[BOOK I]
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
[CHAPTER I]
BEFORE 1800
§ 1. Antiquity. § 2. Middle Ages and Renaissance. § 3. Eighteenth-century Speculation. Herder. § 4. Jenisch.
I.—§ 1. Antiquity.
The science of language began, tentatively and approximately, when the minds of men first turned to problems like these: How is it that people do not speak everywhere the same language? How were words first created? What is the relation between a name and the thing it stands for? Why is such and such a person, or such and such a thing, called this and not that? The first answers to these questions, like primitive answers to other riddles of the universe, were largely theological: God, or one particular god, had created language, or God led all animals to the first man in order that he might give them names. Thus in the Old Testament the diversity of languages is explained as a punishment from God for man’s crimes and presumption. These were great and general problems, but the minds of the early Jews were also occupied with smaller and more particular problems of language, as when etymological interpretations were given of such personal names as were not immediately self-explanatory.
The same predilection for etymology, and a similar primitive kind of etymology, based entirely on a more or less accidental similarity of sound and easily satisfied with any fanciful connexion in sense, is found abundantly in Greek writers and in their Latin imitators. But to the speculative minds of Greek thinkers the problem that proved most attractive was the general and abstract one, Are words natural and necessary expressions of the notions underlying them, or are they merely arbitrary and conventional signs for notions that might have been equally well expressed by any other sounds? Endless discussions were carried on about this question, as we see particularly from Plato’s Kratylos, and no very definite result was arrived at, nor could any be expected so long as one language only formed the basis of the discussion—even in our own days, after a century of comparative philology, the question still remains an open one. In Greece, the two catchwords phúsei (by nature) and thései (by convention) for centuries divided philosophers and grammarians into two camps, while some, like Sokrates in Plato’s dialogue, though admitting that in language as actually existing there was no natural connexion between word and thing, still wished that an ideal language might be created in which words and things would be tied together in a perfectly rational way—thus paving the way for Bishop Wilkins and other modern constructors of philosophical languages.
Such abstract and a priori speculations, however stimulating and clever, hardly deserve the name of science, as this term is understood nowadays. Science presupposes careful observation and systematic classification of facts, and of that in the old Greek writers on language we find very little. The earliest masters in linguistic observation and classification were the old Indian grammarians. The language of the old sacred hymns had become in many points obsolete, but religion required that not one iota of these revered texts should be altered, and a scrupulous oral tradition kept them unchanged from generation to generation in every minute particular. This led to a wonderfully exact analysis of speech sounds, in which every detail of articulation was carefully described, and to a no less admirable analysis of grammatical forms, which were arranged systematically and described in a concise and highly ingenious, though artificial, terminology. The whole manner of treatment was entirely different from the methods of Western grammarians, and when the works of Panini and other Sanskrit grammarians were first made known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, they profoundly influenced our own linguistic science, as witnessed, among other things, by the fact that some of the Indian technical terms are still extensively used, for instance those describing various kinds of compound nouns.
In Europe grammatical science was slowly and laboriously developed in Greece and later in Rome. Aristotle laid the foundation of the division of words into “parts of speech” and introduced the notion of case (ptôsis). His work in this connexion was continued by the Stoics, many of whose grammatical distinctions and terms are still in use, the latter in their Latin dress, which embodies some curious mistakes, as when genikḗ, “the case of kind or species,” was rendered genitivus, as if it meant “the case of origin,” or, worse still, when aitiatikḗ, “the case of object,” was rendered accusativus, as if from aitiáomai, ‘I accuse.’ In later times the philological school of Alexandria was particularly important, the object of research being the interpretation of the old poets, whose language was no longer instantly intelligible. Details of flexion and of the meaning of words were described and referred to the two categories of analogy or regularity and anomaly or irregularity, but real insight into the nature of language made very little progress either with the Alexandrians or with their Roman inheritors, and etymology still remained in the childlike stage.