RELATIONS OF COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR 37 



solved upon the basis of internal evidence, if only one attacks them 

 with that better insight into the principles of linguistic develop- 

 ment and greater precision of method which has been gained by the 

 assistance of comparative grammar. Indeed, it can be said of many 

 specific matters which belong properly to comparative grammar and 

 which the comparison of cognate forms first made clear, that precisely 

 the same result would now be reached even if these cognate forms 

 were not in existence. Only without the help of comparative gram- 

 mar we should never have attained that knowledge of the characteris- 

 tics of each language which makes this possible. 



To demand that every student of a special language should be 

 a comparative grammarian or that every comparative grammarian 

 should have equal knowledge of each language with a specialist, 

 would be to deprecate that division of labor which is absolutely 

 essential in such a wide field of investigation. But what can and should 

 be expected is the fullest cooperation, each recognizing that both 

 are working within the same general field and that neither can with 

 safety ignore the other's results. 



The Relation of Comparative Grammar to Physiology 



The comparative grammarian has to do primarily with the history 

 of spoken language. It is true that except in its latest stages the 

 material is available only in its written form. The invention of the 

 phonograph unfortunately came some thousands of years too late 

 to admit of our possessing reproductions of the speech of the Vedic 

 Hindus, of the Homeric Greeks, of the early Romans, the Goths or 

 the Norsemen, the Celts and the Slavs. One might as well ask out- 

 right for a reproduction of the parent Indo-European, or even of the 

 primitive language or languages of the earth. The school-boy who is 

 taught the proper "pronunciation of the letters" may conceive of 

 speech-sounds as invented to represent these letters, and even the 

 fathers of comparative grammar had not shaken off the domination 

 of the written symbol when they discussed what is now called 

 phonology under the head of "History of the Letters." But now at 

 least there is no failure to recognize that the written language is 

 something secondary, merely an attempt, at best only crude and 

 inadequate, to represent the spoken language, which is the real ob- 

 ject of investigation. Spoken language is made up of a succession of 

 speech-sounds, and the changes with which the historian of language 

 has to deal, so far as they concern the form rather than the con- 

 tent, consist in large part of certain shiftings of the individual 

 speech-sounds which are found to occur with a degree of uniformity 

 which makes their study the very foundation of all comparative 



