If Professor Whitney asserts—
“That I repeatedly will not allow that the sonant letters are intonated, but only that they may be intonated,”
I have no answer but a direct negative. For me to say so, would be to run counter to all my own teaching, and if there is anywhere a passage that would admit of such a construction, Professor Whitney knows perfectly well that this could be due to nothing but an accidental want of precision in expressing myself. I know of no such passage.[5]
In order to leave no doubt as to the real distinction between k, t, p and g, d, b, I quoted, for the satisfaction of Sanskrit scholars, the technical terms by which native grammarians define so admirably the process of their formation, the vâhyaprayatna, viz., vivâraśvâsâghoshâḥ, and saṃvâranâdaghoshâḥ. Would it be believed that Professor Whitney accuses me of having invented these long Sanskrit terms, and to have appended them superfluously and pedantically, as he says, to each list of synonyms? “They are found in no Sanskrit grammarian,” he says. Here again I have no answer but a direct negative. They are found in the native commentary on Pâṇini’s Grammar, in Boehtlingk’s edition, p. 4, and fully explained in the Mahâbhâshya.
If one has again and again to answer the assertions of a critic by direct negatives, is it to be wondered at that one rather shrinks from such encounters? I have for the last twenty years discussed these phonetic problems with the most competent authorities. Not trusting to my own knowledge of physiology and acoustics, I submitted everything that I had written on the alphabet, before it was published, to the approval of such men as Helmholtz, Alexander Ellis, Professor Rolleston, and I hold their vu et approuvé. I had no desire, therefore, to discuss these questions anew with Professor Whitney, or to try to remove the erroneous views which, till lately, he entertained on the structure of a physiological alphabet. I believe Professor Whitney has still much to learn on this subject, and as I never ask anybody to read what I myself have written, still less to read it a second time, might I suggest to him to read at all events the writings of Brücke, Helmholtz, Czermak, to say nothing of Wheatstone, Ellis, and Bell, before he again descends into this arena? If he had ever made an attempt to master that one short quotation from Brücke, which I gave on p. 159, or even that shorter one from Czermak, which I gave on p. 143:—
“Die Reibungslaute zerfallen genau so wie die Verschlusslaute in weiche oder tönende, bei denen das Stimmritzengeräusch oder der laute Stimmton mitlautet, und in harte oder tonlose, bei denen der Kehlkopf absolut still ist,”
the theory which I followed in the classification both of the Checks and the Breathings would not have sounded so unintelligible to him as he says it did; he would have received some rays of that inner light on phonetics which he misses in my Lectures, and would have seen that besides the disingenuousness or the self-deception which he imputes to me, in order to escape from the perplexity in which he found himself, there was after all a third alternative, though he denies it, viz., his being unwilling to confess his own ὀψιμαθία.
FIR, OAK, BEECH.
I now proceed to the next charge. I am told that I am in honor bound to produce a passage where Professor Whitney expressed his dissatisfaction at not being answered, or, as I had ventured to express it, considering the general style of his criticism, when he is angry that those whom he abuses, do not abuse him in turn. He is evidently conscious that there is some slight foundation for what I had said, for he says that if Steinthal thought he was angry, because “he (Mr. William Dwight Whitney) and his school” had not been refuted, instead of philosophers of the last century, he was mistaken. Yet what can be the meaning of this sentence, that “Professor Steinthal ought to have confronted the living and aggressive views of others,” i.e., of Mr. William Dwight Whitney and his school? (p. 365.)
However, I shall not appeal to that; I shall take a case which, in this tedious process of incrimination and recrimination, may perhaps revive for a moment the flagging interest of my readers.