THE PROGRESS OF THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE 

 DURING THE LAST CENTURY 



BY BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER 



[Benjamin Ide Wheeler, President of the University of California, b. July 15, 1854, 

 Randolph, Massachusetts. Brown University, 1875; A.M. 1878; Ph.D. Heidel- 

 berg, 1885; LL.D. Princeton, 1896; Harvard, 1900; Brown, 1900; Yale, 1901; 

 Johns Hopkins, 1902; University of Wisconsin, 1904; Illinois College, 1904; 

 Dartmouth, 1905. Professorof Comparative Philology, 1886, and of Greek, 1888, 

 Cornell University; Professor of Greek, American School of Classical Studies, 

 Athens, Greece, 1896. Member of American Philological Association, American 

 Oriental Society, The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, Correspond- 

 ing Member of Kaiserlichen Archaeologischen Institut. Author of The Greek 

 Noun Accent; Analogy in Language ; Introduction to the History of Language; 

 Dionysos and Immortality ; Organization of the Higher Education in the United 

 States; Life of Alexander the Great, etc.] 



IT cannot be the purpose of this brief address to present even in 

 outline a history of the science of language in the century past; it 

 can undertake only to set forth the 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 Sanskrit; Franz 

 Bopp was a thirteen-year-old student in the gymnasium at Aschaffen- 

 burg; Jakob Grimm was studying law in the University of Marburg. 

 And yet these three were to be the men who should find the paths b)' 

 which the study of human speech might escape from its age-long 

 wanderings in a wilderness without track or cairn or clue, and issue 

 forth upon oriented highways as a veritable science. 



Schlegel the Romanticist, who had peered into Sanskrit literature 

 in the interest of the fantastic humanism modish in his day, hap- 

 pened to demonstrate (Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der 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. Bopp * 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. Grimm, 2 under 

 the promptings of a national enthusiasm, sought after the sources of 

 the German national life, and, finding in language as in lore the roots 

 of the present deep planted in the past, laid the foundations and set 

 forth the method of historical grammar. The grafting of comparative 

 grammar upon the stock of historical grammar gave it wider range 

 and yielded the scientific grammar of the nineteenth century. The 

 method of comparative grammar is merely auxiliary to historical 



1 First work: C onjugationssy stem der Sanskritsprache, 1816. 



2 Deutsche Grammatik, vol. 1 (1819). 



