THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 87 



AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF GRIMM'S 



LAW. 



Read before the Philological Section, January i^tJi, i8gi, 

 BY A. W. STRATTON. 



When a man's attention has been drawn to the language of 

 another people, he is constantly on the watch for points of resem- 

 blance with his own ; and he who seeks will find perhaps not a few. 

 It was so in a marked degree when the study of Greek, literature be- 

 came popular at Rome. How largely the vocabularies of the two 

 languages agreed may readily be seen from such a comparison as 

 that made in Halsey's " Etymology of Latin and Greek ;" and the 

 comparatively early development of Greek civilization caused this 

 agreement to be explained as due to the derivation of the Latin from 

 the Greek of an early time. Something very similar occurred when 

 Englishmen noticed how many of their words, not known to be im- 

 itations of any foreign words, differed but slightly from the Latin, it 

 might be, or the Greek or the Hebrew ; and the theology of the 

 time required that all should be traced to Hebrew, the original 

 speech, it was said, " used between God and man."''' Here was a 

 vast and inviting field of study, but the rude guess-work of the first 

 attempts at comparison made the results almost valueless. 



Some valid distinctions were, of course, made before the days 

 of scientific etymology, e. g. that of the relations of the English 

 fraternal and brotherly to the Latin frater. This distinction was 

 recognized by Home Tooke'''' (1736-1812), a man to whom it was 

 given to see darkly and partially many of the things made clearer to 

 us by the study of Sanskrit, then unknown in Europe. How nearly 

 he anticipated Rask and Grimm may be seen from the following 

 passage :'3' Speaking of prepositions he says : — " Though it is not 

 from Asia or its confines that we are to seek for the origin of this 

 part of our language, yet it is worth noticing here that the Greek, to 



(i) See Pres. White's article in the Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1891. 



(2) See his " Diversions of Purley, Bk. II., Ch. 6. 



(3) Divers. Purl., I. 9. 



