October 23, 1885.] 



SCIENCE. 



367 



themselves largely with glottogonic problems; and 

 some of them had adopted misleadmg metaphors, 

 as Schleicher in his theory that language was an 

 organism, and linguistics one of the natural sci- 

 ences. Brugmann, in a recent pamphlet,^ charges 

 fui-ther that mechanical methods were employed 

 in comparisons of words, as when the fullest form 

 was judged to be always the oldest. The new 

 school discards glottogonic problems, on the ground 

 that the materials for their discussion are, at least 

 at present, insufficient, rejects the misleading meta- 

 phors, and abstractions in general, and professes 

 to confine itself to known facts. But the principle 

 on which it lays most stress is that "our general 

 views of language and methods of comparison 

 should be formed after study of living languages, 

 because these alone are conti'oUable in detail, and 

 can give an insight into the motive forces that 

 shape and modify language " (Sievers). The most 

 promment of these forces are held to be two; 

 phonetic variation, to whose laws there are no 

 exceptions, and which is differentiating in its 

 tendency ; and analogy, an assimilating force, 

 whose procedui'es cannot be reduced to rule. An 

 example of the first is the sei^aration of the old 

 English short a (pronounced as in Italian) into two 

 sounds, that in mare before r, and that in inake 

 before all other consonants ; an example of the 

 second is found in the plural of hook, which was 

 formed in the older language simply by change of 

 vowel, like feet from foot, but was afterwards 

 assimilated to other plurals in s. 



These are the views that Brugmann defends in his 

 pamphlet. It consists of three pieces. The first, 

 an address dehvered when he entered on the duties 

 of his university chair, is a statement of the rela- 

 tion between linguistics and philology. Defining 

 the latter, after Bockh, as the science that inves- 

 tigates the historical manifestation of the mind of 

 peoples, that is, their development of culture, he 

 pomts out that the science of language is merely 

 one branch of this larger department, and that 

 aU attempts to draw a Line between them have 

 failed. After exhorting scholars of all linguistic 

 departments, wider and narrower, Indo-German- 

 ists, Hellenists, Latinists, Germanists and others, 

 to work in harmony, he gives a short sketch of 

 the progress recently made in the systematic 

 investigation of the general vital conditions of 

 language. The foundation for this, he says, was 

 laid by Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Steinthal, 

 and W. D. Whitney had also contributed; Scherer, 

 in 1868, showed the importance of analogy in the 

 explanation of older forms, and Leskien soon 

 after announced the doctrine that the laws of 



1 2^m heutigen stand der sprachwissenschaft. Von Karl 

 Brugmann. Strassburg, Triibner, 1885. 144 p. 8°. 



phonetic variation are in themselves subject to no 

 exception. Other scholars, among whom are 

 Osthoff, Paul, Delbriick, Sievers and Brugmann, 

 have continued the investigation and axjjjlication 

 of principles. Brugmann closes with the expres- 

 sion of the opinion that for young students of 

 classical and Germanic philology, while Sanskrit 

 is important, it is still more important to under- 

 stand the nature of language and the laws that 

 govern its growth. 



The second and longest paper is Brugmann's 

 reply to a ' Criticism of the latest linguistic inves- 

 tigations ' by Georg Curtius, whose recent death 

 has deprived Indo-Germanic philology of one of 

 its most distinguished and useful workers. Cur- 

 tius had treated of four points : phonetic laws, 

 analogy, the Indo-Germanic vowel-system, and 

 the origin of primitive Indo-Germanic forms ; 

 Brugmann takes these up in the same order. The 

 principle of the constancy of phonetic laws, de- 

 fended by the new school against Curtius, is 

 understood by them to mean that the same sound 

 under the same conditions always moves in the 

 same direction and undergoes the same change, — 

 there are no exceptions or irregularities. Brug- 

 mann draws his proof of this proposition from a 

 consideration of the physical and psycliical processes 

 concerned in the production of words, and the 

 way in which the individuals of a community act 

 on one another in the production of sounds. Pho- 

 netic change, he says, is at the same time a 

 psychical and a physical process : individuals are 

 constantly modifying their pronunciation, but the 

 modifications are controUed by the necessity of 

 being understood by the community, and thus all 

 the members of the community necessarily move 

 on together ; when the phonetic change is com- 

 pleted, it is inconceivable that in different words 

 different courses should be taken, for the pronun- 

 ciation is not learned separately for each individual 

 word, but the same phonetic conditions necessarily 

 induce the same feeling and the same pronuncia- 

 tion. Curtius insists that many unexplained 

 cases of phonetic change exist, and that an in- 

 ductive demonstration of the constancy of the law 

 of phonetic change is impossible. Brugmann ad- 

 mits that such demonstration is, in the nature of 

 the case, impossible, since so much of the necessary 

 material has perished, but holds that the number 

 of unexplained changes is constantly diminish- 

 ing, many of the seeming ' exceptions ' to rules 

 depending on false etymologies, or resulting from 

 the fact that one dialect has borrowed from 

 another, in which different laws of hteral inter- 

 change exist, or being otherwise exphcable. Cur- 

 tius thinks that a letter is sometimes retained in a 

 particular form, when it has disappeared from 



