Introduction to the science of language, Volume 1 (of 2)

by A. H. Sayce

It is possible that the democratic movement of Buddhism which broke down caste and raised the inferior dialects and languages of India to the same level as the sacred Sanskrit of the Veda, had much to do with the extraordinary success of the Hindu grammarians. The immediate object of their investigation was the language of the Rig-Veda, which had become obscure and partly obsolete through the changes wrought by time upon the spoken tongue. The Rig-Veda, pre-eminently called “the Veda,” is a collection of hymns and poems of various dates, some of which go back to the earliest days of the Aryan invasion of north-western India; the whole collection, however, may be roughly ascribed to at least the fourteenth or fifteenth century B.C. In course of time it came to assume a sacred character, and the theory of inspiration invented to support this goes much beyond the most extreme theory of verbal inspiration ever held in the Jewish or the Christian Church. The Rig-Veda was divided into ten mandalas or books, each mandala being assigned to some old family; and out of these were formed three new Vedas—the Yajur, the Sâma, and the Âtharva. The Yajur and the Sâma may be described as prayer-books compiled from the Rig for the use of the choristers and the ministers of the priests, and contain little besides what is found in the earliest and most sacred Veda. Along with the latter they sometimes go under the name of the Trayî or “Triad,” a name which implies that the Âtharva-Veda was not yet in existence when it was given. In fact, the Âtharvana may be described as a collection of poems mixed up with popular sayings, medical advice, magical formulæ, and the like. It was assigned to the Brahman or fourth class of priests, who superintended the ritual, just as the Sâma-Veda was assigned to the choristers, the Yajur-Veda to the acolytes, to whom the manual work involved in a sacrifice was delegated, and the Rig-Veda to the Hotri, or priest proper, who had to recite portions of it, whence its name of Rig, or “Praise.” The period that must have elapsed before the hymns of the Rig could have been collected together, invested with a sacred character, and elaborated into a ritual, must have been considerable; but not until this was done, and the three supplementary Vedas composed, was the whole Veda or depository of sacred “knowledge” complete. At a later date came the Brâhmanas, or commentaries on the Veda, the object of which was to explain obscure passages in the old hymns, and the erroneous and absurd explanations sometimes offered show pretty plainly how much both the language and the ideas of the people had changed. The sacredness of the Veda was reflected upon the Brâhmanas themselves, and a time came when they too began to be regarded as divine, and to be superseded by the Sûtras, the “strings” or manuals of the grammarians. The diffuse style of the Brâhmanas made way for the scientific brevity of the Sûtras, and Hindu literature entered upon its Alexandrine stage. Even the grammar of the Brâhmanas became archaic; and accordingly, though the Veda was the primary object of the grammarians’ labours, the Brâhmanas also had a share in their regard. The Sûtras endeavour to explain the Veda and all connected with it—a principal part of their work being naturally an explanation of the Vedic language and grammar. But, before this could be effected, an accurate register of the facts was required, and the Masoretes of India accordingly divided and counted, not only the verses and words, but even the syllables of the Rig-Veda. According to Śaunaka, the teacher of Kâtyâyana, the 1,028 hymns of the Rig-Veda contain 10,616 (or 10,622) verses, 153,826 words (padas), and 432,000 syllables, eleven of the hymns being of later date than the rest; and since the number of syllables and words given by Śaunaka is the number found in our present texts, it is clear that the Rig-Veda has been handed down, from the sixth century B.C. to our own day, with the most perfect precision. This is the more astonishing at first sight, from its being handed down orally alone; but the labours of Śaunaka and his brother scholars had much to do with the result. The numbering of the syllables of the Veda led to the formation of the so-called Pada-text, in which the single words are divided one from another, instead of being run together in accordance with the laws of Sandhi. These laws require that the final letter of a word should be modified by the initial letter of the word that follows, the consequence being that two separate syllables (as in tad śrutwâ, “having heard that”) are made to coalesce into one (tachchhrutwâ). To resolve these amalgamated syllables was to discover the phonetic rules and principles which regulated the pronunciation of Sanskrit, and to lay the foundation of a scientific phonology.

But a more important work remained behind. Kautsa, a grammarian of the fifth or sixth century B.C., tells us that the language of the Rig-Veda had by that time become so obsolete as to be understood with difficulty, and yet the exact recital of the hymns had come to be regarded as indispensable for the performance of religious service. The Prâtiśâkhyas, the oldest production of the grammatical school, show a surprising acquaintance with the physiological facts of phonetic utterance, and far surpass the most advanced labours of the Greeks in the same direction. The Nighantavas, a little later, contain a list of rare Vedic words, and perhaps started the controversy which broke out shortly afterwards among the grammarians as to the origin of the nouns. Śâkatâyana and his followers, the Nairuktas, or Etymologists, maintained that they were all derived from verbs; while his opponents, Gârgya and others, called the Vaiyâkaranas or Analyzers, sought to show that some at least had a different origin. In the end, however, the party of Śâkatâyana proved victorious, and the result was not only the formation of the Sanskrit dictionary, but, what was far more important, the clear enunciation of the doctrine of roots. In the hands of Yâska and Pânini the doctrine became fruitful in consequences; the classical language of India was thoroughly analyzed, and the essential part of each word marked off from its formative suffixes. In short, a scientific grammar was created. The Nirukta, or “Etymology,” of Yâska is a model of method and conciseness, though it is thrown into the shade by the grammar of Pânini. This was the crowning work of the Hindu grammarians, and, composed as it was in the fourth century B.C., may well excite our astonishment and admiration. In eight books, and about 4,000 short rules, it sums up the principles of Sanskrit phonology, the declension of the noun and the conjugation of the verb (which agree in the main with those worked out by the Greek grammarians), the nature of the adverbs and other particles, the rules of syntax, which are interspersed among the various divisions of the accidence, the etymology of words, with an exhaustive list of “primary” and “secondary” formative suffixes, and a minute analysis of composition which has been the basis of modern attempts to deal with this intricate subject. As an appendix to his Grammar, Pânini also compiled a list of roots (dhâtus, or “elements”), amounting in all to about 1,700.

The brevity and compactness of the work was much aided by the algebraic system of symbols by which the various terms of grammar were expressed. Thus, in Pânini, a verbal termination is denoted by l, the endings of the primary tenses by lt, those of the secondary tenses by ln, the special tenses and moods being pointed out by an inserted vowel, as lât for the present, lot for the imperative, and so on. The mathematical character of this device shows the precision with which the several rules of grammar had been ascertained and laid down, as well as the instinctive recognition that there was a science of grammar as well as a science of mathematics. It only remained for a later generation of Western scholars to demonstrate that such was really the case.

It may seem strange that this later generation was so long in coming. Already, at the end of the sixteenth century, an Italian, Philippo Sassetti, during a five years’ residence in India, had made himself acquainted with Sanskrit, and drew attention to the likeness between the Sanskrit numerals and other words and corresponding words in his native language.[23] Another Italian, Roberto de Nobili, who went to India in 1606 as a missionary, actually transformed himself into a Brahman, in order to win over the Hindus; and after acquiring a knowledge not only of Tamil and Telugu, but also of Sanskrit, “showed himself in public, dressed in the proper garb of the Brahmans, wearing their cord and their frontal mark, observing their diet, and submitting even to the complicated rules of caste.”[24] One of his converts—so at least Professor Max Müller thinks—composed the curious Ezur, or fourth Veda, which professes to be a lost Veda that he came to preach, and “contains a wild mixture of Hindu and Christian doctrine.” Fifty years after De Nobili a German missionary, named Heinrich Roth, was able to dispute in Sanskrit with the Brahmans, and in 1740 a Frenchman, Père Pons, sent home a comprehensive and fairly accurate report upon Sanskrit literature. It was not till 1790, however, that the first Sanskrit grammar was published in Europe, at Rome, by two German friars, Hanxleden and Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomeo, whose real name was Philipp Wesdin. Some years before (in 1767) the Frenchmen Cœurdoux and Barthélemy had written from Pondicherry to the Academy to express their opinion that a relationship existed between the vocabularies of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and to prove that this relationship could not be accounted for by the hypothesis of borrowing. Their letter, however, though read in 1768, was not printed until 1808, after the death of Anquetil-Duperron, and at the end of one of his Mémoires. Meanwhile English and German scholars had entered the field, and the opinion expressed by the French missionaries had become a belief of the learned world.

In 1784 the Asiatic Society was founded at Calcutta, and its first members did their utmost to extend a knowledge of the Sanskrit language and literature. Halhed, in the preface to his “Grammar of Bengali,” published in 1778, had noticed the “similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek;” and Sir William Jones,[25] addressing the Asiatic Society at Calcutta in 1786, states that “no philologer could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason,” he goes on to say, “though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.”

Here, then, was the great discovery made. It required a man like Sir William Jones, who united the tastes of the poet and littérateur with those of the linguistic scholar to overcome the prejudices of a classical education, and to admit that the languages of Greece and Rome had the same origin as the languages of the despised Hindu. It required still greater insight and sobriety to trace them all from a common source, rather than to magnify the newly acquired Oriental speech by making it the parent of the languages of the West; and though we may now smile at his attempt to explain classical mythology by comparing its personages with Indian deities with similarly sounding names, Sir William Jones deserves to be remembered as the pioneer of comparative philology. He stands out in honourable contrast to Dugald Stewart, the Scotch philosopher of common sense, who, in absolute ignorance of even a single Sanskrit character, undertook the task of proving that Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature were alike the inventions of the Brahmans, and that they were forged after the model of Greek and Latin in order to deceive European scholars. It was not the first time that philosophy and common sense have found themselves opposed to unwelcome knowledge.

Lord Monboddo, Stewart’s fellow-countryman, showed himself a sounder critic and a more unprejudiced inquirer.[26] His friend, Wilkins, the translator of the “Bhagavadgîta” and “Hitopadeśa,” and author of a Sanskrit grammar, proved to his satisfaction that Sanskrit was “a richer and in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer,” and that the likeness between Sanskrit on the one side, and Greek and Latin on the other, demonstrated the descent of all three from some common primæval tongue. The Scotch judge accordingly found a niche for the new discovery in his theory which derived mankind from two tailless apes, and the languages of the world from the Osirian language of Egypt. Sanskrit, it was plain, had been introduced into India by Osiris, just as Greek had been brought into the Peloponnesus by the Pelasgians. Not only the numerals, “the use of which must have been coeval with civil society,” or the words of common life, but even the grammatical forms of a verb like asmi, “I am,” are produced in evidence of the relationship of the classical languages of Europe and of India. As early as 1795 Lord Monboddo was not far from the discovery of that Indo-European family of speech which has been the starting-point and foundation of the science of language.

Both Sir William Jones and Lord Monboddo, however, did no more than draw aside the curtain for a moment and reveal the new world that lay behind. It was reserved for Germany to accomplish what England had begun. The genius of Leibniz had already prepared the way by overthrowing the belief that Hebrew was the original language from which all others are to be traced, and by setting missionaries and others to work in compiling vocabularies, grammars, and phrase-books of the manifold dialects of the world. Thus, in thanking Witsen, the Burgomaster of Amsterdam, for a translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Hottentot, he writes: “Remember, I implore you, and remind your Muscovite friends, to make researches in order to procure specimens of the Scythian languages, the Samoyedes, Siberians, Bashkirs, Kalmuks, Tungusians, and others;” and his sound scientific instinct makes him ask (in his “Dissertation on the Origin of Nations,” 1710): “Why begin with the unknown instead of the known? It stands to reason that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and then to ascend, step by step, to the most ancient tongues.”[27] He found an illustrious convert in Catherine of Russia, who once shut herself up for nearly a year in order to work at her “Comparative Dictionary of Languages,” and the “Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinitá e diversitá” (1784) of the Spanish Jesuit missionary, Don Lorenzo Hervas and the “Mithridates” of Adelung and Vater are, as Professor Max Müller has observed, plainly due to his influence. The efforts of Leibniz were seconded in another direction by those of Herder, to whom we may trace the conception of a comparative treatment of literature and a recognition of the merits of literary remains beyond those of Greece and Rome. Herder, as has already been remarked, made the rise of an historical science possible by substituting the idea of development for that of uniform sequence in history, and his treatise on the “Origin of Speech,” crowned by the Berlin Academy in 1772, dissipated for ever the theory that language was a miraculous gift and not the slowly evolved creation of the human mind. The German mind was already prepared to seize and unfold the consequences which resulted from the discovery of Sanskrit. It was a poet, Friedrich Schlegel, however, and not a philologist, who first laid down the great fact that the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany, and Slavonia form but one family, daughters of the same mother, and heirs of the same wealth of words and flections. Schlegel learnt Sanskrit while in England during the peace of Amiens (1801-1802), and to his work on “The Language and Wisdom of the Indians,” published in 1808, may be traced the foundation of the science of language. All that was now required was some master-scholar who should continue the work begun by Schlegel, and establish on a deep and firm basis the edifice that he had reared. This master-scholar was found in Francis Bopp.

Bopp, the true founder of comparative philology, made himself acquainted with Sanskrit during a visit to England and the India House library, and in 1816 appeared his famous work, “Das Conjugationssystem,” published at Frankfurt, in which a minute and scientific comparison was instituted between the grammatical systems of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German. It was not until 1833, however, that the first volume of his “Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonic, Gothic, and German” came out, though several minor productions on Comparative Philology had appeared meanwhile, and not until 1852 was the final volume of the Grammar completed. Bopp was the author of the method which must be followed by every student who pretends to a scientific treatment of language; and though there is naturally much in his work that has since needed revision, the main results at which he arrived will always remain among the fundamental truths of linguistic science. His Sanskrit grammars were published in 1827, 1832, and 1834, and his “Vergleichendes Accentuations-System,” published in 1854, not only pointed out the striking analogy between the accentuation of Greek and Sanskrit, but also laid the basis of all future inquiries into the subject. But even Homer nods at times; and as if to warn us against following too implicitly any leader, however illustrious, Bopp sought to include the Polynesian dialects in his Indo-European family, and thereby violated the very method that he had himself inaugurated.[28] His attempt to connect the language of Georgia with the same family was not more fortunate;[29] and though Georgian is undoubtedly inflectional in character, its flections are now known not to be those of the Aryan group, nor its structure and roots those which distinguish an Aryan tongue. Even the errors of a great mind are instructive, and serve to illustrate the soundness of the method which they violate.

Bopp’s work was confined to the more strictly scientific and inductive side of comparative philology, to the comparison of words and forms, and the conclusions we may infer therefrom: the metaphysical side of the science of language found an able expositor in Wilhelm von Humboldt. Starting with the new method of Bopp, Humboldt revised the old endeavours to found a philosophy of speech, and extended the results obtained by Bopp to all the manifold languages of the world. In a number of publications, more especially the introduction to his great work on the Kawi language of Java, which came out after his death in 1836,[30] he dealt with the various problems raised by the science and philosophy of language, and not only sketched the general outlines of a true philosophy of speech, but also threw out suggestions which have since borne abundant fruit in the hands of other scholars. Humboldt’s work was followed up by Steinthal, whose journal, the “Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,”[31] conducted with the help of Lazarus, has proved a treasury of suggestive thought to a whole generation of linguistic scholars. Bopp, on the other hand, was followed by Pott, whose vast knowledge and genial insight are probably unequalled among the students of language. His “Etymologische Forschungen,” in spite of its size and want of an adequate index, is a mine of philological wealth, and his works on the “Language of the Gipsies” (1846), on “Proper Names” (1856), and on the “Quinary and Vigesimal Systems of Numeration” (1847), have largely helped the progress of linguistic science. In the “Anti-Kaulen,” or “Mythical Representations of the Origin of Peoples and Languages” (1865), and “The Inequality of the Races of Men” (1856), where a great display of anthropological knowledge is made, Pott did good service in checking the unifying haste of a young science.