NATURE 



49 



4 



THURSDAY, MAY 20, l5 



THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 

 Inirodiiciioii to the Science of Language. By A. H. 

 Sayce, Deputy Professor of Comparative Philology in 

 the University of Oxford. Two vols. (London : 

 Kegan Paul and Co., iSSo.) 



THIS admirable treatise may be broadly described 

 as the fitting complement and sequel to the author's 

 " Principles of Comparative Philology." The method 

 and theories of that work, as he is careful to remind us in 

 the preface, form the solid basis of the present, and it is 

 ' not saying too much to add that both together stand 

 unrivalled as the most systematic and exhaustive treatise 

 on the Science of Language in its present state that has 

 yet appeared in our literature. At the same time the 

 present work is sufficiently complete in itself to be read 

 with pleasure and studied with profit by those who may 

 be unacquainted with its forerunner, though this must 

 still remain indispensable to a thorough grasp of the 

 subject. 



The author shrewdly remarks (i. 159) that "the com- 

 parative philologist should not introduce the frame of 

 mind of the specialist into his comparative inquiries. The 

 specialist who takes up comparative philology as a sub- 

 sidiary pursuit is likely to spoil it in the taking.' ' Being thus 

 forewarned against an obvious danger, he has not yielded 

 to the temptation of giving undue prominence to any 

 particular branch, nor has he allowed his personal partiality 

 for Assyrian studies in any way to interfere with the broad 

 and catholic spirit pervading the whole work. This catholic 

 spirit, constituting one of its special merits, is everywhere 

 conspicuous, and nowhere more so than in his compre- 

 hensive classification of comparative philology into the 

 three great divisions of phonology, sematology, and 

 morphology (i., 141). This classification at once gives its 

 due position to that more [spiritual, though hitherto almost 

 totally neglected, aspect of the subject which deals with 

 the inner meaning, as phonology does with the outward or 

 material sound of words. The difficulties associated with 

 this branch, for which the happy term sematology is here 

 adopted, are fully recognised ; its somewhat vague and 

 uncertain character, and the intricate psychological phe- 

 nomena surrounding it, all receive due prominence. But 

 a limit is assigned to the arbitrary and to the element of 

 chance, and if a science of sematologj- is not already 

 established on a solid basis, the course that research 

 must take in this direction is at all events ably fore- 

 shadowed. The delicate modifications of meaning that 

 words undergo in their historic life must be carefully 

 noted, the general causes underlying them analysed 

 and formulated, significant change reduced to definite 

 principle and broadly generalised. 



His philosophic classification of his subject enables the 

 writer satisfactorily to settle a point still much discussed 

 by philologists. Whether language is to be grouped with 

 the natural or historical sciences is a question which, he 

 justly remarks, has arisen from the partial views that 

 have been taken of its true character. Speech is not 

 mere sound, nor even articulate sound alone, for many 

 animals can articulate, but articulate sound significant. 

 Vol. X.XI1. — No. 551 



Terminus, said the schoolmen, est vox significans, and 

 for Mr. Sayce the terminus or "word," as here used, is 

 speech, for the isolated term has no independent or 

 abstract existence, and the unit of speech is not the 

 word, but the sentence. It thus becomes impossible 

 to separate the sound from its meaning, phonology from 

 sematology. But phonology, or the outward aspect of 

 language, is confessedly physiological, and subject to 

 purely physical or natural laws, while sematology is 

 essentially historical. And so the whole difficulty is 

 solved ; for " if we claim for the science of language in 

 general the rank of a historical science, it is only because 

 the meaning, rather than the sound, is the essence of 

 speech, and phonology the handmaid and instrument 

 rather than the equivalent of glottology" (i. 165). But 

 " the method pursued by the science of language is the 

 method of physical science ; and this, combined with the 

 fact that the laws of sound are also physical . . . has 

 occasioned the belief that the science of language is a 

 physical science. But such a view results in identifying 

 phonology and glottology, in making a subordinate 

 science equivalent to the higher one, and in ignoring all 

 those questions as to the nature and origin of language 

 which are of supreme importance to the philosophy of 

 speech" {ib.). 



In the chapter devoted to the morphology of speech 

 the attempt made by Hovelacque and some other recent 

 writers to identify polysynthesis with agglutination re- 

 ceives no countenance. That attempt could obviously 

 lead to nothing but hopeless confusion, for " the con- 

 ception of the sentence that underlies the polysynthetic 

 dialects is the precise converse of that which underlies 

 the isolating or the agglutinative groups " (i. 126). This 

 question has been elsewhere dealt with somewhat fully by 

 this writer,' and it is to him a source of no little satisfac- 

 tion to find his views here so fully endorsed. At the 

 same time it seems difficult to accept the author's theory 

 that polysynthesis is " the undeveloped sentence of primi- 

 tive speech," and that "the polysynthetic languages of 

 America preserve the beginnings of grammar, just as the 

 Bushman dialects have preserved the beginnings of 

 phonetic utterance " (ii. 216). For it is hard to believe 

 that primeval man began to speak in " sescjuipedalia 

 verba," and in any case the presence of true pronouns in 

 these lengthy sentence-words is alone sufficient to show 

 that polysynthesis is itself a development, the outcome of 

 slow fusion and of long ages of gradual phonetic decay. 

 The Bushman clicks form very probably a connecting- 

 link between articulate and inarticulate utterance. But 

 the pronoun in all languages stands on a far higher relative 

 level ; it cannot be conceived as a primordial cut-and-dry 

 invention, for it is an abstraction of a high order, whereas 

 the first beginnings of speech must all have been made up 

 of the crudest concrete concepts combined with involuntary 

 or mechanical ejaculations. 



But one of the peculiar charms of the present work is 

 the extreme fairness of the author, who is always ready 

 to recognise the cogency of objections to favourite theories, 

 so that the reader feels that both sides of the question 

 have been fairly placed before him. A good instance 

 occurs at p. 209 of vol. i., where the weakness of Sagard's 



■ In Appendix to the " Central and South America " of " Stanford's 

 Compendium." 



