My best thanks are due to Professor Mahaffy for his kindness in looking over the sheets of the present work during its passage through the press, and to Mr. Henry Sweet for performing the same kind offices towards the fourth chapter. Mr. Sweet’s name will guarantee the freedom of the chapter from phonetic heresies. I have also to tender my thanks to Professor Rolleston for the help he has given me in the preparation of the diagrams which accompany the work, while I hardly know how to express my gratitude sufficiently to Mr. W. G. Hird, of Bradford, who has taken upon himself the onerous task of providing an index to the two volumes. How onerous such a labour is can be realized only by those who have already undergone it.

A. H. Sayce.

Queen’s College, Oxford, November, 1879.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VOL. I.

PAGE
Preface [v]
Chapter I. Theories of Language [1]
” II. The Nature and Science of Language [90]
”III. The three Causes of Change in Language (Imitation, Emphasis, and Laziness) [163]
Dialectic Variety [202]
Appendix to Chapter III. Specimens of Mixed Jargons [219]
Chapter IV. The Physiology and Semasiology of Speech (Phonology and Sematology) [226]
Etymology [345]
Appendix I. to Chapter IV. The Vocal Organs of Animals [350]
” II. ” The Alphabets of Prince L-L. Bonaparte (Mr. A. J. Ellis) and Mr. H. Sweet [353]
Chapter V. The Morphology of Speech [364]
The Metaphysics of Language [404]
Comparative Syntax [421]

CHAPTER I.
THEORIES OF LANGUAGE.

“If we preserve in our histories of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the physical elements—the names of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Empedocles—we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language—the founders of one of the most useful and most successful branches of philosophy—the first grammarians.”—Max Müller.

“Speech is silvern, silence is golden,” is the well-known saying of a modern prophet, wearied with the idle utterances of a transition age, and forgetful that the prophet, or προφητής, is himself but the “spokesman” of another, and that the era which changed the Hebrew seer into the Nabi, or “proclaimer,” brought with it also the beginning of culture and civilization, and the consciousness of a high religious destiny. Far truer was the instinct of the old poet of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient monument of our Aryan literature, written, it may be, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ, when he calls “the Word” one of the highest goddesses “which rushes onward like the wind, which bursts through heaven and earth, and, awe-inspiring to each one that it loves, makes him a Brahman, a poet, and a sage.” The haphazard etymology which saw in the μέροπες ἄνθρωποι of Homer “articulate-speaking men,” must indeed be given up, but we may still picture to ourselves the “winged words” which seemed inspired with the life and divinity of Hermês, or the sacred Muses from whom the Greek singer drew all his genius and power. Language is at once the bond and the creation of society, the symbol and token of the boundary between man and brute.