20 HISTORY OF LANGUAGE 



on its way. Even Jakob Grimm, whose service in promoting the 

 historical study of phonology must be rated with the highest, was 

 still so blind to the necessity of phonetics as to express the view that 

 historical grammar could be excused from much attention to the 

 "bunte wirrwar mundartlicher lautverhaltnisse," and though von 

 Raumer in his Die Aspiration und die Lautverschiebung (1837) had not 

 only set forth in all clearness the theoretical necessity of a phonetic 

 basis, but had given practical illustration thereof in the material with 

 which he was dealing, it still was possible as late as 1868 for Scherer 

 in his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache justly to deplore that " only 

 rarely is a philologist found who is willing to enter upon phonetic 

 discussion." The phonetic treatises of Briicke 1 (1849 and 1866) and 

 of Merkel (1856 and 1866) 2 failed, though excellent of their kind, 

 to bring the subject within the range of philological interest, and it 

 remained for Eduard Sievers in his Grundzilge der Lautphysiologie 

 (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 portion 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 influence. 



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 applications it was that 

 already, for in explaining the relations to each other of various 

 forms of a given root as employed in different words, even though 

 the explanation was intended to serve the purposes of word-analysis 

 and not of sound -history, the grammarians virtually formulated in 

 repeated instances what we now know as "phonetic laws." The 

 recognition of guna 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 treat- 

 ment of the Indo-European vocalism. The first thorough-going 

 formulation, that of Schleicher in his Compendium (1861), was con- 

 ceived 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 des a-Lautes, 1864), Amelung 3 (1871, 



1 E. Briicke, Untersuchungen uber die LautbiMung und das naturliche System der 

 Sprachlaute(1849)-,Grundziige der Physiologic undSystematik derSprachlaute (1856). 



2 C. L. Merkel, Anatomic und Physiologic des menschlichen Stimm- und Sprach- 

 organs (1856); Physiologic der menschlichen Sprache (1866). 



3 A. Amelung, Die Bildungder Tempusstamme durch Vocalsteigerungim Deutsch- 

 en, Berlin, 1871. Erwiderung, KZ. xxn, 361 ff., completed July, 1873, published 

 1874 after the author's death. Der Ursprung der deutschen a-vocale, Haupt's Zeit- 

 *chr. xviii, 161 ff., 1875. 



