CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



according to discoverable laws, some of which are 

 general, and others more or less special Those 

 laws by which languages become transformed, or 

 developed, as it is called, are among the most 

 important of the general principles of language. 



In all this, there is an obvious analogy to 

 the study of natural history. The zoologist, for 

 example, investigates the structure and functions 

 of the different animals, and assigns to each its 

 place in the classification of the animal kingdom. 

 Kut he has this advantage over the linguist : he 

 can trace the organism he is investigating from 

 the embryo, through every stage of its develop- 

 ment and growth, to its death, and thus give a 

 complete scheme of its life. The student of 

 language, on the contrary, has his survey in the 

 historical direction hemmed in by narrow limits. 

 He has never seen, and can never hope to see, 

 a language in embryo ; the oldest relics of 

 language that have come down to us are such 

 as to imply centuries on centuries of previous 

 existence ; so that he is like the naturalist if 

 reduced to study organisms exclusively in the 

 adult state. He is not, however, precluded from 

 all hope of arriving at some notion of the embryo 

 condition of speech. By analysing languages as 

 they exist, and finding the ultimate elements of 

 which the words are built up ; and by reasoning 

 from the way in which words are seen to change, 

 and new words to come into use, we may hope to 

 arrive at some conclusions more or less probable 

 as to what the beginnings of language must, or, at 

 all events, may, have been. It is this speculation 

 as to the Origin of language that forms the 

 crowning of the philological edifice. 



The learning of languages for use is treated of 

 in the grammars and dictionaries of the several 

 languages. The only part of this vast field that 

 at all falls in with the scheme of this work is the 

 grammar of the English language, which is briefly 

 sketched in a special paper. It is the natural- 

 history aspect of speech, above described, its 

 physiology, as it were, and the classification of 

 the different forms it assumes, that is the subject 

 of the present number. This study, as a distinct 

 branch, is of recent growth, and has not yet 

 settled down into a fixed name. It is variously 

 spoken of as Comparative Grammar, Comparative 

 Philology, Linguistic, the Science of Language. 

 The last name seems the most appropriate, but 

 has the disadvantage of being rather cumbrous. 



Although investigations of the kind described 

 may not promise any directly useful result, they 

 are not without interest of an absorbing kind. 

 Speech is at once the sign and the means of man's 

 superiority aver the rest of the animal kingdom ; 

 and he who can find no interest in learning the 

 nature and workings of this precious faculty unless 

 it promise to make him richer, can hardly be 

 called a man. Besides its own inherent attrac- 

 tions, the comparative study of tongues is one 

 of the chief instruments in another inquiry of 

 universal interest, that, namely, of the affinities of 

 nations ; Comparative Philology is the handmaid 

 of Ethnology. See ANTHROPOLOGY, No. 53. 



The science of language, as already remarked, 

 is of recent origin. It is not to be understood by 

 this that it never occurred to anybody, until re- 

 cently, to seek for affinities between the words of 

 different tongues, and to speculate as to the nature 

 and origin of language in general. On the con- 

 is 



trary, inquiring minds have at all times been fond 

 of exercising their ingenuity in this field The 

 exercise, however, was long little better than beat- 

 ing the air ; it consisted mostly in blind gropings, 

 wild guesses, and fanciful theories that died with 

 their projectors. The cause of this fruitlessness 

 lay in the reasoning being founded on too few 

 facts. The ancient Greeks speculated largely on 

 language, but, as a rule, they knew no tongue 

 but their own, and considered all others barbarous 

 jargons, and unworthy of study. The scholars of 

 modern times for a long period confined their 

 attention to Greek and Latin, including, it might 

 be, Hebrew, with a contemptuous glance at their 

 mother-tongue ; hence their theories were nearly 

 as baseless as those of the Greeks. They were 

 mere a-priori speculations, akin to the ' Theory 

 of the Earth,' written by the learned Thomas 

 Kurnet in 1689, before the strata of the earth's 

 crust had been at all explored. 



One great obstruction to the true course of 

 inquiry was the assumption, first made by the 

 Church Fathers, and for a long time unquestioned, 

 that Hebrew was the primitive language of man, 

 and that, therefore, all languages must be derived 

 from Hebrew. A prodigious amount of learning 

 and labour was wasted, during the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries, in trying to trace this 

 imaginary connection. Leibnitz was the first to 

 set aside this notion, and to establish the principle, 

 that the study of languages must be conducted in 

 the same way as that of the exact sciences, by 

 first collecting as many facts as possible, and then 

 proceeding by inductive reasoning. It was owing 

 to his appeals and exertions that missionaries, 

 travellers, and others, now began making those 

 collections of vocabularies and specimens of 

 languages and dialects which form the Herbarium, 

 as it were, of human speech. The truths deduced 

 from these collections were at first fragmentary, 

 and without any fixed principles of classification. 

 The light that brought order into the chaos rose 

 with the study of Sanscrit, first made accessible 

 to European scholars by Sir William Jones, 

 Colebrooke, and other members of the Asiatic 

 Society, founded in Calcutta in 1784. The simi- 

 larity of Sanscrit to Greek and Latin, especially 

 in the grammatical forms, struck every one with 

 surprise. Sir William Jones declared that 'no 

 philologer could examine the Sanscrit, Greek, and 

 Latin without believing them to have sprung from 

 the same source, which perhaps no longer exists. 

 There is a similar reason, though not quite so 

 forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and 

 the Celtic had the same origin with the Sanscrit. 

 The old Persian may be added to the same family.' 

 German scholars now took up the subject, and 

 have since been the chief workers in this field. 

 Frederick Schlegel has the merit of first (in 1808) 

 boldly embracing the languages of India, Persia, 

 and Europe in one family group by the compre- 

 hensive name of the Indo-Germanic languages. 

 When first advanced, this could be considered 

 only as a more or less probable assumption ; but 

 its truth has since been demonstrated by an 

 accumulation of evidence, and it is now received 

 as an established fact. Among the contributors 

 to this demonstration, the chief place is due to 

 the eminent scholar, Franz Bopp, Professor in the 

 University of Berlin. The first instalment of his 

 labours appeared in 1816, and they culminated in 



