finds the root Sanskrit as, ‘to be,’ in Latin perfects like scrip-s-i, in Greek aorists like e-tup-s-a and in futures like tup-s-o. That the same addition thus indicates different tenses does not trouble Bopp greatly; he explains

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