RELATIONS OF GERMAN LINGUISTICS 275 



quarian interests it had concerned itself with the collection and 

 publication of linguistic peculiarities and eccentricities, while it 

 endeavored at the same time to establish a standard of usage for 

 literature and the conversation of the educated classes. With the 

 advent of Bopp and Grimm, however, investigations of the linguistic 

 elements were conducted for their own sake. Henceforth the question 

 no longer turned solely on the "Is" and the "Shall," but new and 

 more important questions arose, as for example, "How are we to 

 apprehend existing forms, where are we to seek their origin, and how 

 has the individual element been developed from the original forms 

 which we must establish? " It was this new range of questions that 

 raised the old descriptive "grammar" with its normalizing tendencies 

 to the rank of a "science of language." 



This series of questions also contains the germ of the elements 

 which constitute the similarity as well as the dissimilarity between 

 Grimm and Bopp. The latter, from the first, boldly attacked the 

 ultimate questions which linguistic science felt permitted to put. 

 First, he turned his attention to the explanation of Indo-Germanic 

 linguistic forms and sought to establish these by the comparative- 

 speculative method on the basis of the great variety of forms found 

 in individual dialects. Jakob Grimm, however, advanced with 

 greater caution and more distinctly along the lines of historical 

 development. To be sure, he also occasionally grappled with general 

 glottological problems, yet his main interest was directed to the 

 narrower field of Germanic, and accordingly he concerned himself 

 more directly with the accurate determination of linguistic resem- 

 blances and differences and their historical development. In Grimm's 

 work, too, considerable prominence is given to the philological ele- 

 ment, as is clearly demonstrated by his extensive collection of 

 authentic and historically arranged material taken directly from the 

 preserved linguistic sources. Bopp had turned his attention first 

 to the Indo-Germanic system of conjugation, and when, in 1819, 

 Grimm appeared on the scene with the first part of his German 

 grammar, he also dealt only with inflections, although he approached 

 the question from an essentially different standpoint. Only three 

 years later, however, in 1822, he adopted a new course, which 

 brought in its train far-reaching results, for in the new edition of the 

 first volume of his grammar he prefaced the consideration of Ger- 

 manic inflections with a complete and systematic investigation of 

 the conditions of Germanic phonetics. This, indeed, was the first 

 systematic attempt in the history of grammar and of the science 

 of language to introduce the new discipline of historical-comparative 

 phonetics, which is now the basis for all formal studies in comparative 

 linguistics, since without its aid a systematic comparison of inflectional 

 forms is impossible. 



