Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin - Otto Jespersen

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the particles denoting secondary sense modifications consist in monosyllables that are completely independent of the actual word. It is clear that from Schlegel’s own point of view we cannot here properly speak of ‘affixes,’ and thus Chinese really, though Schlegel himself does not say so, falls outside his affix languages and forms a class by itself. On the other hand, his arguments for reckoning Semitic languages among affix languages are very weak, and he seems also somewhat inclined to say that much in their structure resembles real flexion. If we introduce these two changes into his system, we arrive at the threefold division found in slightly different shapes in most subsequent works on general linguistics, the first to give it being perhaps Schlegel’s brother, A. W. Schlegel, who speaks of (1) les langues sans aucune structure grammaticale—under which misleading term he understands Chinese with its unchangeable monosyllabic words; (2) les langues qui emploient des affixes; (3) les langues à inflexions.

      Like his brother, A. W. Schlegel places the flexional languages highest and thinks them alone ‘organic.’ On the other hand, he subdivides flexional languages into two classes, synthetic and analytic, the latter using personal pronouns and auxiliaries in the conjugation of verbs, prepositions to supply the want of cases, and adverbs to express the degrees of comparison. While the origin of the synthetic languages loses itself in the darkness of ages, the analytic languages have been created in modern times; all those that we know are due to the decomposition of synthetic languages. These remarks on the division of languages are found in the Introduction to the book Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençale (1818) and are thus primarily meant to account for the contrast between synthetic Latin and analytic Romanic.

      II.—§ 3. Rasmus Rask.

      We now come to the three greatest names among the initiators of linguistic science in the beginning of the nineteenth century. If we give them in their alphabetical order, Bopp, Grimm and Rask, we also give them in the order of merit in which most subsequent historians have placed them. The works that constitute their first claims to the title of founder of the new science came in close succession, Bopp’s Conjugationssystem in 1816, Rask’s Undersøgelse in 1818, and the first volume of Grimm’s Grammatik in 1819. While Bopp is entirely independent of the two others, we shall see that Grimm was deeply influenced by Rask, and as the latter’s contributions to our science began some years before his chief work just mentioned (which had also been finished in manuscript in 1814, thus two years before Bopp’s Conjugationssystem), the best order in which to deal with the three men will perhaps be to take Rask first, then to mention Grimm, who in some ways was his pupil, and finally to treat of Bopp: in this way we shall also be enabled to see Bopp in close relation with the subsequent development of Comparative Grammar, on which he, and not Rask, exerted the strongest influence.

      Born in a peasant’s hut in the heart of Denmark in 1787, Rasmus Rask was a grammarian from his boyhood. When a copy of the Heimskringla was given him as a school prize, he at once, without any grammar or dictionary, set about establishing paradigms, and so, before he left school, acquired proficiency in Icelandic, as well as in many other languages. At the University of Copenhagen he continued in the same course, constantly widened his linguistic horizon and penetrated into the grammatical structure of the most diverse languages. Icelandic (Old Norse), however, remained his favourite study, and it filled him with enthusiasm and national pride that “our ancestors had such an excellent language,” the excellency being measured chiefly by the full flexional system which Icelandic shared with the classical tongues, partly also by the pure, unmixed state of the Icelandic vocabulary. His first book (1811) was an Icelandic grammar, an admirable production when we consider the meagre work done previously in this field. With great lucidity he reduces the intricate forms of the language into a consistent system, and his penetrating insight into the essence of language is seen when he explains the vowel changes, which we now comprise under the name of mutation or umlaut, as due to the approximation of the vowel of the stem to that of the ending, at that time a totally new point of view. This we gather from Grimm’s review, in which Rask’s explanation is said to be “more astute than true” (“mehr scharfsinnig als wahr,” Kleinere schriften, 7. 515). Rask even sees the reason of the change in the plural blöð as against the singular blað in the former having once ended in -u, which has since disappeared. This is, so far as I know, the first inference ever drawn to a prehistoric state of language.

      In 1814, during a prolonged stay in Iceland, Rask sent down to Copenhagen his most important work, the prize essay on the origin of the Old Norse language (Undersøgelse om det gamle nordiske eller islandske sprogs oprindelse) which for various reasons was not printed till 1818. If it had been published when it was finished, and especially if it had been printed in a language better known than Danish, Rask might well have been styled the founder of the modern science of language, for his work contains the best exposition of the true method of linguistic research written in the first half of the nineteenth century and applies this method to the solution of a long series of important questions. Only one part of it was ever translated into another language, and this was unfortunately buried in an appendix to Vater’s Vergleichungstafeln, 1822. Yet Rask’s work even now repays careful perusal, and I shall therefore give a brief résumé of its principal contents.

      Language according to Rask is our principal means of finding out anything about the history of nations before the existence of written documents, for though everything may change in religion, customs, laws and institutions, language generally remains, if not unchanged, yet recognizable even after thousands of years. But in order to find out anything about the relationship of a language we must proceed methodically and examine its whole structure instead of comparing mere details; what is here of prime importance is the grammatical system, because words are very often taken over from one language to another, but very rarely grammatical forms. The capital error in most of what has been written on this subject is that this important point has been overlooked. That language which has the most complicated grammar is nearest to the source; however mixed a language may be, it belongs to the same family as another if it has the most essential, most material and indispensable words in common with it; pronouns and numerals are in this respect most decisive. If in such words there are so many points of agreement between two languages that it is possible to frame rules for the transitions of letters (in other passages Rask more correctly says sounds) from the one language to the other, there is a fundamental kinship between the two languages, more particularly if there are corresponding similarities in their structure and constitution. This is a most important thesis, and Rask supplements it by saying that transitions of sounds are naturally dependent on their organ and manner of production.

      Next Rask proceeds to apply these principles to his task of finding out the origin of the Old Icelandic language. He describes its position in the ‘Gothic’ (Gothonic, Germanic) group and then looks round to find congeners elsewhere. He rapidly discards Greenlandic and Basque as being too remote in grammar and vocabulary; with regard to Keltic languages he hesitates, but finally decides in favour of denying relationship. (He was soon to see his error in this; see below.) Next he deals at some length with Finnic and Lapp, and comes to the conclusion that the similarities are due to loans rather than to original kinship. But when he comes to the Slavonic languages his utterances have a different ring, for he is here able to disclose so many similarities in fundamentals that he ranges these languages within the same great family as Icelandic. The same is true with regard to Lithuanian and Lettic, which are here for the first time correctly placed as an independent sub-family, though closely akin to Slavonic. The comparisons with Latin, and especially with Greek, are even more detailed; and Rask in these chapters really presents us with a succinct, but on the whole marvellously correct, comparative grammar of Gothonic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Latin and Greek, besides examining numerous lexical correspondences. He does not yet know any of the related Asiatic languages, but throws out the hint that Persian and Indian may be the remote source of Icelandic through Greek. Greek he considers to be the ‘source’ or ‘root’ of the Gothonic languages, though he expresses himself with a degree of uncertainty which forestalls the correct notion that these languages have all of them sprung from the same extinct and unknown language. This view is very clearly expressed in a letter he wrote from St. Petersburg in the same year in which his Undersøgelse was published; he here says: “I divide our family of languages in this way: the Indian (Dekanic, Hindostanic), Iranic

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