Those who are acquainted with Vedic studies know that Professor Benfey has been for years preparing a grammar of the Vedic dialect, and, as there is plenty of work for all workers, I purposely left the grammatical questions to him, confining myself in my commentary to the most necessary grammatical remarks, and giving my chief attention to the meaning of words and the poetical conceptions of the ancient poets. If the use of the accusatival form tasthushas, with the sense of a nominative, had been confined to the Veda, or had never been remarked on before, I ought, no doubt, to have called attention to it. But similar anomalous forms occur in Epic literature also, and more than that, attention had but lately been called to them by a very eminent Dutch scholar, Dr. Kern, who, in his translation of the Bṛhat-Saṃhitâ, remarks that the ungrammatical nom. plur. vidushas is by no means rare in the Mahâbhârata and kindred works. If Professor Whitney had only read as far as the eleventh hymn in the first book of the Rig-Veda, he would have met there in abibhyushas an undoubted nom. plur. in ushas:—
tvấm devấḥ ábibhyushaḥ tujyámânâsaḥ âvishuḥ,
The gods, stirred up, came to thee, not fearing.
Now, I ask, was I so far wrong when I said that Professor Whitney speaks loudest when he knows least, and that in charging me, for once at least, with a tangible blunder, he only betrayed his ignorance of Sanskrit grammar? In former times a scholar, after such a misfortune, would have taken a vow of silence or gone into a monastery. What will Professor Whitney do? He will take a vow of speech, and rush into a North American Review.
HARD AND SOFT.
There are other subjects to which Professor Whitney has of late paid much more attention than to Sanskrit Grammar, and we shall find that on them he argues in a much gentler tone.
It is well known that Professor Whitney held curious views about the relation of vowels to consonants, and I therefore was not surprised to hear from him that “my view of the essential difference between vowels and consonants will not bear examination.” He mixes up what I call the substance (breath and voice) with the form (squeezes and checks), and forgets that in rerum naturâ there exist no consonants except as modifying the column of voice and breath, or as what Hindu grammarians call vyanjana, i.e., determinants; and no vowels except as modified by consonants. In order to support the second part of this statement, viz., that it is impossible to pronounce an initial vowel without a slight, and to many hardly perceptible, initial noise, the coup de la glotte, I had appealed to musicians who know how difficult it is, in playing on the flute or on the violin, to weaken or to avoid certain noises (Ansatz) arising from the first impulses imparted to the air, before it can produce really musical sensations. Professor Whitney, in quoting this paragraph, leaves out the sentence where I say that I want to explain the difficulty of pronouncing initial vowels without some spiritus lenis, and charges me with comparing all consonants with the unmusical noises of musical instruments. This was in 1866, whereas in 1854 I had said: “If we regard the human voice as a continuous stream of air, emitted as breath from the lungs and changed by the vibration of the chordæ vocales into vocal sound, as it leaves the larynx, this stream itself, as modified by certain positions of the mouth, would represent the vowels. In the consonants, on the contrary, we should have to recognize a number of stops opposing for a moment the free passage of this vocal air.” I ask any scholar or lawyer, what is one to do against such misrepresentations? How is one to qualify them, when to call them unintentional would be nearly as offensive as to call them intentional?
The greatest offense, however, which I have committed in his eyes is that I revived the old names of hard and soft, instead of surd and sonant. Now I thought that one could only revive what is dead, but I believe there is not a single scholar alive who does not use always or occasionally the terms hard and soft. Even Professor Whitney can only call these technical terms obsolescent; but he thinks my influence is so omnipotent that, if I had struck a stroke against these obsolescent terms, they would have been well nigh or quite finished. I cannot accept that compliment. I have tried my strokes against much more objectionable things than hard and soft, and they have not yet vanished. I know of no living philologist who does not use the old terms hard and soft, though everybody knows that they are imperfect. I see that Professor Pott[2] in one passage where he uses sonant thinks it necessary to explain it by soft. Why, then, am I singled out as the great criminal? I do not object to the use of surd or sonant. I have used these terms from the very beginning of my literary career, and as Professor Whitney evidently doubts my word, I may refer him to my Proposals, submitted to the Alphabetic Conferences in 1854. he will find that as early as that date, I already used sonant, though, like Pott, I explained this new term by the more familiar soft. If he will appeal to Professor Lepsius, he will hear how, even at that time, I had translated for him the chapters of the Prâtiśâkhyas, which explain the true structure of a physiological alphabet, and ascribe the distinction between k and g to the absence and presence of voice. I purposely avoided these new terms, because I doubted, and I still doubt, whether we should gain much by their adoption. I do not exactly share the misgivings that a surd mute might be mistaken for a deaf and dumb letter, but I think the name is awkward. Voiced and voiceless would seem much better renderings of the excellent Sanskrit terms ghoshavat and aghosha, in order to indicate that it is the presence and absence of the voice which causes their difference. Frequent changes in technical terms are much to be deprecated,[3] particularly if the new terms are themselves imperfect.
Every scholar knows by this time what is meant by hard and soft, viz., voiceless and voiced. The names hard and soft, though not perfect, have, like most imperfect names, some kind of excuse, as I tried to show by Czermak’s experiments.[4] But while a good deal may be said for soft and hard, what excuse can be pleaded for such a term as media, meaning originally a letter between the Psila and the Dasea? Yet, would it be believed that this very term is used by Professor Whitney on the page following immediately after his puritanical sermon against my backslidings!
This gentle sermon, however, which Professor Whitney preaches at me, as if I were the Pope of Comparative Philologists, is nothing compared with what follows later. When he saw that the difference between voiced and voiceless letters was not so novel to me as he had imagined, that it was known to me even before I published the Prâtisâkhya,—nay, when I had told him that, to quote the words of Professor Brücke, the founder of scientific phonetics,—