Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, comparative and historical linguistics remained very much a German discipline. Although it is impossible to disregard the contributions made by scholars of other nationalities (for example by Rasmus Rask, the Danish precursor of Grimm, or by later linguists such as G.I. Ascoli in Italy or Michel Bréal in France), their achievements appear isolated and scattered when compared to the steady and cumulative work of the German comparative grammarians. German linguists laid the foundations for the new discipline, and their comparative and historical grammars, dictionaries, and compendia dominated it throughout the nineteenth century. What accounts for this continuing advantage of German linguistics?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Otto Jespersen, Language (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 33;
Georges Mounin, Histoire de la linguistique des origines au XX éme siècle (Paris: PUF, 1974), p. 161.
Quoted in Jespersen, p. 33.
S. Lefmann, Franz Bopp, sein Leben, seine Wissenschaft (Berlin: 1897), pp. 10*, 33*, 37*.
On the development of linguistics in England and the obstacles which it encountered, see Linda Dowling, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,” in PMLA, Vol. 97 No. 2 (March 1982), pp. 160–178.
See for example the list of Curtius’ foreign students in Ernst Windisch, “Georg Curtius,” Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumskunde, vol. 9 (1886), pp. 75–128;
reprinted in Thomas A. Sebeok, Portraits of Linguists (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 344–45.
Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 98.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), p. xii.
Friedrich von Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808), in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, trans. E.J. Millington (London: Bohn, 1849). p. 427.
Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 147.
The question of the origins of language was, of course, not a new one, and it was especially salient during the latter half of the eighteenth century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G. Herder were among the many trying to find an answer to it. They were both transitional figures, incorporating elements of the Enlightenment as well as Romanticism in their thought. On the anti-Enlightenment views of Rousseau and especially Herder, see Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (New York: Random House, 1976, pp. 177–78), where ideas similar to those I describe as Romantic are attributed to them both. The comparative grammarians were much less interested in the question of the origin of language as a human faculty than in the recovery and understanding of that stage of linguistic development when languages achieved the greatest perfection. Both Grimm and Schlegel believed, however, that the question of origin might be answered by means of comparative grammar.
Jacob Grimm, Vorreden zur deutschen Grammatik von 1819 und 1822, ed. Hugo Steger (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), p. 18.
Grimm, p. 19.
Franz Bopp, A Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Gothic, German and Sclavonic Languages, vol. I (1833), trans. E.B. Eastwick (London: Williams and Norgate, 1862), p. v.
Franz Bopp, Vocalismus (Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1836), p. 1.
It is here that the differences beteween the Romantic conception of an organism and the modern concept of structure (so often based on organic metaphors) become most apparent. Our notions of organism differ from those of the Romantics, and therefore our organic metaphors are based on different premises. For Schlegel and Bopp, a language had an organic structure not because they saw a relationship between its elements, but because they believed that all these elements and their unity were generated by the same life-force. Their concept of an organism is much closer to that of the Naturphilosophen and the vitalists than to that of the reductionist biologists of the mid-nineteenth century. And it should not be forgotten that the designation of something as organic carried within it an explicitly normative judgment: organic entities were harmonious, natural, and vital, with no trace of accident, artifice, or external determination. See also William M. Norman, The Neogrammarians and Comparative Linguistics, Ph.D. Diss. Princeton 1972 (Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms International, 1975), p. 19.
Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Schleiermacher Biography,” in Selected Writings, ed. H.P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), p. 61.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Principes de Philosophie zoologique discutés en Mars 1830 au sein de l’Académie Royale de Sciences,” in Naturwissenschaftlische Schriften, Werke, Vol. VII (Weimar: Bohlau, 1890);
quoted after Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), p. 140.
Fr. v. Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom..., p. 455.
Fr. v. Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom..., p. 449. One of the results of this approach is that only organic languages can be said to have a history — they carry their own laws of development in their internal forms, just like natural organisms. According to Schlegel, mechanical languages have no possibility of development; they cannot change systematically for they possess no internal living forces. Change in such languages can be only accidental and can never follow from the essence of the language. Conversely, organic languages are stable and develop coherently; the principle of their internal organization can be preserved.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), trans. John Black (London: Bohn, 1848), p. 340.
Humboldt’s classification included a fourth category of “incorporating” languages, where a single “word” expressed a subject, an object, a verb, etc.
Franz Bopp, Konjugationssystem der Sanskrit Sprache (Frankfurt am Main, 1816).
Franz Bopp, Konjugationssystem, p. 332.
“If we can draw any conclusions from the fact that roots are monosyllabic in Sanskrit and its kindred languages, it is this, that such languages cannot display any great facility of expressing grammatical modification by the change of their original materials, without the help of foreign additions. We must expect that in this family of languages the principle of compounding words will extend to the first rudiments of speech, as to the persons, tenses of verbs, and cases of nouns, etc. That this really is the case, I hope I shall be enabled to prove in this essay, in opposition to the opinion of a celebrated German author, who believes that the grammatical forms of Sanskrit and of its kindred languages consist merely of inflections, or inner modifications of words.” Franz Bopp, “Analytical Comparison of Sankrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages” in Annals of Oriental Literature, 1820, p. 10.
Paul Kiparsky, “From Paleogrammarians to Neogrammarians,” in Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. Dell Hymes (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1974).
Kiparsky, p. 332.
Bopp, Konjugationssystem, p. 37.
Bopp did admit some “morphophonemic variation” by allowing for the operation of what he called mechanical laws: he assigned weights to roots and suffixes depending on their vowels in order to explain some variations in the vowel of the root syllable. Berthold Delbrück, Introduction to the Study of Language (1880),trans. Eva Channing (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1974).
Bopp, Vocalismus, p. 12.
Georg Curtius, “Zur Erklärung der Personalendungen,” in Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik, vol. 4 (1871), p. 213; quoted by Kiparsky, p. 333.
There have been attempts to portray Schleicher exclusively as a Hegelian (e.g., by John Arbuckle in “Schleicher and the Linguistics/Philology Controversy,” in Word, vol. 26 (1970), pp. 17–31), and to deny that the natural sciences had any influence on his thought. In view of his constant references to biology and his use of metaphors from the natural sciences, it seems unjustifiable to view Schleicher simply as a follower of Hegel. The influence of the evolutionary biological models should not, however, be interpreted as a direct influence of Darwin. Schleicher admired Darwin’s work and attempted to prove that linguistic evidence of comparative grammar supports Darwin’s theory (in Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, 1860. 2nd ed. 1873, Weimar: Böhlau), but the essential aspects of his theory and his model of language predated Darwin.
Schleicher, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Übersicht (Bonn: König, 1850).
(Bonn: König, 1848).
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache (Stuttgart: Gottaschen Verlag, 1860, 2nd. ed. 1869), p. 21.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 33.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 35.
Bopp and his immediate followers did not attempt to reconstruct the actual or hypothetical proto-Indo-European roots or words. In their comparisons, they attempted to discern the fullest existing form, to assign a meaning to it, and to trace the changes related words had undergone in other Indo-European languages. It was Schleicher who first attempted a full reconstruction of conjectured forms. But we can speak of reconstruction also in reference to the earlier linguists, since to describe the origin of forms, they offered conjectures about which elements of the existing forms were original. The goal, according to Bopp, was to arrive at the oldest and purest form which would also be complete and would reflect its provenance most transparently.
Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” pp. 147–48.
Many historians of linguistics suggest that the early comparative grammarians were directly influenced by the work of the comparative anatomists, especially by Georges Cuvier, who conducted his research at the same time that Bopp and Schlegel were studying Sanskrit in Paris. Schlegel explicitly acknowledges the similarities between the study of comparative anatomy and that of the inner structure of language: “There is, however, one single point, the investigation of which ought to decide every doubt, and elucidate every difficulty; the structure of the comparative grammar of the languages furnishes as certain a key to their general analogy, as the study of comparative anatomy has done to the loftiest branch of natural science” (Schlegel, On the Language, p. 439). However, it seems to me that this reference to comparative anatomy cannot be taken as proof of Cuvier’s influence on Schlegel. Cuvier is best known for his principle of correlation, according to which each part of an organism is intimately interrelated with all the other parts in such a way that a knowledge of one part enables the researcher to deduce the shape and form of all the other parts. Although both Bopp and Schlegel believed that the principle underlying the grammar of language shapes the appearance of each root, they did not propose a functional correlation between forms and did not claim that a change in one aspect of language necessarily brings about changes in other aspects, which would be required by Cuvier’s principle. Moreover, Cuvier staunchly opposed any suggestion that organisms undergo historical transformations, while this was the essence of Schlegel’s and Bopp’s beliefs about language and their own methodology. Also, Cuvier was predominantly concerned with the scientific classification of organisms; for Bopp and Schlegel, this was a secondary problem. References to the natural sciences appear too scattered to warrant the conjecture of a direct influence of any one natural science on comparative grammar. Bopp refers to his task as the “physics and physiology” of language, as a “rigorous and systematic process of comparison and anatomical investigation” (Comparative Grammar, pp. XIII, VII). He sees a similarity between the “history and natural description of language” and “natural history” (quoted in Hans Arens, Sprachwissenschaft, Munich: Alber, 1955, p. 198). Elsewhere he compares his method of analysis to “anatomic dissection or chemical analysis” (Comparative Grammar, p. 124). Although these multiple but vague references to various natural sciences do not testify to any direct influence of physiology, anatomy, physics, or chemistry on comparative grammar, they apparently reflect a need to claim for the new discipline the methodological rigor of the natural sciences.
The importance of sound laws for the new “scientific” etymology is best exemplified by the work of August Pott, who, as a student of Bopp, was mainly interested in developing the etymological aspects of comparative grammar and was among the first comparative grammarians to insist on the importance of phonetics and sound laws for the new science.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 47. He had argued the same point already in 1850: “Just as the progressive history of language can be recognized as a regular process of becoming, so also in the decline of language rules and laws are apparent” (Die Sprachen Europas, p. 15).
Schleicher, Die darwinische Theorie, p. 7.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 50.
“Even in the earliest periods of a language, at a time when sounds were even more steadfast, a power begins to take effect, working in opposition to the multiplicity of forms in order to limit them more and more to the minimum necessary. This is the above- mentioned differentiation of less commonly used but justifiedly special forms into others, especially those in frequent use which strongly influence linguistic feeling — in other words, the process of analogy. The striving toward ease and uniformity, towards the handling of the maximum number of words in a uniform manner, and the ever-declining feeling for the significance and origins of special forms, all result in the fact that later languages possess fewer grammatical forms than earlier ones, that the structure of language in time becomes more and more simple” (Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 55).
Schleicher, Die Sprachen Europas, p. 19.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 65.
Schleicher, Die deutsche Sprache, p. 64.
In the Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (London: Trübner, 1874), Schleicher repeatedly uses such turns of phrase as “less regularly,” “frequently,” “by no means invariable,” “generally,” etc.
Norman, The Neogrammarians, p. 39.
Georg Curtius, Principles of Greek Etymology, tr. England (London: Murrey, 1875), p. 104.
Georg Curtius, “Bemerkungen über die Tragweite der Lautgesetze insbesondere im Griechischen und Lateinischen” (1871), in E. Windisch, ed., Kleine Schriften (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886), p. 52.
Curtius, Principles, p. 105.
Curtius, “Bemerkungen,” p. 55.
Curtius, Principles, p. 110.
Curtius, “Bemerkungen,” p. 55.
For example, Curtius argues that roots expressing referential meanings were less affeted by sound changes than roots expressing relations: “We can further assume that comfort will have the greatest impact on those syllables and words that possess no great weight as regards meaning and the least impact on those most filled with meaning. Naturally, such differences do not rest on conscious reflection, but are to be understood psychologically, i.e. from the soul of the speaker” (“Bemerkungen,” pp. 55–56).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Amsterdamska, O. (1987). The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians. In: Schools of Thought. Sociology of the Sciences Monographs, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3759-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3759-8_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-8175-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-3759-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive