Part 8

I have dwelt at some length on the changes in the intellectual atmosphere of Rome at the end of the Punic wars, and I have endeavored to show how completely it was impregnated with Greek ideas in order to explain, what otherwise would seem almost inexplicable, the zeal and earnestness with which the study of Greek grammar was taken up at Rome, not only by a few scholars and philosophers, but by the leading statesmen of the time. To our minds, discussions on nouns and verbs, on cases and gender, on regular and irregular conjugation, retain always something of the tedious character which these subjects had at school, and we can hardly understand how at Rome, grammar—pure and simple grammar—should have formed a subject of general interest, and a topic of fashionable conversation. When one of the first grammarians of the day, Crates of Pergamus, was sent to Rome as ambassador of King Attalus, he was received with the greatest distinction by all the literary statesmen of the capital. It so happened that when walking one day on the Palatian hill, Crates caught his foot in the grating of a sewer, fell and broke his leg. Being thereby detained at Rome longer than he intended, he was persuaded to give some public lectures, or _akroaseis_, on grammar; and from these lectures, says Suetonius, dates the study of grammar at Rome. This took place about 159 B. C., between the second and third Punic wars, shortly after the death of Ennius, and two years after the famous expulsion of the Greek rhetors and philosophers (161). Four years later Carneades, likewise sent to Rome as ambassador, was prohibited from lecturing by Cato. After these lectures of Crates, grammatical and philological studies became extremely popular at Rome. We hear of Lucius Ælius Stilo,(93) who lectured on Latin as Crates had lectured on Greek. Among his pupils were Varro, Lucilius, and Cicero. Varro composed twenty-four books on the Latin language, four of which were dedicated to Cicero. Cicero, himself, is quoted as an authority on grammatical questions, though we know of no special work of his on grammar. Lucilius devoted the ninth book of his satires to the reform of spelling.(94) But nothing shows more clearly the wide interest which grammatical studies had then excited in the foremost ranks of Roman society than Cæsar’s work on Latin grammar. It was composed by him during the Gallic war, and dedicated to Cicero, who might well be proud of the compliment thus paid him by the great general and statesman. Most of these works are lost to us, and we can judge of them only by means of casual quotations. Thus we learn from a fragment of Cæsar’s work, _De analogia_, that he was the inventor of the term _ablative_ in Latin. The word never occurs before, and, of course, could not be borrowed, like the names of the other cases, from Greek grammarians, as they admitted no ablative in Greek. To think of Cæsar fighting the barbarians of Gaul and Germany, and watching from a distance the political complications at Rome, ready to grasp the sceptre of the world, and at the same time carrying on his philological and grammatical studies together with his secretary, the Greek Didymus,(95) gives us a new view both of that extraordinary man, and of the time in which he lived. After Cæsar had triumphed, one of his favorite plans was to found a Greek and Latin library at Rome, and he offered the librarianship to the best scholar of the day, to Varro, though Varro had fought against him on the side of Pompey.(96)

We have thus arrived at the time when, as we saw in an earlier part of this lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first elementary grammar of Greek at Rome. Empirical grammar had thus been transplanted to Rome, the Greek grammatical terminology was translated into Latin, and in this new Latin garb it has travelled now for nearly two thousand years over the whole civilized world. Even in India, where a different terminology had grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Rome, we may now hear such words as _case_, and _gender_, and _active_ and _passive_, explained by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination papers of the government schools in India, such questions as—“Write the genitive case of Siva,” seemed to reduce whole volumes of history into a single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term _case_, or _ptōsis_, had a philosophical meaning; at Rome, _casus_ was merely a literal translation; the original meaning of _fall_ was lost, and the word dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the mind. The terminology of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics was divided into two parts,(97) called _rhetoric_ and _dialectic_, and the latter treated, first, “On that which signifies, or language;” secondly, “On that which is signified, or things.” In their philosophical language _ptōsis_, which the Romans translated by _casus_, really meant fall; that is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried on as to whether the name of _ptōsis_, or fall, was applicable to the nominative; and every true Stoic would have scouted the expression of _casus rectus_, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other words of a sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak of cases.

And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess the meaning of _genitive_? The Latin _genitivus_ is a mere blunder, for the Greek word _genikē_ could never mean _genitivus_. _Genitivus_, if it is meant to express the case of origin or birth, would in Greek have been called _gennētikē_, not _genikē_. Nor does the genitive express the relation of son to father. For though we may say, “the son of the father,” we may likewise say, “the father of the son.” _Genikē_, in Greek, had a much wider, a much more philosophical meaning.(98) It meant _casus generalis_, the general case, or rather the case which expresses the gentus or kind. This is the real power of the genitive. If I say, “a bird of the water,” “of the water” defines the genus to which a certain bird belongs; it refers it to the genus of water-birds. “Man of the mountains,” means a mountaineer. In phrases such as “son of the father,” or “father of the son,” the genitives have the same effect. They predicate something of the son or of the father; and if we distinguished between the sons of the father, and the sons of the mother, the genitives would mark the class or genus to which the sons respectively belonged. They would answer the same purpose as the adjectives, paternal and maternal. It can be proved etymologically that the termination of the genitive is, in most cases, identical with those derivative suffixes by which substantives are changed into adjectives.(99)

It is hardly necessary to trace the history of what I call the empirical study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With Dionysius Thrax the framework of grammar was finished. Later writers have improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman writers. We find Quintilian in the first century; Scaurus, Apollonius Dyscolus, and his son, Herodianus, in the second; Probus and Donatus in the fourth. After Constantine had moved the seat of government from Rome, grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople. There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century, the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his work remained an authority during the Middle Ages to nearly our own times. We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.

LECTURE IV. THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.

We traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly intended.

Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences between the grammatical terminology of the Greeks and the Hindús, which would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation for the much-abused grammatical system of the schools. The Hindús are the only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in Sanskrit too the same system of cases, called _vibhakti_, or inflections, the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons, divided not exactly, but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.(100) In Sanskrit, grammar is called _vyâkaraņa_, which means analysis or taking to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The differences between the dialect of these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and preserved with a religious care. We still possess the first essays in the grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called _prâtiśâkhyas_. These works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same time with observations of a grammatical character, and particularly with those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable, the Gaņas. These supplied that solid basis on which successive generations of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection in the grammar of Pâņini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of Pâņini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything in the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet of the real nature, and natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing.

What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar to our own tongue?

We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative, the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form, may be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas in English the genitive is marked by a final _s_, or by the preposition _of_, it is in Greek expressed by a final ος, in Latin by _is_. But what this ος and _is_ represent, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a distinction would seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages which have distinct forms for these two categories of thought. Even in Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the nominative and accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, it is commonly said, has no grammar at all, that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and conjugation, in our sense of these words; it makes no formal distinction of the various parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c. Yet there is no shade of thought that cannot be rendered in Chinese. The Chinese have no more difficulty in distinguishing between “James beats John,” and “John beats James,” than the Greeks and Romans or we ourselves. They have no termination for the accusative, but they attain the same by always placing the subject before, and the object after the verb, or by employing words, before or after the noun, which clearly indicate that it is to be taken as the object of the verb.(101) There are other languages which have more terminations even than Greek and Latin. In Finnish there are fifteen cases, expressive of every possible relation between the subject and the object; but there is no accusative, no purely objective case. In English and French the distinctive terminations of the nominative and accusative have been worn off by phonetic corruption, and these languages are obliged, like Chinese, to mark the subject and object by the collocation of words. What we learn therefore at school in being taught that _rex_ in the nominative becomes _regem_ in the accusative, is simply a practical rule. We know when to say _rex_, and when to say _regem_. But why the king as a subject should be called _rex_, and as an object _regem_, remains entirely unexplained. In the same manner we learn that _amo_ means I love, _amavi_ I loved; but why that tragical change from _love_ to _no love_ should be represented by the simple change of _o_ to _avi_, or, in English, by the addition of a mere _d_, is neither asked nor answered.

Now if there is a science of language, these are the questions which it will have to answer. If they cannot be answered, if we must be content with paradigms and rules, if the terminations of nouns and verbs must be looked upon either as conventional contrivances or as mysterious excrescences, there is no such thing as a science of language, and we must be satisfied with what has been called the art (τέχνη) of language, or grammar.

Before we either accept or decline the solution of any problem, it is right to determine what means there are for solving it. Beginning with English we should ask, what means have we for finding out why _I love_ should mean I am actually loving, whereas _I loved_ indicates that that feeling is past and gone? Or, if we look to languages richer in inflections than English, by what process can we discover under what circumstances _amo_, I love, was changed, through the mere addition of an _r_, into _amor_, expressing no longer _I love_, but _I am loved_? Did declensions and conjugations bud forth like the blossoms of a tree? Were they imparted to man ready made by some mysterious power? Or did some wise people invent them, assigning certain letters to certain phases of thought, as mathematicians express unknown quantities by freely chosen algebraic exponents? We are here brought at once face to face with the highest and most difficult problem of our science, the origin of language. But it will be well for the present to turn our eyes away from theories, and fix our attention at first entirely on facts.

Let us keep to the English perfect, _I loved_, as compared with the present, _I love_. We cannot embrace at once the whole English grammar, but if we can track one form to its true lair, we shall probably have no difficulty in digging out the rest of the brood. Now, if we ask how the addition of a final _d_ could express the momentous transition from being in love to being indifferent, the first thing we have to do, before attempting any explanation, would be to establish the earliest and most original form of _I loved_. This is a rule which even Plato recognized in his philosophy of language, though, we must confess, he seldom obeyed it. We know what havoc phonetic corruption may make both in the dictionary and the grammar of a language, and it would be a pity to waste our conjectures on formations which a mere reference to the history of language would suffice to explain. Now a very slight acquaintance with the history of the English language teaches us that the grammar of modern English is not the same as the grammar of Wycliffe. Wycliffe’s English again may be traced back to what, with Sir Frederick Madden, we may call Middle English, from 1500 to 1330; Middle English to Early English, from 1330 to 1230; Early English to Semi-Saxon from 1230 to 1100; and Semi-Saxon to Anglo-Saxon.(102) It is evident that if we are to discover the original intention of the syllable which changes _I love_ into _I loved_, we must consult the original form of that syllable wherever we can find it. We should never have known that _priest_ meant originally _an elder_, unless we had traced it back to its original form _presbyter_, in which a Greek scholar at once recognizes the comparative of _presbys_, old. If left to modern English alone, we might attempt to connect _priest_ with _praying_ or _preaching_, but we should not thus arrive at its true derivation. The modern word _Gospel_ conveys no meaning at all. As soon as we trace it back to the original _Goddspell_, we see that it is a literal translation of _Evangelium_, or good news, good tidings.(103) _Lord_ would be nothing but an empty title in English, unless we could discover its original form and meaning in the Anglo-Saxon _hlafford_, meaning a giver of bread, from _hlaf_, a loaf, and _ford_, to give.

But even after this is done, after we have traced a modern English word back to Anglo-Saxon, it follows by no means that we should there find it in its original form, or that we should succeed in forcing it to disclose its original intention. Anglo-Saxon is not an original or aboriginal language. It points by its very name to the Saxons and Angles of the continent. We have, therefore, to follow our word from Anglo-Saxon through the various Saxon and Low-German dialects, till we arrive at last at the earliest stage of German which is within our reach, the Gothic of the fourth century after Christ. Even here we cannot rest. For, although we cannot trace Gothic back to any earlier Teutonic language, we see at once that Gothic, too, is a modern language, and that it must have passed through numerous phases of growth before it became what it is in the mouth of Bishop Ulfilas.

What then are we to do?—We must try to do what is done when we have to deal with the modern Romance languages. If we could not trace a French word back to Latin, we should look for its corresponding form in Italian, and endeavor to trace the Italian to its Latin source. If, for instance, we were doubtful about the origin of the French word for fire, _feu_, we have but to look to the Italian _fuoco_, in order to see at once that both _fuoco_ and _feu_ are derived from the Latin _focus_. We can do this, because we know that French and Italian are cognate dialects, and because we have ascertained beforehand the exact degree of relationship in which they stand to each other. Had we, instead of looking to Italian, looked to German for an explanation of the French _feu_, we should have missed the right track; for the German _feuer_, though more like _feu_ than the Italian _fuoco_, could never have assumed in French the form _feu_.

Again, in the case of the preposition _hors_, which in French means _without_, we can more easily determine its origin after we have found that _hors_ corresponds with the Italian _fuora_, the Spanish _fuera_. The French _fromage_, cheese, derives no light from Latin. But as soon as we compare the Italian _formaggio_,(104) we see that _formaggio_ and _fromage_ are derived from _forma_; cheese being made in Italy by keeping the milk in small baskets or forms. _Feeble_, the French _faible_, is clearly derived from Latin; but it is not till we see the Italian _fievole_ that we are reminded of the Latin _flebilis_, tearful. We should never have found the etymology, that is to say the origin, of the French _payer_, the English _to pay_, if we did not consult the dictionary of the cognate dialects, such as Italian and Spanish. Here we find that _to pay_ is expressed in Italian by _pagare_, in Spanish by _pagar_, whereas in Provençal we actually find the two forms _pagar_ and _payar_. Now _pagar_ clearly points back to Latin _pacare_, which means _to pacify_, _to appease_. To appease a creditor meant to pay him; in the same manner as _une quittance_, a quittance or receipt, was originally _quietantia_, a quieting, from _quietus_, quiet.

If, therefore, we wish to follow up our researches,—if, not satisfied with having traced an English word back to Gothic, we want to know what it was at a still earlier period of its growth,—we must determine whether there are any languages that stand to Gothic in the same relation in which Italian and Spanish stand to French;—we must restore, as far as possible, the genealogical tree of the various families of human speech. In doing this we enter on the second or classificatory stage of our science; for genealogy, where it is applicable, is the most perfect form of classification.

Before we proceed to examine the results which have been obtained by the recent labors of Schlegel, Humboldt, Bopp, Burnouf, Pott, Benfey, Prichard, Grimm, Kuhn, Curtius, and others in this branch of the science of language, it will be well to glance at what had been achieved before their time in the classification of the numberless dialects of mankind.