death). Both works are already somewhat antiquated. As
to the history of the study, see Lersch’s Sprachphilosophie der
Alten (1840); Steinthal’s Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei
den Griechen und Römern (1863); Benfey’s Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft
und Orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland (1869);
Sandys’s History of Classical Scholarship (3 vols., 1906–1908);
Vilh Thomsen’s Sprogardenskatens Historien Kortpattit franckling
(1902). (W. D. W.)
II.—Comparative Philology of the Indo-European Languages.
The study of Indo-European comparative philology has from
its outset necessarily been in close connexion with the study of
Sanskrit, a language unparalleled amongst its cognates in
antiquity and distinctness of structure, and consequently the
natural basis of comparison in this field. It is therefore not
to be wondered at that we find no clear views of the mutual
relationship of the individual members of the Indo-European
family or their position with regard to other languages until
Sanskrit began to attract the attention of European philologists,
or that the introduction of Sanskrit as an object of study was
closely followed by the discovery of the original community
of a vast range of languages and dialects hitherto not brought
into connexion at all, or only made the objects of baseless
speculations. We meet with the first clear conception
Historical Sketch.
of this idea of an Indo-European community
of languages in the distinguished English scholar
Sir William Jones, who, as early as 1786, expressed himself
as follows: “The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its
antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek,
more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than
either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in
the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could have
been produced by accident; so strong that no philologer could
examine all the three without believing them to have sprung
from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists.
There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing
that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a
different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit.”[1] But
neither Sir William Jones nor any of his older contemporaries
who had arrived at similar conclusions ever raised this important
discovery from a brilliant apergu into a valid scientific the0ry
through a detailed and systematic comparison of the languages
in question. To have achieved this is the undoubted merit of
the German, Franz Bopp (q.v.), the founder of scientific philology
of the Indo-European languages, and subsequently
Bopp and
J. Grimm.
through this example also the founder of comparative
philology in general. Next to him Jacob Grimm (q.v.)
must be mentioned here as the father of historical grammar.
The first part of his famous Deutsche Grammatik appeared in
1810, three years after Bopp had published his first epoch making
book, Ueber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache.
Bopp’s results were here at once utilized, yet Grimm’s whole
system was entirely independent of that of Bopp, and had no
doubt been worked out before Grimm knew of his illustrious
predecessor. In fact, their scientific aims and methods were
totally different. Bopp’s interest was not concentrated in
comparison as such, but chiefly inclined towards the explanation
of the origin of grammatical forms, and comparison to him was
only a means of approaching that end.
In this more or less speculative turn of his interest Bopp showed himself the true son of a philosophical period when general linguistics received its characteristic stamp from the labours and endeavours of men like the two Schlegels and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Jacob Grimm’s aims were of a less lofty character than those of Bopp, whose work, to his own mind, was crowned by his theory of the origin of inflexion through agglutination. In confining his task to a more limited range than the vast field of Indo-European languages embraced in
Bopp’s researches, and thus fixing his attention on a group of idioms exhibiting a striking regularity in their mutual relationship, both where they coincide and where tthey differ, he made it his foremost object to investigate and illustrate the continuous progress, subject to definite laws, by which these languages had been developed from their common source. He thus raised the hitherto neglected study of the development of sounds to an equal level With the study of grammatical forms, which had so far almost exclusively absorbed all the interest of linguistic research. Grimm’s discovery of the so-called “Lautverschiebung,” or Law of the Permutation of Consonants in the Teutonic languages (which, however, had been partly found and proclaimed before Grimm by the Danish scholar Rask), became especially important as a stimulus for further investigation in this line. Grimm’s influence on comparative philology (which is secondary only to that of Bopp, although he was never a comparative philologist in the sense that Bopp was, and did not always derive the benefit from Bopp’s works which they might have afforded him) is clearly traceable in the work of Bopp’s successors, amongst Whom Friedrich August Pott (1802–1887) is universally judged to hold the foremost rank. In his great work, Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, mit besonderem Bezug auf die Lautum wandlung im Sanskrit, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Littauischen, und Gothischen (Lemgo, 1833–1836), we find Indo-European etymology for the first time based on a scientific investigation of general Indo-European phonology. Amongst Pott’s contemporaries Theodor Benfey deserves mention on account of his Benfey. Griechisches Wurzellexicon (Berlin, 1839), a work equally remarkable for copiousness of contents and power of combination, yet showing no advance on Bopp’s standpoint in its conception of phonetic changes.
A third period in the history of Indo-European philology is marked by the name of August Schleicher, whose Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen first appeared in 1861. In the period subsequent to the appearance of Pott’s Etymologische Forschungen, a number of distinguished scholars, too large to Schleicher. be recorded here individually,[2] had devoted their labours to the different branches of Indo-European philology, especially assisted and promoted in their work by the rapidly progressing Vedic (and Avestic) studies that had been inaugurated by Rosen, Roth, Benfey, Westergaard, Muller, Kuhn, Aufrecht and others. Moreover, new foundations had been laid for the study of the Slavonic languages by Miklosich and Schleicher, of Lithuanian by Kurschat and Schleicher, of Celtic by Zeuss. Of the classical languages Greek had found a most distinguished representative in Curtius, while Corssen, Mommsen, Aufrecht, Kirchhoff, &c., had collected most valuable materials towards
- ↑ For this quotation and the following historical sketch in general see Th. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, p. 438 (Munich, 1869), and especially B. Delbrück, Introduction to the Study of Language, p. 1 (Leipzig, 1882; a fifth German edition appeared in 1909).
- ↑ The extensive progress made in this period is best illustrated by the foundation of two periodicals especially devoted to Indo-European comparative philology, Kuhn’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung (now 27 vols., Berlin, from 1851), and Kuhn’s Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung (8 vols., Berlin, from 1858) Benfey’s school is more especially represented by the contributors to Benfey’s Orient und Occident (3 vols., Göttingen, from 1862), and subsequently through Bezzenberger’s Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen (30 vols., Göttingen, from 1877); this journal has now been amalgamated with Kuhn’s Zeitschrift The views of the “New Grammarians”—Leskien, Brugmann, Osthoff and their schools—are represented in Indogermanische Forschungen (27 vols., since 1890). The Göttingen school has a further representative in Glotta, now (1910) in its third volume. The history of the meaning of words has a special periodical for itself, Worter und Sachen, now in its second volume. Besides those mentioned there are many journals, publications of academies, &c., in Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, &c., which no serious student of comparative philology can ignore. France possesses two periodicals of the same kind, the Revue de Linguistique (Paris, from 1868) and the Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris (also from 1868), while En land is represented by the Proceedings and Transactions of the Philological Societies of London and Cambridge, the Classical Review (23 vols., since 1887), and the Classical Quarterly (4 vols., since 1907), and America by the Transactions of the American Philological Association (from 1868), the American Journal of Philology (30 vols., from 1880), Classical Philology (5 vols., from 1906), and other more specialist organs.
