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Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. Otto Jespersen
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isbn 4057664590428
Автор произведения Otto Jespersen
Жанр Языкознание
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III.—§ 3. J. H. Bredsdorff.
Another (and still earlier) work that was overlooked at the time was the little pamphlet Om Aarsagerne til Sprogenes Forandringer (1821) by the Dane J. H. Bredsdorff. Bopp and Grimm never really asked themselves the fundamental question, How is it that language changes: what are the driving forces that lead in course of time to such far-reaching differences as those we find between Sanskrit and Latin, or between Latin and French? Now, this is exactly the question that Bredsdorff treats in his masterly pamphlet. Like Rapp, he was a very good phonetician; but in the pamphlet that concerns us here he speaks not only of phonetic but of other linguistic changes as well. These he refers to the following causes, which he illustrates with well-chosen examples: (1) Mishearing and misunderstanding; (2) misrecollection; (3) imperfection of organs; (4) indolence: to this he inclines to refer nine-tenths of all those changes in the pronunciation of a language that are not due to foreign influences; (5) tendency towards analogy: here he gives instances from the speech of children and explains by analogy such phenomena as the extension of s to all genitives, etc.; (6) the desire to be distinct; (7) the need of expressing new ideas. He recognizes that there are changes that cannot be brought under any of these explanations, e.g. the Gothonic sound shift (cf. above, p. 43 note), and he emphasizes the many ways in which foreign nations or foreign languages may influence a language. Bredsdorff’s explanations may not always be correct; but what constitutes the deep originality of his little book is the way in which linguistic changes are always regarded in terms of human activity, chiefly of a psychological character. Here he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries; in fact, most of Bredsdorff’s ideas, such as the power of analogy, were the same that sixty years later had to fight so hard to be recognized by the leading linguists of that time.[13]
III.—§ 4. August Schleicher.
In Rapp, and even more in Bredsdorff, we get a whiff of the scientific atmosphere of a much later time; but most of the linguists of the twenties and following decades (among whom A. F. Pott deserves to be specially named) moved in essentially the same grooves as Bopp and Grimm, and it will not be necessary here to deal in detail with their work.
August Schleicher (1821–68) in many ways marks the culmination of the first period of Comparative Linguistics, as well as the transition to a new period with different aims and, partially at any rate, a new method. His intimate knowledge of many languages, his great power of combination, his clear-cut and always lucid exposition—all this made him a natural leader, and made his books for many years the standard handbooks of linguistic science. Unlike Bopp and Grimm, he was exclusively a linguist, or, as he called it himself, ‘glottiker,’ and never tired of claiming for the science of linguistics (‘glottik’), as opposed to philology, the rank of a separate natural science. Schleicher specialized in Slavonic and Lithuanian; he studied the latter language in its own home and took down a great many songs and tales from the mouths of the peasants; he was for some years a professor in the University of Prague, and there acquired a conversational knowledge of Czech; he spoke Russian, too, and thus in contradistinction to Bopp and Grimm had a first-hand knowledge of more than one foreign language; his interest in living speech is also manifested in his specimens of the dialect of his native town, Volkstümliches aus Sonneberg. When he was a child his father very severely insisted on the constant and correct use of the educated language at home; but the boy, perhaps all the more on account of the paternal prohibition, was deeply attracted to the popular dialect he heard from his playfellows and to the fascinating folklore of the old townspeople, which he was later to take down and put into print. In the preface he says that the acquisition of foreign tongues is rendered considerably easier through the habit of speaking two dialects from childhood.
What makes Schleicher particularly important for the purposes of this volume is the fact that in a long series of publications he put forth not only details of his science, but original and comprehensive views on the fundamental questions of linguistic theory, and that these had great influence on the linguistic philosophy of the following decades. He was, perhaps, the most consistent as well as one of the clearest of linguistic thinkers, and his views therefore deserve to be examined in detail and with the greatest care.
Apart from languages, Schleicher was deeply interested both in philosophy and in natural science, especially botany. From these he fetched many of the weapons of his armoury, and they coloured the whole of his theory of language. In his student days at Tübingen he became an enthusiastic adherent of the philosophy of Hegel, and not even the Darwinian sympathies and views of which he became a champion towards the end of his career made him abandon the doctrines of his youth. As for science, he says that naturalists make us understand that in science nothing is of value except facts established through strictly objective observation and the conclusions based on such facts—this is a lesson that he thinks many of his colleagues would do well to take to heart. There can be no doubt that Schleicher in his practice followed a much more rigorous and sober method than his predecessors, and that his Compendium in that respect stands far above Bopp’s Grammar. In his general reasonings on the nature of language, on the other hand, Schleicher did not always follow the strict principles of sober criticism, being, as we shall now see, too dependent on Hegelian philosophy, and also on certain dogmatic views that he had inherited from previous German linguists, from Schlegel downwards.
The Introductions to Schleicher’s two first volumes are entirely Hegelian, though with a characteristic difference, for in the first he says that the changes to be seen in the realm of languages are decidedly historical and in no way resemble the changes that we may observe in nature, for “however manifold these may be, they never show anything but a circular course that repeats itself continually” (Hegel), while in language, as in everything mental, we may see new things that have never existed before. One generation of animals or plants is like another; the skill of animals has no history, as human art has; language is specifically human and mental: its development is therefore analogous to history, for in both we see a continual progress to new phases. In Schleicher’s second volume, however, this view is expressly rejected in its main part, because Schleicher now wants to emphasize the natural character of language: it is true, he now says, that language shows a ‘werden’ which may be termed history in the wider sense of this word, but which is found in its purest form in nature; for instance, in the growing of a plant. Language belongs to the natural sphere, not to the sphere of free mental activity, and this must be our starting-point if we would discover the method of linguistic science (ii. 21).
It would, of course, be possible to say that the method of linguistic science is that of natural science, and yet to maintain that the object of linguistics is different from that of natural science, but Schleicher more and more tends to identify the two, and when he was attacked for saying, in his pamphlet on the Darwinian theory, that languages were material things, real natural objects, he wrote in defence Ueber die bedeutung der sprache für die naturgeschichte des menschen, which is highly characteristic as the culminating point of the materialistic way of looking at languages. The activity, he says, of any organ, e.g. one of the organs of digestion, or the brain or muscles, is dependent on the constitution of that organ. The different ways in which different species, nay even different individuals, walk are evidently conditioned by the structure of the limbs; the activity or function of the organ is, as it were, nothing but an aspect of the organ itself, even if it is not always possible by means of the knife or microscope of the scientist to demonstrate the material cause of the phenomenon. What is true of the manner of walking is true of language as well; for language is nothing but the result, perceptible through the ear, of the action of a complex of material substances in the structure of the brain and of the organs of speech, with their nerves, bones, muscles, etc. Anatomists, however, have not yet been able