I

-

'

-

7fr KOT-I YV5W

D

Wheeler

Whence and Whither of the Modern Science of Language

y

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY

Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 95-109 May 19, 1905

THE WHENCE AND WHITHER OF THE MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE

BENJ. IDE WHEELER

BERKELEY

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS Price so. 26

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS

CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY.— Edward B. Clapp, William A. Merrill, Herbert C. Nutting, Editors. Price per volume $2.00. Volume 1 (in progress) : No. 1. Hiatus in Greek Melic Poetry, by Edward B. Clapp. Price, $0.50 No. 2. Studies in the Si-clause, by Herbert C. Nutting. . . " 0.60 No. 3. The Whence and Whither of the Modern Science of Lan- guage, by Benj. Ide Wheeler " 0.25

The following series in Graeco-Roman Archaeology, Egyptian Archaeology, Ameri- can Archaeology and Ethnology and Anthropological Memoirs are publications from the Department of Anthropology:

GRAECO-ROMAN ARCHAEOLOGY.

Vol. 1. The Tebtunis Papyri, Part I. Edited by Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt, and J. Gilbart Smyly. Pages 690, Plates 9, 1903 Price, $16.00

Vol. 2. The Tebtunis Papyri, Part 2 (in preparation).

EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY.

Vol. 1. The Hearst Medical Papyrus. Edited by G. A. Reisner and A. M. Lythgoe (in press).

AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY.

Vol. 2. No. 1. The Exploration of the Potter Creek Cave, by William J.

Sinclair. Pages 27, Plates 14, April, 1904 . . Price, .40

No. 2. The Languages of the Coast of California South of San

Francisco, by A. L. Kroeber. Pages 72, June, 1904. Price, .60 No. 3. Types of Indian Culture in California, by A. L. Kroeber.

Pages 22, June, 1904 Price, .25

No. 4. Basket Designs of the Indians of Northwestern California,

by A. L. Kroeber. Pages 60, Plates 7, January, 1905. Price, .75 Vol. 3. The Morphology of the Hupa Language, by Pliny Earle Goddard

(in press).

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MEMOIRS.

Vol. I. Explorations in Peru, by Max Uhle (in preparation). No. 1. The Ruins of Moche. No. 2. Huamachuco, Chincha, lea. No. 3. The Inca Buildings of the Valley of Pisco.

ASTRONOMY.-W. W. Campbell, Editor.

Publications o! the Lick Observatory.— Volumes I-V completed. Volume

VI (in progress): No. 1. A Short Method of Determining Orbits from Three Observations,

by A. O. Leuschner. No. 2. Elements of Asteroid 1900 GA, by A. O. Leuschner and Adelaide

M. Hobe. No. 3. Preliminary Elements of Comet 1900 III, by R. H. Curtiss and

C. G. ball.

Contributions from the Lick Observatory.— Nos. I-V. Lick Observatory Bulletins.— Volume I (pp. 193) completed. Volume II (in progress).

*" P5<fl

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY

Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 95-109 May 19, 1905

THE WHENCE AND WHITHER OF THE MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.1

nv BENJ. IDE WHEELER.

It cannot In' the purpose of Ihis brief paper to present even in outline a history <>t' the science of language in the century past: it can undertake only to set forth tin- chief motives and directions of its development.

A hundred years ago this year Friedrich von Schlegel was in Paris studying Persian and the mysterious, new-found San- skrit : Franz Bopp was a thirteen-year old student in the gymna- sium at Aschaffenburg ; Jacob Grimm was studying law in the University of Marburg. And yet these three were to be the men who should find the paths by which the study of human speech might escape from its age-long wanderings in a wilderness with- out track or cairn or clue, and issue forth upon oriented high- ways as a veritable science.

Schlegel the Romanticist, who had peered into Sanskrit litera- ture in the interest of the fantastic humanism modish in his day, happened to demonstrate in Ueber di< Spraclu und Weisheit <l< r Inder, 1808, beyond cavil the existence of a genetic relationship between the chief members of what we now know as the Indo- European family of languages. Bopp2 found a way to utilize this demonstrated fact in a quest which, though now recognized as mostly vain, incidentally set in operation the mechanism of

comparative grammar. Gri i,! under the promptings of a

national enthusiasm, sought after the sources of the German

'Address delivered at the St. Louis Congress of Aits and Sciences, October, 1904.

'First \Mirk: Conjiigationssystem ■ '■ r Sansiritsprache, lsiii. 'Deutsche Grammatik, Vol. 1 i 1819).

705012

96 University of California Publications! [Ci^ass. Phu*

national life, and, finding in language as in lore the roots of the present deep planted in the past, laid the Foundations and sel forth the method of historical grammar. The grafting of com- parative grammar upon the stuck of historical grammar gave it

w ider range and yielded the scientific '_rr; ar of the nineteenth

century. The method of comparative grammar is merely auxil- iary i" historical grammar; it establishes determinations of fad Car behind the poinl of earliesl record and enables historical grammar to push its Inns of descenl in the form of 'dotted lines' far bach into the unwritten past.

It was the discovery of Sanskrit to the attention and use of European scholars a1 the close of the eighteenth century that

gav< casion to an effective use of the comparative method and

a consequent establishment of ;i veritable comparative grammar.

Bu1 in two other distinct ways it exercised a notable inline ■

upon the study of language. First, it offered to observation a

language whose Structure yielded itself readily to analysis ill

terms of the adaptation of its formal mechanism to the expres- sion of modifications of thought, and thus cave an encourage- ment to a dissection of words in the interest of tracing the

principles of their formation. St d, the Hindoo national

grammar itself presented to Western scholars an illustration of accuracy and completeness in collecting, lifying, and report- ing the facts of ;i language, especially such as related to phon- ology, inflexion, and word-formation, that involved the i ssity

of .-i complete revolution in the whole attitude of grammatical procedure. The discovery of Panini and the Praticakhyas meant far more to the science of Language than the discovery of the Vedas. The grammar of the Greeks had marked a path so clear and established ;i tradition so strong, guaranteed in a prestige so high, that the linguist ics of the West through all the generations faithfully abode in the way. The grammatical categories once taught and established became the irrefragable moulds of gram- matical thought, and constituted a system so complete in its enslaving power that if any man ever suspected himself in bond- age he was yet unable to identify his bonds.

The Creeks had addressed themselves to linguistic reflexion in connection with their study of tin- content and the forms of

Vol. ij Wheeler. Tht Modern Scienct of Language. 97

thought ; grammar arose as the handmaiden of philosophy. They assumed, without consciously and expressly formulating it as a doctrine, that language is the inseparable shadow of thought, and therefore proceeded without more ado to find in its structure and parts replicas of the substances and moulds of thought. They sought among the facts of language for illustrations of theories; it did not occur to them to collect the facts and organize them to yield their own doctrine. Two distinct practical uses finally brought the chief materials of rules and principles to formulation in the guise of a system of descriptive grammar; first, the interpretation of Homer and the establishment of a correct text ; second, the teaching of Greek to aliens, and the establishment of a standard by which to teach. These practical uses came in however rather as fortunate opportunities for prac- tical application of an established discipline than as the motives to its creation. With the Hindoos it was the direct reverse. They had a sacred language and sacred texts rescued from ear- lier days by means of oral tradition. The meaning of the texts had grown hazy, but the word was holy, and even though it remained but an empty shell to human understanding, it was pleasing to the gods and had served its purpose through the generations to bring gods and men into accord, and must be pre- served : likewise the language of ritual and comment thereon, which, as the possession of a limited class, required not only to be protected from overwhelming beneath the floods of the vernac- ular but demanded to be extended to the use of wider circles in the dominant castes. Sanskrit had already become a moribund or semi-artificial language, before grammar laid hold upon it to continue and extend it. But from the outstart the Hindoo gram- marian sat humbly at the feet of language to learn of it, and never assumed to lie its master or its guide. Inasmuch as the language had existed and been perpetuated primarily as a thing of the living voice and not of ink and paper, and had been used to reach the ears rather than the eyes of the divine, it followed in a measure remotely true of no other grammatical endeavor that the Hindoo grammar was compelled to devote itself to the most exactingly accurate report upon the sounds of the language. The niceties of phonetic discrimination represented in the alpha-

'is University of California Publications. [Class. Phil.

bel itself, the refinements of observation involved in the reports on accenl and the phenomenon of pluti; the formulation of the principles of sentence phonetics in the rules <>l' sandhi ; the obser- vations on the physiology of speech scattered through the Prdti- cdkhyas are all brillianl illustrations of the Hindoo's direct

approach to the real substance of living s|m h. None of the

aational systems of grammar, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Greek, or the Arabic had anything to show remotely comparable to this; and up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite all the long endeavors expended on Greek and

Hebrew and Latin, nothing remotely like it had I n known to

the Western world. The Greek gri larians had really never

stunned the barriers of written language; they were mostly con- cerned with establishing and teaching literary forms of the lan- guage. Even when they dealt with the dialects, they had the Standardized literary types thereof before their eyes rather than the spoken forms ringing in their ears. When the einmmars of Colebrooke (1805), of Carej (1806), and of Wilkins (1808) opened the knowledge of Sanskrrl to European scholars, it involved nothing short of a grammal ical revelation, and prepared the way for an ultimate remodeling of language-study nothing short of a revolution. Though these Hindoo lessons in accurate phonetics as the hasis of sure knowledge and safe procedure had their immediate and unmistakable influence upon Hie scientific work id' the first half-century, their1 full acceptance tarried until the second half was well on its way. Even Jakob Grimm, whose

service in promoting the historical study of pi logy must he

rated with the highest, was si ill so Mind to the necessity of pho netics as to express Hie view that historical grai ar could he

excused from much attention to tin- "hunte win-war mundart- licher lautverhaltnisse, " and though von Raumer in his />/< Aspi- ration mill dti Lii ill n rsrliii hit nil (1837) had not only set forth in all clearness the theoretical necessity of a phonetic hasis. hut given practical illustration thereof in the material with which he

was dealing, it still was possible as late as 1868 for Scherer in his GeschichU der deutschen Sprache justly to deplore that "only rarely is a philologist found who is willing to enter upon phonetic

'Cf. H. Oertel, Lectures on the Study of Language, pp. 30 IV ( 1901 |.

Vol. i.| Wheeler. — The Modern Science of Language. 99

discussion." The phonetic treatises of Briicke1 (1849 and 1866) and of Merkel (185*5 and 1866)2 failed, though excellent of their kind, to bring the subject within the range of philological inter- est and it remained for Eduard Sievers in his Grundzugt der LautphysioUgie (1876) and Grundzuge der Phonetik (1881) by stating- phonetics more in terms of phonology to bridge the gap and establish phonetics as a constituent and fundamental por- tion of the science of language. The radical change of character assumed by the science in the last quarter of the century is due as much to the consummation of this union as to any one influ- ence.

But it was not phonetics alone that the Indian grammarians were able to teach to the West; they had developed in their processes of identifying the roots of words a scientific phonology that was all but an historical phonology. In some of its appli- cations it was that already, for in explaining the relations to each other of various forms of a given root as employed in dif- ferent words, even though the explanation was intended to serve the purposes of word analysis and not of sound-theory, the gram- marians virtually formulated in repeated instances what we now know as "phonetic laws." 'Flu- recognition of gum and vrddhi, which antedates Panini, must, rank as one of the most brilliant inductive discoveries in the history of linguistic science. The theory involved became the basis of the treatment of the Indo- European vocalism. The first thorough-going formulation, that of Schleicher in his Compendium (1861 ). was conceived entirely in the Hindoo sense, and it was to the opportunity which this formulation offered of overseeing- the material and the problems involved that we owe the brilliant series of investigations by Georg Curtius (Spaltung <l<s a-Lautes, 1864), Amelung3 (1871, ls?:<. 1875), Osthoff (N-Declination, 1876), Brugmann (Nasalis sonans.

E. Brucke, Untersuehungen iiber die Lautbadung un<l das riaturliche

System der Sprachlaute (1849); Griindzuge der Physiologic mid Kvstematik der Sprachlaute (1856).

:C. L. Merkel, Anatomie und Physiologie des mensc lilu-lien Stinnn-und Sprachorgana (1856); Physiologie der nieiis.-liliehen Sprache (1866).

A. Amelung: Die Bildung der Tempusstamme durcb Vbcalsteigerung mi Deutsehen, Berlin, 1871. Erwiderung. KZ. XXII, 361 IV. completed July,

1873, published 1874, after the author's death. Der TJrsprung der deutsehen

a Voeale, Haupt's Zeitsehr. XVI11. 161 ff. (is;:,).

100 University of California Publications. [Class.Pito.

1-Tii; GeschichU der stammabstufenden Declination, 1876), Col- lit/. (Veber du Annahnu mehrerer grundsprachUchen a-Laute, 1878), Joh. Scluiiiilt (Zwei ariscJu a-Laute, 1VT:» . which led n|> step by step steadily and unerringly to the definite proof thai the [ndo-European vocalism was to be understood in terms of the Greek rather than the Sanskrit. These articles, written in the period of intensest creative activity the science has known, rep- resenl in the cases of four of the scholars mentioned, viz.. Cur- tius. Amelung, Brugmann, Collitz, the masterpii s of the scien- tific lit''' of each. Though dealing with a single problem, they combined both through the results they achieved and the method and outlook they embodied to give character and direction to the science of the next quarter-century. Karl Verner's famous article, Eini Ausnahmt der ersten Lautverschiebung, KX. XXIII, 97 IV. July, 1875), which proved of great importance

among other things in establishing i onection between I. E.

ablaut and accent, belongs to this period; and Brugmann 's arti- cle, Nasalis sonans, which served more than any other work to clear the way for the now prevailing view of ablaut, was influ- enced by Verner's article, which was by a few months its prede- cessor. Hot li articles, it is worthy of noting, were distinctly influ- enced by the new phonetic: Verner's, it would appear, chiefly by Briicke, Brugmann 's, through a suggestion of Osthoff's, by Sie- vers. whose Lautphysiologit had .just appeared within the same year. The full effect upon Western science of the introduction of the Indian attitude toward language study appears therefore to have been realized only with the last quarter of the century.

More prompt than the response of European science to the teachings of Hindoo phonetics and phonology had been the acceptance of the Hindoo procedure in word analysis, especially with relation to suffixes and inflexional endings. The centuries

id' study of Creek and Latin had yielded no clue to any classifi- cation or assorting of this material according to meaning or func- tion. The medieval explanation of dominicus as domini custos was as good a-> any. Besnier in his essay. /,</ scienci des Ety- mologies i 1694), counted it the mark of a sound etymologist that lie restrict his attention to the roots id' words, for to bother with tin' other parts would he "useless and ludicrous." And when

Vni.. i| Wheeler. — Tin Modern Srif-iia. of Language. 101

Home Took.- in the Diversions of Purley. II. 429 1786-1805), just before the sunrise, wrote the startling words: "All those common terminations in any Language . . . are themselves separate words with distinct meanings," and i II, 454 : "Adjec- tives with such terminations (i.e., ly, ous, ful, some, ish, etc. i arc. in truth, all compound words" ; and when he flung out like a chal- lenge the analysis of Latin ibo, 'I shall go.' as three letters con- taining three words, viz. i, 'go,' 6 (jSo«5X.o/uai)'will,' o(ego) 'I.' qo one seems to have been near enough to the need of such instruc- tion to know whether or not he was to be taken seriously: for the words bore no fruit, and only years afterward, when Bopp's doc- trine had been recognized, were they disinterred as antiquarian curiosities. Eleven years later, in the full light of the Sanskrit grammar, Bopp published his Conjugationssystem, and the clue had been found. To be sure. Bopp was misguided in his belief that he could identify each element of a word-ending with a significant word, and assign to it a distinct meaning, but he had found the key to an analysis having definite historical value and permitting the identification of such entities as mode-sign, tense- sign, personal-endings, etc. The erroneous portion of his doc- trine, based upon his conception of the Indo-European as an agglutinative type of speech, dragged itself as an encumbrance through the first half-century of the science, and. though gasping, still lived in the second edition of Curtius' Verbum ; 1877 I. This. along with many other mechanical monstrosities of its kind, was gradually banished from the linguistic arena by the saner views of the life-habits of language which had their rise from linguistic psychology as a study of the relations of language to the hearing as well as speaking individual and the relations of the individual to the speech community, and which asserted themselves with full power in the seventies.

Bopp had from the beginning devoted himself to language- study, not as an end in itself, but. as we know from his teacher and sponsor Windischmann,1 as well as infer from the direction anil spirit of his work, he hoped to be able •"in this way to pene- trate into the mysteries of the human mind and learn something

'Introduction to Bopp's Conjugationssystem iter Sanskritsprache, p. iv. I W6).

102 University of California Publications. [Class.Phil.

of its nature and its laws." Se was therefore unmistakably of the school of the < (reeks, oot of the Hindoos; for the Gi k gram- marian in facing language asks the question 'why,' grammar being to him philosophy, whereas the 1 1 i ■ i < ]< >• • asks the question 'what,' grammar being to him ;i science after 1 1 1 * - manner of whal we call the 'natural sciences.' There is indeed but slight reason for the common practice of dating the beginning of the modern science of language with Bopp, aside from the one simple result lit' his activity, which must in stricl logic be treated as merely incidental thereto, namely, thai he gave a practical illustration of the possibility of applying the comparative method for widening the scope and enriching the results of historical grammar.

As Bopp had tried to use tin mparative method in deter- mining the true and original meanings of the formative elements. so iliil liis later contemporary, Augusl Friedrich Pott1 (1802- 1887) undertake to use it in finding out the original meaning of words. The search for the etymology or real meaning of words had been a favorite and mostly bootless exercise of all European grammarians from the Greek philosophers down, having its orig- inal animus ami more or less confessedly its continuing power in the broadly human, though barely on occasion half-formulated conviction, that words and their values belong by some mysteri- ous tie naturally to each other. In the instinet to begin his task

Pott was still with the traditions of the Greeks ami the Greco- Europeans, bul in developing it he was guided into new paths

by two forces that had arisen since tin ntury opened. Under

the guidance of the comparative method, whereby the vocabu- laries of demonstrably cognate languages now assumed a deter- minate relation to each other, he came unavoidably to the recog- nition of certain normal correspondences of sounds between the different tongues. < >n the other hand, in almost entire indepen dence hereof. Jakob Grimm in the pursuit of his historical method had formulated the regularities of the mutation of eon- sonants in the Teutonic dialects and had set them forth in a second edition of the first volume of his grammar, appearing in 1822, In all this was contained a strong encourage nt as well

K. I'. Pott : Etymologische ForschuDgen, l' vols. Lenigo, 1833-3t>; 2nd

.-■lit. (J M.ls.. ]s5!»-7G.

Vol.11 Wheeler. — Tin Modern Scienct of Language. 103

as warning to apply these new definite tests to every etymological postulate, and therewith arose under Pott's hands the beginnings

of a scientific etymology. It was a first promise of deliverance from a long wilderness of caprice.

The positivistie attitude which had been gradually infused into language-study under the influence of the Hindoo grammar anally readied its extremesl expression in the works of August Schleicher 1821-1868). The science of language he treated under the guise of a natural science. Language became isolated from the speaking individual or the speaking community to an extenl unparalleled in any of his predecessors or successors, and was viewed as an organism having a life of its own and laws of growth or decline within itself. Following the analogies of the natural sciences and trusting to the inferred laws of growth, he ventured to reconstruct from the scattered data of the cognate Indo-European languages the visible form of the mother speech. His confidence in the character of language as a natural growth made him the first great systematizer and organizer of the mate- rials of Indo-European comparative grammar {Compendium il< r vt rgli "In ndt n (hunt/until;, 1861 i ; as confidence in the unerring uniformity of the action of the laws of sound made Karl Brug- mann the second [Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik, 1886-1892).

It is not by accident that the first one to voice outright the dogma of the absoluteness (Ausnahmslosigkeit) of the laws of sound was a pupil of Schleicher, August Leskien (Die Declina- tion in Slavisch-litauisch&n und Germanisclien xxviii. 1876). The use of this dogma as a norm and test in the hands of a sie- nally active and gifted body of scholars who followed the leader- ship of Leskien and were known under the title of the Leipziger Srliuli or the Junggrammatiker, and the adherence to it in practice of many others who did not accept the theory involved, — a use which was undoubtedly greatly stimulated by Verner's discovery (1875) that a great body of supposed exceptions to Grimm's law were in reality obedient to law. gave t" the science in the two following decades, along with abundance of results, an objectivity of attitude and procedure and a firmness of struc- ture that may fairly be said to represent the consummation of

In} I niversity of California Publications. [Clabb.Phil.

thai positivisl tendency which we have soughl to identify with the influence of Hindoo grammar. This movement, however, derived its impulse by do means exclusively through Schleicher. A new stream had meanwhile blended its waters with the current. The psychology of language as 8 study of the relations of Language to the speaking individual, thai is. of the conditions under which language is received, retained, and reproduced, and of the rela- tions of the individual to his speech community, had been brought into play preeminently through the lahorsof Heymann Steinthal, who, though as a psychologisl a follower of Herbart, must be felt in represent in general .-is ;i linguisl the attitude toward Language stud} firsl established by Willi. •Im v. Humboldt. Wil- liam D. Whitney shows in his writings on general linguistics the

indue if Steinthal, as well as good schooling in the grammar

of the Hindoos and much good common ^nsr. His Lectures on Languagt and tin Study of Languagt (1867) and tin- Lift and Growth of Languagi (1875)1 helped chase many a goblin from the sky. Scherer's OeschichU der deutschen Spracht (1868),

combined more than any book of its day the influe b of new

lines of endeavor, and especially gave hearing in the new work in the psychology ;is well as the physiology of speech. To this period (1865-1880), under the influence of the combination of the psychological with ihr physiological point of view, belongs the establishmenl of scientific common sense in the treatmenl of Language. By virtue of this. ;is it were, binocular vision, lan- guage was thrown up into relief, isolated, and object ivised as it had never been before. Old half-mystical notions, such as the belief in a period of upbuilding in language and a period of decay, — all savoring of Hegel, and the consequenl fallacy that

ancient lamjmeje^ display a keener speech consciousness than the modern, — S] dily faded away. The center of interest trans- ferred itself from ancient and written types of speech to the modern and Living. .Men came to see that vivisection rather than

II. Steinthal: Der I rsprung det Sprache, im Zusammenhang mil den

I aUes Wissens, 1851; Characteristil der hauptsachlichsten

Typen des Sprocft&awes, L860; Einleitvng in die Psychology* und Sprach-

nschaft, 1881; Gesch, der Sprocket!., h, i ,i, n Griechen und Somern,

1863, L890-91. AJbo editor «itli Lazarus of the Zeitschrifi fur Votker-

psychologit un,i Sprachwissenechaft, from 1859.

vol.1] Wheeler.— Tht Modern Science of Language. 105

morbid anatomy must supply the method and spirit of linguistic research. The germs of a new idea affecting the conditions under which cognate languages may be supposed to have differentiated out of a mother speech, and conceived in terms of the observed relations of dialects to languages, were infused by Johannes Schmidt's Venuandtschaftsverhaltnisse der mdogerman. Sprach- •■//(1872). The rigid formulas of Schleicher's Stammbuum melted away before Schmidt's Wellentheorit and its line of successors down to the destructive theories of Kretschmer's Einleitung in ili, Geschichtt der griech. Sprache (1896). Herein as in many another movement of the period we trace the results of applying the lessons of living languages to the understanding of the old. A remarkable document thoroughly indicative of what was mov- ing in the spirit of the times was the Introduction to Osthoff and Brugmann's Morphologische Untersuchungen, Vol. I (1878). But the gospel of the period, and its theology for that matter, was most effectively set forth in Hermann Paul's Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1st edit., 1880), a work that has had more influence upon the science than any since Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik. Paul was the real successor of Steinthal. He also represented the strictest sect of the positivists in histor- ical grammar. As a consequence of the union in Paul of the two tendencies, his work acquires its high significance. He estab- lished the reaction from Schleicher's treatment of language sci- ence as a natural science; he showed it to be beyond peradven- t n it* one of the social sciences, and set forth the life conditions of Language as a socio-historical product.

The work of the period dominated by Paul and the neo-gram- marians, as well as the theories of method proclaimed, show, how- ever, that the two factors just referred to had not reached in the scientific thought and practice of the day a perfect blending. A well-known book of Osthoff's bears the title Das physiologischi mill psychologist Moment in der sprachlichen Formenbildung (1879). The title is symptomatic of the times. The physiolog- ical and the psychological were treated as two rival interests vying for the control of language. What did not conform to the phonetic laws, in case it were not a phenomenon of mixture, was to be explained if possible as due to analogy. This dualism could

106 University of California Publications. [Class.Phil.

be expected i" be bul a temporary device like the Betting up of

Satan over againsl God, in order to accounl for the existen P.

sin. A temporary device it has proved itself to be. The close of the firsl century of the modern science of language is tending toward a unitary conception of the various forms of historical change in language. The process by which the language of the

individual adjusts itself to tl mnity s] eh differs in kind

mi whit from thai by which dialed yi< Ids to the standard lan- guage of the larger community. The process by which the products of form-association or analogy establish themselves in language differ in no whit in land from thai by which new pro- nunciations of words, i.i . new sounds make their way to general

acceptance. The pi ss by which loan-elements from an alien

tongue adjust themselves to use in a given language differs psj

chologically and fundamentally no whit fro ither of the four

pr ssses mentioned. In fad they all, all five, are phenomena

of 'mixture in language.11 The process, furthermore, by which a sound-change in one word tends to spread from word to word

and displace the old throughoul the entire vocalinlary of the lan- guage is also a process of 'mixture.'-' and depends for its mo- mentum in last analysis upon a proportionate analogy after the same essential model as that by which an added sound or a suffix is carried by analogy from word to word. All the movements

of historical chance in language respond to the social motive; they .ill represent in some form the absorption of the individual into the community mass. It has therewith become evident that there is nothing physiological in language thai is not psycholog- ically conditioned and controlled. So then it appears that the

■See O. Bremer. Deutsche Phonetik, Vorworl \ It. L893) ; 1'.. I. Wheeler, Causes of Oniformitj in Phonetic Change; Transac. Amer. Philol. Ai XXIII, 1 ff. ( 190] I.

,\ point oi view involving the recognition of ■ < more recondite form of speech-mixture is that first suggested by '•■ I. Ascoli (Sprachwissensch l,,!,, Briefe, pp. 17 ff., Issi 86; trsl. 1887), nbereby the initiation of pho netie and syntactical changes in language, and ultimately the differentia

tii. ii ni' dialects .-in. I even of languages may :i tion to languages oi

ili.' substratum, .-is they may !"■ termed, i.e., prior and ■ I isus.-. I languages of

peoples or tribes who have through the tut.' of conquest or assunilal b<

absorbed int.. another s| Ii community. Notably has this poinl of view

urged by II. Ilirt (Indog. I ■. l\'. :'.''. ff., 1894), and by

We, •:■ pp. 99 it. i With this poinl of view the

science of language will have largely to deal, we arc persuaded, in the sec ond century of its existei

Vol. 11 Wheeler. — Tin Modern Scienct of Language. 1 < >T

modern science of language has fairly shaken itself free again from the natural sciences and from such influences of their method and analogies as were intruded upon it by Schleicher and his period lSfiO-Ml . and after a century of groping and experi- ment has definitely oriented and found itself as a social science

dealing with an institution which represents i •>■ intimately ami

exactly than any other the total life of man in the historically determined society of men.

Within the history of the science of language the beginning of the nineteenth century establishes beyond doubt a most impor- tant frontier. To appreciate how sharp is the contrast between hither ami yonder we have only to turn to any part or phase of the work yonder. — the derivation of Latin from Greek, or may- hap, to be most utterly scientific, from the Aeolic dialect of Greek, the sane libration of the claims of Dutch as against Hebrew to be the original language of mankind, the bondage to the forms of Greek and Latin grammar as well as to the traditional point of view of the philosophical grammar of the Greeks, the snbordina- nation of grammar to logic, the hopeless etymologies and form analyses culminating in the phantasies of Hemsterhuis and Valckenaeer, the lack of any guiding clue for the explanation of how sound or form came to be what it is. and the curse of arid sterility that rested upon every effort. All the ways were blind and all the toil was vain. On the hither side, however, there is every- where a new leaven working in the mass. What was that leaven .' To identify if possible what it was has been the purpose of this review. I think we have seen it was not the influence of the natural sciences, certainly not directly; wherever that infiuenci found direct application it led astray. It was not in itself the discovery of the comparative method, for that proved but an auxiliary to a greater. If a founder must lie proclaimed for the model n science of language, that founder was clearly Jakob ( irimm. not Franz Bopp.

The leaven in question was comprised of two elements. One was found in the establishment of historical grammar, for this furnished the long-needed elm-: the other was found in the dis- covery of Hindoo grammar, for this disclosed the fruitful atti- tude for linguistic observation. Historical grammar furnished

108 University of California Publications. [Clabs.Phil.

the missing clue, because it represented the Form of language as created, whal it is. nol by the thought struggling for expression,

bul by historical conditions anl Ien1 to it. Hindoo grammar

Furnished the method of observation because by its Fundamental instinct it asked the question how in a given language does one say a given thing, ratlin- than why does a given form embodj the thoughl it dues.

The germinal forces which have made this century of the sci ence of Language are aol withoul their parallels in the century of American national life we arc me1 to celebrate today Jakob Grimm was of the school of the Romanticists and he gained his conception of historical grammar from his ardor to derive the

institutions of his | pie direct from their sources in the national

life. The acquaintance of European scholars with the grammar

of India arose from a counter-spirit in the world of the day whereby an expansion of intercourse and rule was bringing to the wine-press fruits plucked in many various fields of national life. Thus diil the spirit of national particularism reconcile itself, in the experience of a science, with tile fruits of national expansion. After like sort has tin' American nation in its development for tin' century following Upon the typical event of l.-li:; coiiihined the widening of peaceful interchange and common standards of order with strong insistence upon the righl of separate cm uni- ties in things pertaining separately to them to determine their lives out of the sources thereof. Then in has the nation given fuliilliiient to the prophetic hope of its -real democratic imperial- ist, Thomas Jefferson,1 "] am persuaded no constitution was ever

before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self- government. "

The linguistic science of the second century will build upon

the plateau leveled by the varied toils and experiences of the

first. More than ever those who are to read I lie lessons of human speech will gain their power through intimate sympathetic acquaintance with the historically conceived material of the indi- vidual language. Hut though the wide rangings of the compara- tive method have for the time abated somewhat of their interest

■Letter t.. Mr. M.i.lis. i

Vol. i] Wheeler.— The Moduli Science of Language. I1 '!•

and their yield, it will remain that he who would have Larges! vision must gain perspective by frequent resort to the extra-mural lookouts. Language is an offprint of human life, and to the student of human speech nothing linguistic can be ever foreign

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PU BLICATION S-(CONTINUED)

BOTANY.— W. A. Setchell, Editor. Price per volume $3.50. Volume I (pp. 418) completed. Volume II (in progress):

No. I. A Review of Californian Polemoniaceae, by Jessie Milliken. Price, $0.75 No. 2. Contributions to Cytological Technique, by W.J. V.Osterhout. Price, .50

No. 3. Limu, by William Albert Setchell Price, .25

No. 4. Post- Embryonal Stages of the Laminariaceaj, by William Albert

Setchell. Price, .25

EDUCATION.— Elmer E. Brown, Editor. Price per volume $2.50.

Volume I (pp. 424). Notes on the Development of a Child, by Milicent W.

Shinn Price, 2.25

Vol. II (in progress). — No. 1. Notes on Children's Drawings, by Elmer E.

Brown Price, .50

Vol. Ill (in progress). —No. 1. Origin of American State Universities, by

Elmer E. Brown Price, .50

No. 2. State Aid to Secondary Schools, by David Rhys Jones Price, .75

GEOLOGY.— Bulletin of the Department of Geology. Andrew C. Lawson, Editor.

Price per volume $3.50. Volumes I (pp. 428), II (pp. 450) and III (475), completed. Volume IV (in progress):

No. 1. The Geology of the Upper Region of the Main Walker River, Nevada,

by T. D. Smith. Price, .25

No. 2. A Primitive Ichthyosaurian Limb from the Middle Triassic of Nevada,

by John C. Merriam. Price, .10

No. 3. A Geological Section of the Coast Ranges North of the Bay of San

Francisco, by Vance C. Osmont Price, .40

No. 4. Areas of the California Neocene, by Vance C. Osmont. Price, .20

No. 5. A Contribution to the Palaeontology of the Martinez Group, by

Charles E. Weaver ' . . Price, .20

PATHOLOGY.— Alonzo Englebert Taylor, Editor. Price per volume $2.00 Volume I (in progress):

No. 3. On the Synthesis of Fat Through the Reversed Action of a Fat- Splitting Enzyme, by Alonzo Englebert Taylor.

No. 4. On the Occurrence of Amido-Acids in Degenerated Tissues, by Alonzo Englebert Taylor.

No. 5. On the Autolysis of Protein, by Alonzo Englebert Taylor.

No. 6. On the Reversion of Tryptic Digestion, by Alonzo Englebert Taylor.

No. 7. Studies on an Ash-Free Diet, by Alonzo Englebert Taylor.

PHILOSOPHY.— Volume I, completed. Price, $2.00

In one

cover.

In

one

cover.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS-(CONTINUEO)

PHYSIOLOGY.— Jacques Loeb, Editor. Price per volume $2.00. (pp. 217) completed. Volume II (in progress):

Volume I

No. 5. The Action on the Intestine of Solutions Containing Two Salts, by John Bruce MacCallum

No. 6. The Action of Purgatives in a Crustacean (Sida Crystallina), by John Bruce MacCallum.

No. 7. On the Validity of Pfliiger's Law for the Galvanofropic Reactions 1 of Paramecium (a preliminary communication), by Frank W. ! Bancroft.

No. 8. On Fertilization, Artificial Parthenogenesis, and Cytolysis of the Sea Urchin Egg, by Jacques Loeb.

No. 9. On an Improved Method of Artificial Parthenogenesis, by Jacques Loeb.

No. 10. On the Diuretic Action of Certain Haemolytics, and the Action 1

of Calcium in Suppressing Haemoglobinuria (a pre minary In communication), by John Bruce MacCallum. . 0ne

No. 11. On an Improved Method of Artificial Parthenogenesis (second cover, communication), Dy Jacques Loeb. j

In

one

cover.

In

one

cover.

No. 12.

No. 13.

No. 14.

The Diuretic Action of Certain Haemolytics and the Influence of Calcium and Magnesium in Suppressing the Haemolysis (second communication), by John Bruce MacCallum.

The Action of Pilocarpine and Atropin on the Flow of Urine, by John Bruce MacCallum.

On an Improved Method of Artificial Parthenogenesis (third com munication), by Jacques Loeb.

In

one cover.

ZOOLOGY.— W. E. Ritter, Editor. Price per volume $3.50. (in progress). Volume II (in progress):

Volume I

Introduction. A General Statement of the Ideas and the Present Aims and

Status of the Marine Biological Association of San Diego, by

Wm. E. Ritter. No. 1. The Hydroids of the San Diego Region, by Harry Beal Torrey.

Pages 43, text figures 23. No. 2. The Ctenophores of the San Diego Region, by Harry Beal

Torrey. Pages 6, Plate 1 . No. 3. The Pelagic Tunicata of the San Diego Region, excepting the Lar-

vacea, by Wm. E. Ritter. Pages 62, text figures 23, Plates 2.

Price, 65

In one

cover.

Price .60

UNIVERSITY CHRONICLE.— An official record of University life, issued quarterly, edited by a committee of the faculty. Price, $1.00 per year. Current volume No. VII.

Address all orders, or requests for information concerning the above publications (except Astronomy) to The University Press, Berkeley, California.

» :-^Rler -

ILher of the

idem bcxtfii i

Iflllfi 3

of 1-

n lQfifl

WS>6w

'

.

■

i

.

jPyMW vt

■

t

1 1

t I

* ■ I

I