Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

1. Dialectical Regeneration.

2. Phonetic Decay.

I begin with the second, as the more obvious, though in reality its operations are mostly subsequent to the operations of dialectical regeneration. I must ask you at present to take it for granted that everything in language had originally a meaning. As language can have no other object but to express our meaning, it might seem to follow almost by necessity that language should contain neither more nor less than what is required for that purpose. It would also seem to follow that if language contains no more than what is necessary for conveying a certain meaning, it would be impossible to modify any part of it without defeating its very purpose. This is really the case in some languages. In Chinese, for instance, ten is expressed by shĭ. It would be impossible to change shĭ in the slightest way without making it unfit to express ten. If instead of shĭ we pronounced t'sĭ, this would mean seven, but not ten. But now, suppose we wished to [pg 052] express double the quantity of ten, twice ten, or twenty. We should in Chinese take eúl, which is two, put it before shĭ, and say eúl-shĭ, twenty. The same caution which applied to shĭ, applies again to eúl-shĭ. As soon as you change it, by adding or dropping a single letter, it is no longer twenty, but either something else or nothing. We find exactly the same in other languages which, like Chinese, are called monosyllabic. In Tibetan, chu is ten, nyi two; nyi-chu, twenty. In Burmese she is ten, nhit two; nhit-she, twenty.

But how is it in English, or in Gothic, or in Greek and Latin, or in Sanskrit? We do not say two-ten in English, nor duo-decem in Latin, nor dvi-da'sa in Sanskrit.

We find[26] in Sanskrit vin'sati.

in Greek eikati.

in Latin viginti.

in English twenty.

Now here we see, first, that the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, are only local modifications of one and the same original word; whereas the English twenty is a new compound, the Gothic tvai tigjus (two decads), the Anglo-Saxon tuêntig, framed from Teutonic materials; a product, as we shall see, of Dialectical Regeneration.

We next observe that the first part of the Latin viginti and of the Sanskrit vin'sati contains the same number, which from dvi has been reduced to vi. This is not very extraordinary; for the Latin bis, twice, which you still hear at our concerts, likewise stands for an original dvis, the English twice, the Greek dis. This dis appears again as a Latin preposition, meaning a-two; so that, for instance, discussion means, originally, [pg 053] striking a-two, different from percussion, which means striking through and through. Discussion is, in fact, the cracking of a nut in order to get at its kernel. Well, the same word, dvi or vi, we have in the Latin word for twenty, which is vi-ginti, the Sanskrit vin-'sati.