Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin - Otto Jespersen

Скачать книгу

only to Schleicher among the linguists of those days was Georg Curtius (1820–85), at one time his colleague in the University of Prague. Curtius’s special study was Greek, and his books on the Greek verb and on Greek etymology cleared up a great many doubtful points; he also contributed very much to bridge the gulf between classical philology and Aryan linguistics. His views on general questions were embodied in the book Zur Chronologie der indogermanischen Sprachforschung (1873). While Schleicher died when his fame was at its highest and his theories were seemingly victorious in all the leading circles, Curtius had the misfortune to see a generation of younger men, including some of his own best disciples, such as Brugmann, advance theories that seemed to him to be in conflict with the most essential principles of his cherished science; and though he himself, like Schleicher, had always been in favour of a stricter observance of sound-laws than his predecessors, his last book was a polemic against those younger scholars who carried the same point to the excess of admitting no exceptions at all, who believed in innumerable analogical formations even in the old languages, and whose reconstructions of primitive forms appeared to the old man as deprived of that classical beauty of the ursprache which was represented in his own and Schleicher’s works (Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung, 1885). But this is anticipating.

      If Curtius was a comparativist with a sound knowledge of classical philology, Johan Nikolai Madvig was pre-eminently a classical philologist who took a great interest in general linguistics and brought his critical acumen and sober common sense to bear on many of the problems that exercised the minds of his contemporaries. He was opposed to everything of a vague and mystical nature in the current theories of language and disliked the tendency of some scholars to find deep-lying mysterious powers at the root of linguistic phenomena. But he probably went too far in his rationalism, for example, when he entirely denied the existence of the sound-symbolism on which Humboldt had expatiated. He laid much stress on the identity of the linguistic faculty in all ages: the first speakers had no more intention than people to-day of creating anything systematic or that would be good for all times and all occasions—they could have no other object in view than that of making themselves understood at the moment; hence the want of system which we find everywhere in languages: a different number of cases in singular and plural, different endings, etc. Madvig did not escape some inconsistencies, as when he himself would explain the use of the soft vowel a to denote the feminine gender by a kind of sound-symbolism, or when he thought it possible to determine in what order the different grammatical ideas presented themselves to primitive man (tense relation first in the verb, number before case in the noun). He attached too little value to phonological and etymological research, but on the whole his views were sounder than many which were set forth on the same subjects at the time; his papers, however, were very little known, partly because they were written in Danish, partly because his style was extremely heavy and difficult, and when he finally brought out his Kleine philologische schriften in German (1875), he expressed his regret in the preface at finding that many of the theories he had put forward years before in Danish had in the meantime been independently arrived at by Whitney, who had had the advantage of expressing them in a world-language.

      One of the most important features of the period with which we are here dealing is the development of a number of special branches of historical linguistics on a comparative basis. Curtius’s work on Greek might be cited as one example; in the same way there were specialists in Sanskrit (Westergaard and Benfey among others), in Slavonic (Miklosich and Schleicher), in Keltic (Zeuss), etc. Grimm had numerous followers in the Gothonic or Germanic field, while in Romanic philology there was an active and flourishing school, headed by Friedrich Diez, whose Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen and Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen were perhaps the best introduction to the methodical study of linguistics that anyone could desire; the writer of these lines looks back with the greatest gratitude to that period of his youth when he had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of these truly classical works. Everything was so well arranged, so carefully thought out and so lucidly explained, that one had everywhere the pleasant feeling that one was treading on firm ground, the more so as the basis of the whole was not an artificially constructed nebulous ursprache, but the familiar forms and words of an historical language. Here one witnessed the gradual differentiation of Latin into seven or eight distinct languages, whose development it was possible to follow century by century in well-authenticated texts. The picture thus displayed before one’s eyes of actual linguistic growth in all domains—sounds, forms, word-formation, syntax—and (a very important corollary) of the interdependence of these domains, could not but leave a very strong impression—not merely enthusiasm for what had been achieved here, but also a salutary skepticism of theories in other fields which had not a similarly solid basis.

      III.—§ 8. Max Müller and Whitney.

      Working, as we have seen, in many fields, linguists had now brought to light a shoal of interesting facts affecting a great many languages and had put forth valuable theories to explain these facts; but most of their work remained difficult of access except to the specialist, and very little was done by the experts to impart to educated people in general those results of the new science which might be enjoyed without deeper study. But in 1861 Max Müller gave the first series of those Lectures on the Science of Language which, in numerous editions, did more than anything else to popularize linguistics and served to initiate a great many students into our science. In many ways these lectures were excellently adapted for this purpose, for the author had a certain knack of selecting interesting illustrations and of presenting his subject in a way that tended to create the same enthusiasm for it that he felt himself. But his arguments do not bear a close inspection. Too often, after stating a problem, he is found to fly off at a tangent and to forget what he has set out to prove for the sake of an interesting etymology or a clever paradox. He gives an uncritical acceptance to many of Schleicher’s leading ideas; thus, the science of linguistics is to him a physical science and has nothing to do with philology, which is an historical science. If, however, we look at the book itself, we shall find that everything that he counts on to secure the interest of his reader, everything that made his lectures so popular, is really non-naturalistic: all those brilliant exposés of word-history are really like historical anecdotes in a book on social evolution; they may have some bearing on the fundamental problems, but these are rarely or never treated as real problems of natural science. Nor does he, when taken to task, maintain his view very seriously, but partly retracts it and half-heartedly ensconces himself behind the dictum that everything depends on the definition you give of “physical science” (see especially Ch 234, 442, 497)—thus calling forth Whitney’s retort that “the implication here is that our author has a right at his own good pleasure to lay down such a definition of a physical science as should make the name properly applicable to the study of this particular one among the products of human capacities. … So he may prove that a whale is a fish, if you only allow him to define what a fish is” (M 23 f.).

      Though Schleicher and Max Müller in their own day had few followers in defining linguistics as a natural or physical science—the opposite view was taken, for instance, by Curtius (K 154), Madvig and Whitney—there can be no doubt that the naturalistic point of view practically, though perhaps chiefly unconsciously, had wide-reaching effects on the history of linguistic science. It was intimately connected with the problems chiefly investigated and with the way in which they were treated. From Grimm through Pott to Schleicher and his contemporaries we see a growing interest in phonological comparisons; more and more “sound-laws” were discovered, and those found were more and more rigorously applied, with the result that etymological investigation was attended with a degree of exactness of which former generations had no idea. But as these phonological studies were not, as a rule, based on a real, penetrating insight into the nature of speech-sounds, the work of the etymologist tended more and more to be purely mechanical, and the science of language was to a great extent deprived of those elements which are more intimately connected with the human ‘soul.’ Isolated vowels and consonants were compared, isolated flexional forms and isolated words were treated more and more in detail and explained by other isolated forms and words in other languages, all of them being like dead leaves shaken off a tree rather than parts of a living and moving whole. The speaking individual and the speaking community were too much lost sight of. Too often comparativists gained a considerable acquaintance with the sound-laws and the grammatical

Скачать книгу