The whence and whither of the modern science of language

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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

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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

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