Language according to Rask is our principal means of finding out anything about the history of nations before the existence of written documents, for though everything may change in religion, customs, laws and institutions, language generally remains, if not unchanged, yet recognizable even after thousands of years. But in order to find out anything about the relationship of a language we must proceed methodically and examine its whole structure instead of comparing mere details; what is here of prime importance is the grammatical system, because words are very often taken over from one language to another, but very rarely grammatical forms. The capital error in most of what has been written on this subject is that this important point has been overlooked. That language which has the most complicated grammar is nearest to the source; however mixed a language may be, it belongs to the same family as another if it has the most essential, most material and indispensable words in common with it; pronouns and numerals are in this respect most decisive. If in such words there are so many points of agreement between two languages that it is possible to frame rules for the transitions of letters (in other passages Rask more correctly says sounds) from the one language to the other, there is a fundamental kinship between the two languages, more particularly if there are corresponding similarities in their structure and constitution. This is a most important thesis, and Rask supplements it by saying that transitions of sounds are naturally dependent on their organ and manner of production.
Next Rask proceeds to apply these principles to his task of finding out the origin of the Old Icelandic language. He describes its position in the ‘Gothic’ (Gothonic, Germanic) group and then looks round to find congeners elsewhere. He rapidly discards Greenlandic and Basque as being too remote in grammar and vocabulary; with regard to Keltic languages he hesitates, but finally decides in favour of denying relationship. (He was soon to see his error in this; see below.) Next he deals at some length with Finnic and Lapp, and comes to the conclusion that the similarities are due to loans rather than to original kinship. But when he comes to the Slavonic languages his utterances have a different ring, for he is here able to disclose so many similarities in fundamentals that he ranges these languages within the same great family as Icelandic. The same is true with regard to Lithuanian and Lettic, which are here for the first time correctly placed as an independent sub-family, though closely akin to Slavonic. The comparisons with Latin, and especially with Greek, are even more detailed; and Rask in these chapters really presents us with a succinct, but on the whole marvellously correct, comparative grammar of Gothonic, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Latin and Greek, besides examining numerous lexical correspondences. He does not yet know any of the related Asiatic languages, but throws out the hint that Persian and Indian may be the remote source of Icelandic through Greek. Greek he considers to be the ‘source’ or ‘root’ of the Gothonic languages, though he expresses himself with a degree of uncertainty which forestalls the correct notion that these languages have all of them sprung from the same extinct and unknown language. This view is very clearly expressed in a letter he wrote from St. Petersburg in the same year in which his Undersøgelse was published; he here says: “I divide our family of languages in this way: the Indian (Dekanic, Hindostanic), Iranic (Persian, Armenian, Ossetic), Thracian (Greek and Latin), Sarmatian (Lettic and Slavonic), Gothic (Germanic and Skandinavian) and Keltic (Britannic and Gaelic) tribes” (SA 2. 281, dated June 11, 1818).
This is the fullest and clearest account of the relationships of our family of languages found for many years, and Rask showed true genius in the way in which he saw what languages belonged together and how they were related. About the same time he gave a classification of the Finno-Ugrian family of languages which is pronounced by such living authorities on these languages as Vilhelm Thomsen and Emil Setälä to be superior to most later attempts. When travelling in India he recognized the true position of Zend, about which previous scholars had held the most erroneous views, and his survey of the languages of India and Persia was thought valuable enough in 1863 to be printed from his manuscript, forty years after it was written. He was also the first to see that the Dravidian (by him called Malabaric) languages were totally different from Sanskrit. In his short essay on Zend (1826) he also incidentally gave the correct value of two letters in the first cuneiform writing, and thus made an important contribution towards the final deciphering of these inscriptions.
His long tour (1816-23) through Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Caucasus, Persia and India was spent in the most intense study of a great variety of languages, but unfortunately brought on the illness and disappointments which, together with economic anxieties, marred the rest of his short life.
When Rask died in 1832 he had written a great number of grammars of single languages, all of them remarkable for their accuracy in details and clear systematic treatment, more particularly of morphology, and some of them breaking new ground; besides his Icelandic grammar already mentioned, his Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Lapp grammars should be specially named. Historical grammar in the strict sense is perhaps not his forte, though in a remarkable essay of the year 1815 he explains historically a great many features of Danish grammar, and in his Spanish and Italian grammars he in some respects forestalls Diez’s historical explanations. But in some points he stuck to erroneous views, a notable instance being his system of old Gothonic ‘long vowels,’ which was reared on the assumption that modern Icelandic pronunciation reflects the pronunciation of primitive times, while it is really a recent development, as Grimm saw from a comparison of all the old languages. With regard to consonants, however, Rask was the clearer-sighted of the two, and throughout he had this immense advantage over most of the comparative linguists of his age, that he had studied a great many languages at first hand with native speakers, while the others knew languages chiefly or exclusively through the medium of books and manuscripts. In no work of that period, or even of a much later time, are found so many first-hand observations of living speech as in Rask’s Retskrivningslære. Handicapped though he was in many ways, by poverty and illness and by the fact that he wrote in a language so little known as Danish, Rasmus Rask, through his wide outlook, his critical sagacity and aversion to all fanciful theorizing, stands out as one of the foremost leaders of linguistic science.[3]
II.—§ 4. Jacob Grimm.
Jacob Grimm’s career was totally different from Rask’s. Born in 1785 as the son of a lawyer, he himself studied law and came under the influence of Savigny, whose view of legal institutions as the outcome of gradual development in intimate connexion with popular tradition and the whole intellectual and moral life of the people appealed strongly to the young man’s imagination. But he was drawn even more to that study of old German popular poetry which then began to be the fashion, thanks to Tieck and other Romanticists; and when he was in Paris to assist Savigny with his historico-legal research, the old German manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale nourished his enthusiasm for the poetical treasures of the Middle Ages. He became a librarian and brought out his first book, Ueber den altdeutschen meistergesang (1811). At the same time, with his brother Wilhelm as constant companion and fellow-worker, he began collecting popular traditions, of which he published a first instalment in his famous Kinder- und hausmärchen (1812 ff.), a work whose learned notes and comparisons may be said to have laid the foundation of the science of folklore. Language at first had only a subordinate interest to him, and when he tried his hand at etymology, he indulged in the wildest guesses, according to the method (or want of method) of previous centuries. A. W. Schlegel’s criticism of his early attempts in this field, and still more Rask’s example, opened Grimm’s eyes to the necessity of a stricter method, and he soon threw himself with great energy into a painstaking and exact study of the oldest stages of the German language and its congeners. In his review (1812) of Rask’s Icelandic grammar he writes: “Each individuality, even in the world of languages, should be respected as sacred; it is desirable that even the smallest and most despised dialect should be left only to itself and to its own nature and in nowise subjected to violence, because it is sure to have some secret advantages over the greatest and most highly valued language.” Here we meet with that valuation of the hitherto overlooked popular dialects which sprang from the Romanticists’ interest in the ‘people’ and everything it had produced. Much valuable linguistic work was directly inspired by this feeling and by conscious opposition to the old philology, that occupied itself exclusively with the two classical languages and the upper-class literature embodied in them. As Scherer expresses it (Jacob Grimm, 2te ausg., Berlin, 1885, p. 152): “The brothers Grimm applied to the old national literature and to popular traditions the old philological virtue of exactitude, which had up to then been bestowed solely on Greek and Roman classics and on the Bible. They extended the field of strict philology, as they extended the field of recognized poetry. They discarded the aristocratic narrowmindedness with which philologists looked down on unwritten tradition, on popular ballads, legends, fairy tales, superstition, nursery rimes.... In the hands of the two Grimms philology became national and popular; and at the same time a pattern was created for the scientific study of all the peoples of the earth and for a comparative investigation of the entire mental life of mankind, of which written literature is nothing but a small epitome.”
But though Grimm thus broke loose from the traditions of classical philology, he still carried with him one relic of it, namely the standard by which the merits of different languages were measured. “In reading carefully the old Gothonic (altdeutschen) sources, I was every day discovering forms and perfections which we generally envy the Greeks and Romans when we consider the present condition of our language.”... “Six hundred years ago every rustic knew, that is to say practised daily, perfections and niceties in the German language of which the best grammarians nowadays do not even dream; in the poetry of Wolfram von Eschenbach and of Hartmann von Aue, who had never heard of declension and conjugation, nay who perhaps did not even know how to read and write, many differences in the flexion and use of nouns and verbs are still nicely and unerringly observed, which we have gradually to rediscover in learned guise, but dare not reintroduce, for language ever follows its inalterable course.”
Grimm then sets about writing his great historical and comparative Deutsche Grammatik, taking the term ‘deutsch’ in its widest and hardly justifiable sense of what is now ordinarily called Germanic and which is in this work called Gothonic. The first volume appeared in 1819, and in the preface we see that he was quite clear that he was breaking new ground and introducing a new method of looking at grammar. He speaks of previous German grammars and says expressly that he does not want his to be ranged with them. He charges them with unspeakable pedantry; they wanted to dogmatize magisterially, while to Grimm language, like everything natural and moral, is an unconscious and unnoticed secret which is implanted in us in youth. Every German therefore who speaks his language naturally, i.e. untaught, may call himself his own living grammar and leave all schoolmasters’ rules alone. Grimm accordingly has no wish to prescribe anything, but to observe what has grown naturally, and very appropriately he dedicates his work to Savigny, who has taught him how institutions grow in the life of a nation. In the new preface to the second edition there are also some noteworthy indications of the changed attitude. “I am hostile to general logical notions in grammar; they conduce apparently to strictness and solidity of definition, but hamper observation, which I take to be the soul of linguistic science.... As my starting-point was to trace the never-resting (unstillstehende) element of our language which changes with time and place, it became necessary for me to admit one dialect after the other, and I could not even forbear to glance at those foreign languages that are ultimately related with ours.”
Here we have the first clear programme of that historical school which has since then been the dominating one in linguistics. But as language according to this new point of view was constantly changing and developing, so also, during these years, were Grimm’s own ideas. And the man who then exercised the greatest influence on him was Rasmus Rask. When Grimm wrote the first edition of his Grammatik (1819), he knew nothing of Rask but the Icelandic grammar, but just before finishing his own volume Rask’s prize essay reached him, and in the preface he at once speaks of it in the highest terms of praise, as he does also in several letters of this period; he is equally enthusiastic about Rask’s Anglo-Saxon grammar and the Swedish edition of his Icelandic grammar, neither of which reached him till after his own first volume had been printed off. The consequence was that instead of going on to the second volume, Grimm entirely recast the first volume and brought it out in a new shape in 1822. The chief innovation was the phonology or, as he calls it, “Erstes buch. Von den buchstaben,” which was entirely absent in 1819, but now ran to 595 pages.