PROBLEMS IN GERMANIC PHILOLOGY 289 



actually belonged to consecutive periods, periods, however, not far 

 distant in time. 



The attempts systematically to restore the Early Germanic period 

 are of rather recent date. However valuable the services are which 

 Jakob Grimm in his Deutsche .Grammatik (that is, "Germanic" 

 Grammar, not "German" Grammar) has rendered to Germanic 

 philology, there was no attempt on Grimm's part to restore the Early 

 Germanic period or any other of the lost periods in the history of the 

 Germanic languages. He has been satisfied in his great work with 

 giving parallel grammars of the principal Germanic languages, 

 especially those which have served as literary languages. And 

 nothing more could we expect at Grimm's time, since at that period, 

 even in comparative Indo-European philology, no attempt had been 

 made to reconstruct the Indo-European parent speech. It was 

 reserved for August Schleicher to urge for the first time the necessity 

 of reducing the various Indo-European languages to a common 

 basis which he called the " Indogermanische Grundsprache." Now 

 Schleicher might have been expected to apply this point of view 

 to the Germanic languages, and to try to reconstruct in his Com- 

 pendium l the Primitive Teutonic grammar. Schleicher indeed men- 

 tions here and there the " Deutsche Grundsprache." Actually, how- 

 ever, with him as with his predecessors, the Gothic language has to 

 serve as representative of the earliest period of the Germanic languages. 



Yet the course taken by Schleicher for the Indo-European natur- 

 ally led to attempting the same for the Germanic languages, and 

 when in 1870 in his preface to a reprint of Grimm's grammar, 2 

 Wilhelm Scherer stated that to adapt Grimm's work to the needs of 

 our time would mean first to reconstruct the Germanic parent 

 speech, he probably voiced an opinion which was gradually becoming 

 ' more general among philologists. 



There followed, a year afterwards, an attempt to reconstruct the 

 Early Germanic vocabulary, by a scholar whose work in Indo- 

 European lexicology forms a counterpart of Schleicher's work in 

 Indo-European grammar. I am referring to August Fick's Compar- 

 ative Dictionary of the Indo-European Languages, which in the second 

 edition (Gottingen, 1871) contains a comprehensive chapter on the 

 Germanic vocabulary. 3 It is not a mere accident that the recon- 



1 Schleicher's Compendium der Vergleichenden Grammatik der Indogermanischen 

 Sprachen was first published (in two volumes) in 1861 and 1862. 



3 Deutsche Grammatik, von Jakob Grimm. Erster Teil. Neuer vennehrter 

 Abdruck. Berlin, 1870. The reference is to p. xxvii. 



3 Vergleichendes Worterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen, von Aug. Tick. 

 2 Aufl., Gottingen, 1871. ("Zum Wortschatz der germanischen Spracheinheit," 

 pp. 685-924.) As regards the progress made in Fick's dictionary in the method 

 of reconstruction I may refer to my review of the fourth edition in American 

 Journal of Philology, vol. xn (1891), pp. 293-309. This subject as well as similar 

 historical and methodological questions has also been touched upon in my review 

 of Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, in the Modern Languages Notes, 

 vol. vni (1893), nos. 2, 3, and 4. 



