Part 1
# Lectures on the Science of Language ### By Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
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Lectures on
The Science of Language
Delivered At The
Royal Institution of Great Britain
In
April, May, and June, 1861.
By Max Müller, M. A.
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Correspondence Member of the Imperial Institute of France.
From the Second London Edition, Revised.
New York:
Charles Scribner, 124 Grand Street.
1862
CONTENTS
Dedication Preface. Lecture I. The Science Of Language One Of The Physical Sciences. Lecture II. The Growth Of Language In Contradistinction To The History Of Language. Lecture III. The Empirical Stage. Lecture IV. The Classificatory Stage. Lecture V. Genealogical Classification Of Languages. Lecture VI. Comparative Grammar. Lecture VII. The Constituent Elements Of Language. Lecture VIII. Morphological Classification. Lecture IX. The Theoretical Stage, And The Origin Of Language. Appendix. Index. Footnotes
DEDICATION
Dedicated
To
The Members Of The University Of Oxford,
Both Resident And Non-Resident,
To Whom I Am Indebted
For Numerous Proofs Of Sympathy And Kindness
During The Last Twelve Years,
In Grateful Acknowledgment Of Their Generous Support
On The
7th Of December, 1860.
PREFACE.
My Lectures on the Science of Language are here printed as I had prepared them in manuscript for the Royal Institution. When I came to deliver them, a considerable portion of what I had written had to be omitted; and, in now placing them before the public in a more complete form, I have gladly complied with a wish expressed by many of my hearers. As they are, they only form a short abstract of several Courses delivered from time to time in Oxford, and they do not pretend to be more than an introduction to a science far too comprehensive to be treated successfully in so small a compass.
My object, however, will have been attained, if I should succeed in attracting the attention, not only of the scholar, but of the philosopher, the historian, and the theologian, to a science which concerns them all, and which, though it professes to treat of words only, teaches us that there is more in words than is dreamt of in our philosophy. I quote from Bacon: “Men believe that their reason is lord over their words, but it happens, too, that words exercise a reciprocal and reactionary power over our intellect. Words, as a Tartar’s bow, shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment.”
MAX MÜLLER.
_Oxford_, June 11, 1861.
LECTURE I. THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE ONE OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES.
When I was asked some time ago to deliver a course of lectures on Comparative Philology in this Institution, I at once expressed my readiness to do so. I had lived long enough in England to know that the peculiar difficulties arising from my imperfect knowledge of the language would be more than balanced by the forbearance of an English audience, and I had such perfect faith in my subject that I thought it might be trusted even in the hands of a less skilful expositor. I felt convinced that the researches into the history of languages and into the nature of human speech which have been carried on for the last fifty years in England, France, and Germany, deserved a larger share of public sympathy than they had hitherto received; and it seemed to me, as far as I could judge, that the discoveries in this newly-opened mine of scientific inquiry were not inferior, whether in novelty or importance, to the most brilliant discoveries of our age.
It was not till I began to write my lectures that I became aware of the difficulties of the task I had undertaken. The dimensions of the science of language are so vast that it is impossible in a course of nine lectures to give more than a very general survey of it; and as one of the greatest charms of this science consists in the minuteness of the analysis by which each language, each dialect, each word, each grammatical form is tested, I felt that it was almost impossible to do full justice to my subject, or to place the achievements of those who founded and fostered the science of language in their true light. Another difficulty arises from the dryness of many of the problems which I shall have to discuss. Declensions and conjugations cannot be made amusing, nor can I avail myself of the advantages possessed by most lecturers, who enliven their discussions by experiments and diagrams. If, with all these difficulties and drawbacks, I do not shrink from opening to-day this course of lectures on mere words, on nouns and verbs and particles,—if I venture to address an audience accustomed to listen, in this place, to the wonderful tales of the natural historian, the chemist, and geologist, and wont to see the novel results of inductive reasoning invested by native eloquence, with all the charms of poetry and romance,—it is because, though mistrusting myself, I cannot mistrust my subject. The study of words may be tedious to the school-boy, as breaking of stones is to the wayside laborer; but to the thoughtful eye of the geologist these stones are full of interest;—he sees miracles on the high-road, and reads chronicles in every ditch. Language, too, has marvels of her own, which she unveils to the inquiring glance of the patient student. There are chronicles below her surface; there are sermons in every word. Language has been called sacred ground, because it is the deposit of thought. We cannot tell as yet what language is. It may be a production of nature, a work of human art, or a divine gift. But to whatever sphere it belongs, it would seem to stand unsurpassed—nay, unequalled in it—by anything else. If it be a production of nature, it is her last and crowning production which she reserved for man alone. If it be a work of human art, it would seem to lift the human artist almost to the level of a divine creator. If it be the gift of God, it is God’s greatest gift; for through it God spake to man and man speaks to God in worship, prayer, and meditation.
Although the way which is before us may be long and tedious, the point to which it tends would seem to be full of interest; and I believe I may promise that the view opened before our eyes from the summit of our science, will fully repay the patient travellers, and perhaps secure a free pardon to their venturous guide.
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The Science of Language is a science of very modern date. We cannot trace its lineage much beyond the beginning of our century, and it is scarcely received as yet on a footing of equality by the elder branches of learning. Its very name is still unsettled, and the various titles that have been given to it in England, France, and Germany are so vague and varying that they have led to the most confused ideas among the public at large as to the real objects of this new science. We hear it spoken of as Comparative Philology, Scientific Etymology, Phonology, and Glossology. In France it has received the convenient, but somewhat barbarous, name of _Linguistique_. If we must have a Greek title for our science, we might derive it either from _mythos_, word, or from _logos_, speech. But the title of _Mythology_ is already occupied, and _Logology_ would jar too much on classical ears. We need not waste our time in criticising these names, as none of them has as yet received that universal sanction which belongs to the titles of other modern sciences, such as Geology or Comparative Anatomy; nor will there be much difficulty in christening our young science after we have once ascertained its birth, its parentage, and its character. I myself prefer the simple designation of the Science of Language, though in these days of high-sounding titles, this plain name will hardly meet with general acceptance.
From the name we now turn to the meaning of our science. But before we enter upon a definition of its subject-matter, and determine the method which ought to be followed in our researches, it will be useful to cast a glance at the history of the other sciences, among which the science of language now, for the first time, claims her place; and examine their origin, their gradual progress, and definite settlement. The history of a science is, as it were, its biography, and as we buy experience cheapest in studying the lives of others, we may, perhaps, guard our young science from some of the follies and extravagances inherent in youth by learning a lesson for which other branches of human knowledge have had to pay more dearly.
There is a certain uniformity in the history of most sciences. If we read such works as Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences or Humboldt’s Cosmos, we find that the origin, the progress, the causes of failure and success have been the same for almost every branch of human knowledge. There are three marked periods or stages in the history of every one of them, which we may call the _Empirical_, the _Classificatory_, and the _Theoretical_. However humiliating it may sound, every one of our sciences, however grand their present titles, can be traced back to the most humble and homely occupations of half-savage tribes. It was not the true, the good, and the beautiful which spurred the early philosophers to deep researches and bold discoveries. The foundation-stone of the most glorious structures of human ingenuity in ages to come was supplied by the pressing wants of a patriarchal and semi-barbarous society. The names of some of the most ancient departments of human knowledge tell their own tale. Geometry, which at present declares itself free from all sensuous impressions, and treats of its points and lines and planes as purely ideal conceptions, not to be confounded with those coarse and imperfect representations as they appear on paper to the human eye; geometry, as its very name declares, began with measuring a garden or a field. It is derived from the Greek _gē_, land, ground, earth, and _metron_, measure. Botany, the science of plants, was originally the science of _botanē_, which in Greek does not mean a plant in general, but fodder, from _boskein_, to feed. The science of plants would have been called Phytology, from the Greek _phyton_, a plant.(1) The founders of Astronomy were not the poet or the philosopher, but the sailor and the farmer. The early poet may have admired “the mazy dance of planets,” and the philosopher may have speculated on the heavenly harmonies; but it was to the sailor alone that a knowledge of the glittering guides of heaven became a question of life and death. It was he who calculated their risings and settings with the accuracy of a merchant and the shrewdness of an adventurer; and the names that were given to single stars or constellations clearly show that they were invented by the ploughers of the sea and of the land. The moon, for instance, the golden hand on the dark dial of heaven, was called by them the Measurer,—the measurer of time; for time was measured by nights, and moons, and winters, long before it was reckoned by days, and suns, and years. Moon(2) is a very old word. It was _môna_ in Anglo-Saxon, and was used there, not as a feminine, but as a masculine; for the moon was a masculine in all Teutonic languages, and it is only through the influence of classical models that in English moon has been changed into a feminine, and sun into a masculine. It was a most unlucky assertion which Mr. Harris made in his _Hermes_, that all nations ascribe to the sun a masculine, and to the moon a feminine gender.(3) In Gothic moon is _mena_, which is a masculine. For month we have in A.-S. _mónâdh_, in Gothic _menoth_, both masculine. In Greek we find _mēn_, a masculine, for month, and _mēnē_, a feminine, for moon. In Latin we have the derivative _mensis_, month, and in Sanskrit we find _mâs_ for moon, and _mâsa_ for month, both masculine.(4) Now this _mâs_ in Sanskrit is clearly derived from a root _mâ_, to measure, to mete. In Sanskrit, I measure is _mâ-mi_; thou measurest, _mâ-si_; he measures, _mâ-ti_ (or _mimî-te_). An instrument of measuring is called in Sanskrit _mâ-tram_, the Greek _metron_, our metre. Now if the moon was originally called by the farmer the measurer, the ruler of days, and weeks, and seasons, the regulator of the tides, the lord of their festivals, and the herald of their public assemblies, it is but natural that he should have been conceived as a man, and not as the love-sick maiden which our modern sentimental poetry has put in his place.
It was the sailor who, before intrusting his life and goods to the winds and the waves of the ocean, watched for the rising of those stars which he called the Sailing-stars or _Pleiades_, from _plein_, to sail. Navigation in the Greek waters was considered safe after the return of the Pleiades; and it closed when they disappeared. The Latin name for the _Pleiades_ is _Vergiliæ_, from _virga_, a sprout or twig. This name was given to them by the Italian husbandman, because in Italy, where they became visible about May, they marked the return of summer.(5) Another constellation, the seven stars in the head of Taurus, received the name of _Hyades_ or _Pluviæ_ in Latin, because at the time when they rose with the sun they were supposed to announce rain. The astronomer retains these and many other names; he still speaks of the pole of heaven, of wandering and fixed stars,(6) but he is apt to forget that these terms were not the result of scientific observation and classification, but were borrowed from the language of those who themselves were wanderers on the sea or in the desert, and to whom the fixed stars were in full reality what their name implies, stars driven in and fixed, by which they might hold fast on the deep, as by heavenly anchors.
But although historically we are justified in saying that the first geometrician was a ploughman, the first botanist a gardener, the first mineralogist a miner, it may reasonably be objected that in this early stage a science is hardly a science yet: that measuring a field is not geometry, that growing cabbages is very far from botany, and that a butcher has no claim to the title of comparative anatomist. This is perfectly true, yet it is but right that each science should be reminded of these its more humble beginnings, and of the practical requirements which it was originally intended to answer. A science, as Bacon says, should be a rich storehouse for the glory of God, and the relief of man’s estate. Now, although it may seem as if in the present high state of our society students were enabled to devote their time to the investigation of the facts and laws of nature, or to the contemplation of the mysteries of the world of thought, without any side-glance at the practical result of their labors, no science and no art have long prospered and flourished among us, unless they were in some way subservient to the practical interests of society. It is true that a Lyell collects and arranges, a Faraday weighs and analyzes, an Owen dissects and compares, a Herschel observes and calculates, without any thought of the immediate marketable results of their labors. But there is a general interest which supports and enlivens their researches, and that interest depends on the practical advantages which society at large derives from their scientific studies. Let it be known that the successive strata of the geologist are a deception to the miner, that the astronomical tables are useless to the navigator, that chemistry is nothing but an expensive amusement, of no use to the manufacturer and the farmer—and astronomy, chemistry, and geology would soon share the fate of alchemy and astrology. As long as the Egyptian science excited the hopes of the invalid by mysterious prescriptions (I may observe by the way that the hieroglyphic signs of our modern prescriptions have been traced back by Champollion to the real hieroglyphics of Egypt(7))—and as long as it instigated the avarice of its patrons by the promise of the discovery of gold, it enjoyed a liberal support at the courts of princes, and under the roofs of monasteries. Though alchemy did not lead to the discovery of gold, it prepared the way to discoveries more valuable. The same with astrology. Astrology was not such mere imposition as it is generally supposed to have been. It is counted as a science by so sound and sober a scholar as Melancthon, and even Bacon allows it a place among the sciences, though admitting that “it had better intelligence and confederacy with the imagination of man than with his reason.” In spite of the strong condemnation which Luther pronounced against astrology, astrology continued to sway the destinies of Europe; and a hundred years after Luther, the astrologer was the counsellor of princes and generals, while the founder of modern astronomy died in poverty and despair. In our time the very rudiments of astrology are lost and forgotten.(8) Even real and useful arts, as soon as they cease to be useful, die away, and their secrets are sometimes lost beyond the hope of recovery. When after the Reformation our churches and chapels were divested of their artistic ornaments, in order to restore, in outward appearance also, the simplicity and purity of the Christian church, the colors of the painted windows began to fade away, and have never regained their former depth and harmony. The invention of printing gave the death-blow to the art of ornamental writing and of miniature-painting employed in the illumination of manuscripts; and the best artists of the present day despair of rivalling the minuteness, softness, and brilliancy combined by the humble manufacturer of the mediæval missal.
I speak somewhat feelingly on the necessity that every science should answer some practical purpose, because I am aware that the science of language has but little to offer to the utilitarian spirit of our age. It does not profess to help us in learning languages more expeditiously, nor does it hold out any hope of ever realizing the dream of one universal language. It simply professes to teach what language is, and this would hardly seem sufficient to secure for a new science the sympathy and support of the public at large. There are problems, however, which, though apparently of an abstruse and merely speculative character, have exercised a powerful influence for good or evil in the history of mankind. Men before now have fought for an idea, and have laid down their lives for a word; and many of these problems which have agitated the world from the earliest to our own times, belong properly to the science of language.
Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word, but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence. Most of the Greek, the Roman, the Indian, and other heathen gods are nothing but poetical names, which were gradually allowed to assume a divine personality never contemplated by their original inventors. _Eos_ was a name of the dawn before she became a goddess, the wife of _Tithonos_, or the dying day. _Fatum_, or fate, meant originally what had been spoken; and before Fate became a power, even greater than Jupiter, it meant that which had once been spoken by Jupiter, and could never be changed,—not even by Jupiter himself. _Zeus_ originally meant the bright heaven, in Sanskrit _Dyaus_; and many of the stories told of him as the supreme god, had a meaning only as told originally of the bright heaven, whose rays, like golden rain, descend on the lap of the earth, the _Danae_ of old, kept by her father in the dark prison of winter. No one doubts that _Luna_ was simply a name of the moon; but so was likewise _Lucina_, both derived from _lucere_, to shine. _Hecate_, too, was an old name of the moon, the feminine of _Hekatos_ and _Hekatebolos_, the far-darting sun; and _Pyrrha_, the Eve of the Greeks, was nothing but a name of the red earth, and in particular of Thessaly. This mythological disease, though less virulent in modern languages, is by no means extinct.
During the Middle Ages the controversy between Nominalism and Realism, which agitated the church for centuries, and finally prepared the way for the Reformation, was again, as its very name shows, a controversy on names, on the nature of language, and on the relation of words to our conceptions on one side, and to the realities of the outer world on the other. Men were called heretics for believing that words such as _justice_ or _truth_ expressed only conceptions of our mind, not real things walking about in broad daylight.
In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe; and in America comparative philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery. Never do I remember to have seen science more degraded than on the title-page of an American publication in which, among the profiles of the different races of man, the profile of the ape was made to look more human than that of the negro.
Lastly, the problem of the position of man on the threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit has of late assumed a very marked prominence among the problems of the physical and mental sciences. It has absorbed the thoughts of men who, after a long life spent in collecting, observing, and analyzing, have brought to its solution qualifications unrivalled in any previous age; and if we may judge from the greater warmth displayed in discussions ordinarily conducted with the calmness of judges and not with the passion of pleaders, it might seem, after all, as if the great problems of our being, of the true nobility of our blood, of our descent from heaven or earth, though unconnected with anything that is commonly called practical, have still retained a charm of their own—a charm that will never lose its power on the mind, and on the heart of man. Now, however much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed forward, so that at one time the line of demarcation between animal and man seemed to depend on a mere fold in the brain, there is _one_ barrier which no one has yet ventured to touch—the barrier of language. Even those philosophers with whom _penser c’est sentir_,(9) who reduce all thought to feeling, and maintain that we share the faculties which are the productive causes of thought in common with beasts, are bound to confess that _as yet_ no race of animals has produced a language. Lord Monboddo, for instance, admits that as yet no animal has been discovered in the possession of language, “not even the beaver, who of all the animals we know, that are not, like the orang-outangs, of our own species, comes nearest to us in sagacity.”