278 GERMANIC LANGUAGES 



certain pedantry in the field at that time. A considerable number 

 of old doctrines of which some had been established a priori in 

 a period when language-research tended to be philosophical and spec- 

 ulative, and of which others can be traced back to exaggerated con- 

 ceptions of the antiquity of the Aryan languages, especially of San- 

 skrit, and to the uncritical acceptance of doctrines of the old Indian 

 grammarians were accepted at their face-value and transmitted 

 without investigation from generation to generation. (As examples 

 I need only cite the doctrine of the priority of the o-sounds over the 

 e- and o-sounds, or of all explosives over spirants; the doctrine of 

 guna; or the theory of the distribution of the Indo-Germanic lan- 

 guages on the basis of a genealogical tree, etc.) Above everything else, 

 however, these investigations were based solely on the written word, 

 which was duly " analyzed " and with the aid of all manner of little 

 strokes divided and subdivided into roots and the most varied forms 

 of derivative and inflectional suffixes, etc. But no attention whatever 

 was paid to the psychology of language, which unites the smaller 

 particles into the finished word, nor to the psychic processes which 

 control the transmission and transformation of human speech. 

 Moreover, no one attempted seriously to throw light on the phonetic 

 aspects of linguistic changes established on paper by calling into 

 requisition an aid of the utmost importance, that is, the comparative 

 study of the phonetic phenomena of living languages. 



It was naturally not to be expected that a sudden improvement 

 could be made in these conditions. Long conflicts have been neces- 

 sary before the new ideas and methods, which have been so widely 

 promulgated, especially since the seventies, could become adjusted 

 and secure more universal recognition. But at the present time 

 scarcely any essential difference in methods exists, and it is probable 

 that all language-investigators to-day employ in practice the methods 

 first adopted by the Young Grammarians, even though a certain 

 antipathy may be felt here and there for the name of the movement 

 and although in theory opposition against certain of their principles 

 still exists. 



To this transformation in linguistic conceptions and methods 

 Germanic linguistics, as we should expect, has contributed its due 

 share. While the older science of language had concerned itself 

 primarily with the written forms of the earlier and most ancient 

 language-periods, the Germanists, like the Romanists and Slavists, 

 by reason of the fact that their linguistic sources reach directly 

 into the present, have from the very beginning been concerned also 

 with the study of living languages and dialects. Hence, necessarily, 

 their attention has also been directed to the psychological side of 

 language-structure and language-development, which can be inves- 

 tigated successfully only on the basis of the living language. We 



