We can now see clearly what is the object and scope of the science of language. It has to do with language in all its forms as the significant utterance of society. Where utterance ceases to be significant, the science of language also ceases to investigate it. Beyond the barrier of roots it is unable to pass; other sciences—ethnology, psychology, physiology—must be called in if we wish to know what lies beyond that barrier, what, in short, were the inarticulate utterances and gestures which gave rise to articulate speech. Glottology has to investigate the origin of language so far as it is really language, but no further. By the use of the comparative method, words, forms, sentences, dialects, and languages are classified and traced back to their most primitive form, and the laws which govern their development and relationships determined and explained. In this work of comparison, phonology and sematology ought to go hand in hand, since language consists in the intimate union of sound and thought; but inasmuch as the facts and laws of phonology can be more readily discovered and tested than those of sematology, it is necessary that our linguistic researches should have their starting-point on the phonological side. Inasmuch as language is the reflection of the thought of a community, the history of words and forms, as determined by the application of the laws of glottology, will be also the mental and spiritual history of the community that used them. Like the geologist, therefore, who can reconstruct the material history of the earth and restore the various forms of life that have successively peopled it, the scientific student of language can read the past history of human society in the fossil-records of speech. By tracing the Greek δῆμος to the root δα, “to divide,” he can show that private property in Attica originated in that allotment of land by the commune which still prevails among the Slavs, while not only the existence but even the mode of life and intellectual horizon of the primitive Aryans has been revealed by comparative philology with more certainty and minuteness than could have been done by any chronicle, however perfect. But perhaps the most important of the results obtained by the application of the comparative method to language, has been the light thrown upon the origin and nature of mythology and the history of religion. Two new sciences, those of comparative mythology and comparative religion, have grown up under the shelter of glottology, and form subordinate sciences dependent upon it. In the more immediately practical sphere of education, again, the science of language has lightened the labours of the learner by explaining the reason of the rule while it insists upon the reversal of the old unscientific mode of teaching languages by beginning with the dead ones, and points out that the method of science and of nature alike is to proceed from the known to the unknown. By breaking down the prejudices that have so long maintained our present cumbrous and inaccurate spelling, it is preparing the way for a reform in that direction, with its consequent saving of time and labour, while the construction of an universal language is the aim towards which its students ultimately look.
But meanwhile, though much has been accomplished, much more still remains to be done. Comparative philology and the science of language are not yet a century old, and the problems of speech that still await solution are many and important. The previous chapter will have shown how various are the opinions still held as to the nature of language and its science, while the belief that the exceptional—we might almost say abnormal—Aryan family of speech is the type and rule of all others still unconsciously influences a large amount of philological reasoning. Is the science of language a physical or a historical one? Did roots constitute a spoken language or are they phonetic types which never entered into actual speech? Have isolating languages become agglutinative and agglutinative languages inflectional? Do dialects precede the common language or does the common language precede dialects? Have the languages of the world been all derived from one or two primitive centres or do they point to an infinite diversity of origin? Such are some of the questions which still await an answer, and the answer requires more investigation, more patient observation and induction, and, above all, more labourers in the field of research.
CHAPTER III.
THE THREE CAUSES OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE.
“Πάντα ῥεῖ.”—Herakleitus.
Sciences may be classed as historical or physical according as they deal with the mind of man or with external nature. The forces and materials of nature remain always the same: oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, are in no way different to-day from what they were a million of ages ago, and, combined in the same proportions, would always have produced water. Man and his intellectual creations, on the other hand, have a history; that is, the same causes do not always act in the same way, nor do the causes themselves always remain the same. The sum of the forces set in motion by the human will goes on increasing in an accelerated ratio: each new generation is influenced and moulded by the one that preceded it, and that influence becomes itself a fresh factor in the sum of the forces and causes at work. In place of the simpler processes of nature, with their unvarying uniformity of action, we have an infinitely complicated development, each stage of which is the immediate growth of the previous one, and is in turn the origin and germ of all that are to follow. Unlike the forces and phænomena of nature, thought is infinitely progressive, for
“through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”
Wherever we have to deal with the products of human thought, there we have a constant ever-varying evolution, conditioned, it is true, by the uniform laws of outward nature, but continually modifying and adapting them. It is through the conditions thus imposed on the development of thought that we can discover the direction it has taken, and our inquiry thus becomes in great measure a historical one. We have to see under what conditions, in what external shape, as it were, the development of thought has displayed itself at each particular stage of its progress.
Like sociology, or comparative law, the science of language is concerned with a product of the human intelligence, and must consequently be included among the historical sciences. Language, we have seen, is significant sound; sound without significance is not yet language. As it is the inward sense and meaning, therefore, which constitute the essence of language, the primary object of comparative philology ought to be to discover the nature, origin, and history of the signification we breathe into our words and sentences. This can only be done, however, by finding out the conditions under which this signification is put into them, and by questioning the external side of language, those articulate sounds, namely, whereby we communicate our meaning to another. Now the external side of language is purely physiological and governed accordingly by purely physical laws. Phonology, in short, is as much a physical science as sematology is a historical one; and if we claim for the science of language in general the rank of a historical science, it is only because the meaning, rather than the sound, is the essence of speech, and phonology the handmaid and instrument rather than the equivalent of glottology. The method pursued by the science of language is the method of physical science; and this, combined with the fact that the laws of sound are also physical—the same conditions producing the same sounds in all periods of human history,—has occasioned the belief that the science of language is a physical science. But such a view results in identifying phonology and glottology, in making a subordinate science equivalent to the higher one, and in ignoring all those questions as to the nature and origin of language which are of supreme importance to the philosophy of speech. If we treat glottology as a physical science we must content ourselves with an exposition of the laws of sound and a mere description of the languages of the world and their classification, so far as it is founded on phonology alone. It is evident that such a classification must be superficial and incomplete; the relationship of languages is primarily based on grammar and structure rather than on a community of roots, and even roots must agree in sense as well as in sound before they can be admitted in proof of linguistic kinship. The intimate and inseparable connection between the inward and the outward, between sense and sound, in articulate speech, is a symbol of the connection between the historical and the physical methods of investigating it; but inasmuch as the sense is more important than the sound, so, too, the historical side of linguistic science is more important than its physical side.