22 HISTORY OF LANGUAGE 



have been near enough to the need of such instruction to know whether 

 or not he was to be taken seriously; for the words bore no fruit, and 

 only years afterward when Bopp's doctrine had been recognized were 

 they disinterred as antiquarian curiosities. Eleven years later, in the 

 full light of the Sanskrit grammar, Bopp published his Conjugations- 

 system, 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 per- 

 mitting the identification of such entities as mode-sign, tense-sign, 

 personal endings, etc. The erroneous portion of his doctrine based 

 upon his conception of the Indo-European as an agglutinative type 

 of -speech dragged itself as an incumbrance through the first half- 

 century of the science, and, though gasping, still lived in the second 

 edition of Curtius's Verbum (1877). 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 rela- 

 tions 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. We shall have 

 occasion to return to this subject later. 



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 and spirit of his 

 work, he hoped to be able "in this way to penetrate into the mys- 

 teries of the human mind and learn something of its nature and its 

 laws." He was therefore unmistakably of the school of the Greeks, 

 not of the Hindoos; for the Greek grammarian in facing language 

 asks the question '' why," grammar being to him philosophy, whereas 

 the Hindoo asks the question, " what," grammar being to him a science 

 after the manner of what we call the " natural sciences." There is 

 indeed but slight reason for the common practice of dating the begin- 

 ning of the modern science of language with Bopp, aside from the one 

 simple result of his activity, which must in strict logic be treated as 

 merely incidental thereto, namely, that he gave a practical illustra- 

 tion of the possibility of applying the comparative method for widen- 

 ing the scope and enriching the results of historical grammar. 



As Bopp had tried to use the comparative method in determining 

 the true and original meanings of the formative elements, so did his 

 later contemporary, August Friedrich Pott 2 (1802-87), undertake 

 to use it in finding out the original meaning of words. The search for 



1 Introduction to Bopp's Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache, p. 4, 1816. 



2 A. F. Pott, Etymologische For&chungen, 2 vols. Lemgo, 1833-36; 2d ed. 

 6 vols. 1859-76. 



