SOME PRESENT PROBLEMS AND TENDENCIES IN COM- 

 PARATIVE PHILOLOGY 



i 



BY HANNS OERTEL 



[Harms Oertel, Professor of Linguistics and Comparative Philology, Yale Univers- 

 ity, b. April 20, 1868, Geithain, Saxony. A.M. (hon.) Yale, 1888; Ph.D. ibid. 

 1890. Member of American Oriental Society; Librarian, ibid. Author of Lectures 

 on the Study of Language, The Jaiminiya or Talavakdra Upanisad Brahmana 

 (Text, Translation, and Notes), and many articles on Linguistics and Sanskrit 

 Philology.] 



IN an address delivered almost sixty years ago (in 1846; printed in 

 Lassen's Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. vn, 1850, 

 p. 25 ff .) Schleicher divided the new science of comparative philology, 

 which owes its name to Friedrich.Schlegel, into the following three 

 departments: (1) The "philosophical," in so far as the comparative 

 study of languages aims to discover the laws and processes of lin- 

 guistic development ("die fur die Sprache geltenden Entwicklungs- 

 gesetze aufzustellen," p. 36). Included in this are also questions 

 touching the relation of speech and thought, and the origin of lan- 

 guage. It is immaterial here whether the languages compared are 

 genetically related to one another or not. (2) The " historical," which 

 deals with such ethnological information regarding prehistoric times 

 as may be inferentially derived from a comparison of cognate lan- 

 guages; it thus appears as a valuable ally of history. In contradis- 

 tinction to the preceding division, the interest here does not centre 

 in language itself, but in the historical, mythological, institutional, 

 inferences which may be based upon language. Language plays 

 here the same part in the investigation of prehistoric periods which 

 Wolf, in his Alterthumswissenschaft, assigned to it for historic times. 

 (3) The "grammatical," in which the grammatical system of a given 

 language is illumined and cleared up by the comparison of cognate 

 languages. While the first two departments dealt respectively with 

 language in general and with the historical inferences to be derived 

 from a set of cognate languages, this third department is concerned 

 with some one definite language whose structure it analyzes by 

 means of the comparative method. 



Although these three divisions are not mutually exclusive, still 

 less antagonistic to each other, and although the work of most 

 scholars has been, to a certain degree, extended over more than a 

 single one of the three subdivisions, it is easy to name the pioneer 

 and earliest representative for each, namely, Wilhelm von Humboldt 

 for the first (the "philosophical"), August Schleicher himself for 

 the second (the "historical"), and Franz Bopp for the third (the 

 "grammatical"). 



