Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

The old poetry which flourished in Norway in the eighth century, and which was cultivated by the skalds in the ninth, would have been lost in Norway itself had it not been for the jealous care with which it was preserved by the emigrants of Iceland. The most important branch of their traditional poetry were short [pg 193] songs (hliod or Quida), relating the deeds of their gods and heroes. It is impossible to determine their age, but they existed at least previous to the migration of the Northmen to Iceland, and probably as early as the seventh century, the same century which yields the oldest remnants of Anglo-Saxon, Low-German, and High-German. They were collected in the middle of the twelfth century by Saemund Sigfusson (died 1133). In 1643 a similar collection was discovered in MSS. of the thirteenth century, and published under the title of Edda, or Great-Grandmother. This collection is called the old or poetic Edda, in order to distinguish it from a later work ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (died 1241). This, the younger or prose Edda, consists of three parts: the mocking of Gylfi, the speeches of Bragi, and the Skalda, or Ars poetica. Snorri Sturluson has been called the Herodotus of Iceland; and his chief work is the “Heimskringla,” the world-ring, which contains the northern history from the mythic times to the time of King Magnus Erlingsson (died 1177). It was probably in preparing his history that, like Cassiodorus, Saxo Grammaticus, Paulus Diaconus, and other historians of the same class, Snorri collected the old songs of the people; for his “Edda,” and particularly his “Skalda,” are full of ancient poetic fragments.

The “Skalda,” and the rules which it contains, represent the state of poetry in the thirteenth century; and nothing can be more artificial, nothing more different from the genuine poetry of the old “Edda” than this Ars poetica of Snorri Sturluson. One of the chief features of this artificial or skaldic poetry was this, that nothing should be called by its [pg 194] proper name. A ship was not to be called a ship, but the beast of the sea; blood, not blood, but the dew of pain, or the water of the sword. A warrior was not spoken of as a warrior, but as an armed tree, the tree of battle. A sword was the flame of wounds. In this poetical language, which every skald was bound to speak, there were no less than 115 names for Odin; an island could be called by 120 synonymous titles. The specimens of ancient poetry which Snorri quotes are taken from the skalds, whose names are well known in history, and who lived from the tenth to the thirteenth century. But he never quotes from any song contained in the old “Edda,”[179] whether it be that those songs were considered by himself as belonging to a different and much more ancient period of literature, or that they could not be used in illustration of the scholastic rules of skaldic poets, these very rules being put to shame by the simple style of the national poetry, which expressed what it had to express without effort and circumlocution.

We have thus traced the modern Teutonic dialects back to four principal channels,—the High-German, Low-German, Gothic, and Scandinavian; and we have seen that these four, together with several minor dialects, must be placed in a co-ordinate position from the beginning, as so many varieties of Teutonic speech. This Teutonic speech may, for convenience' sake, be spoken of as one,—as one branch of that great family of language to which, as we shall see, it belongs; but [pg 195] it should always be borne in mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several distinct national deposits.

We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld's Great Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic, form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.

And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian,—the languages of Portugal, of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,[180] and [pg 196] of the Grisons of Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.[181] The Provençal, which, in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere patois. The earliest Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d'Oil, or the ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen of the Langue d'Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan languages than a careful perusal of the “Comparative Grammar of the Six Romance Languages” by Professor Diez.

Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north, and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen, [pg 197] had produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are still called vulgar or popular.[182] A great deal, no doubt, of the corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a smaller extent, the same barbarizing has affected all other Roman dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local, provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by the Teutonic conquerors.

The next branch of the Indo-European family of [pg 198] speech is the Hellenic. Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious refutation.

The fourth branch of our family is the Celtic. The Celts seem to have been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and Gadhelic. The Kymric comprises the Welsh; the Cornish, lately extinct; and the Armorican, of Brittany. The Gadhelic comprises the Irish; the Galic of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the Isle of Man. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated inroads into the regions of civilization, [pg 199] familiarizing Latin and Greek writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh brennin. A Brennus conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls. Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed. A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin might, in their turn, be derived.

The fifth branch, which is commonly called Slavonic, I prefer to designate by the name of Windic, Winidae being one of the most ancient and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions, the Lettic and the Slavonic, and we shall have to subdivide the Slavonic again into a South-East Slavonic and a West Slavonic branch.

The Lettic division consists of languages hardly known to the student of literature, but of great importance to the student of language. Lettish is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. Lithuanian is the name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism of 1547.[183] In this, and even in the language as [pg 200] now spoken by the Lithuanian peasant, there are some grammatical forms more primitive, and more like Sanskrit, than the corresponding forms in Greek and Latin.