the elucidation of Latin and the cognate Italic idioms In
his Compendmm Schleicher undertook and solved the difficult
task of sifting down the countless details amassed since the
days of Bopp and Grimm, and thus making the individual
languages stand out clearly on their common background,
while Bopp's attention had been especially occupied with what
was common to all Indo-European tongues. There are two
prominent features which characterize this part of Schleicher's
work-his assumption and partial reconstruction of a prehistoric
parent speech, from which the separate Indo-European
languages were supposed to have sprung, and the establishment
of a long series of phonetic laws, regulating the
changes by which that development of the individual idioms
had taken place. On Schleicher's views of and contributions
towards general comparative philology (which he erroneously
proposed to consider as a branch of natural science) we need
not enter here. (See Evolution and the Science of Language in
Darwin and Modern Science, 1909, pp. 526 sqq.)
For some time after Schleicher's premature death (in 1868) Indo-European philology continued in paths indicated by him and Curtius, with the exception, perhaps, of the school founded by Benfey, who had always stood on independent ground. The difference between the two schools, however, was less strikingly marked in their writings, because it chiefly concerns general views of language and the Indo-European languages in particular, although the characteristic task of the period alluded to was that of working out the more minute details of comparison; but behind all this the general interest still clung to Bopp's old glottogonic problems. In 1876, however, a new movement, inspired in the first instance by the works of W. D. Whitney, began, and a younger school of linguists has sprung up who are united in their opposition to many theories of the older generation, yet often differ materially both with regard to method and the solution of individual problems. In its present state this younger school (often branded with the name of Neo-Grammarians, “Junggrammatiker," by its opponents real and imaginary) is marked by certain distinct tendencies. In the first place, they are inclined more or less, and the older members of the school perhaps more than the younger, to abandon glottogonic problems as insoluble, if not for ever, yet for the present and with the scanty means that Indo-European philology alone can furnish for this purpose. In this they are in opposition to the whole of the older school. In the second place, they object to the use of all misleading metaphorical comparisons of processes in the history of language with processes of organic development-comparisons used at all times, but especially cherished by Schleicher. In the third place*and this has been of the greatest practical importance-they hold that our general views of language and our methods of comparison should be formed after a careful study of the living languages, because these alone are fully controllable in every minute detail, and can therefore alone give us a clear insight into the working of the different motive forces which shape and modify language, and that the history of earlier periods of language, consequently, can only be duly illustrated by tracing out the share which each of these forces has had in every individual case of change. Of these forces two are found to be especially prominent—phonetic variation and formation by analogy. They generally work in turns and often in opposition to one another, the former frequently tending to differentiation of earlier unities, the latter to abolition of earlier differences, especially to restoration of conformity disturbed by phonetic change. There are, however, other important differences in the action of the two forces: Phonetic change affects exclusively the pronunciation of a language by substituting one sound or sound-group for another. From this simple fact it is self evident that phonetic changes as such admit of no exceptions. Pronuncxation-that is, the use of certain sounds in certain combinations-is perfectly unconscious in natural unstudied speech, and every speaker or generation of speakers has only one way of utterance for individual sounds or their combinations. If, therefore, a given sound was once changed into another under given circumstances, the new sound must necessarily and unconsciously replace its predecessor in every word that falls under the same rules, because the older sound ceases to be practised and therefore disappears from the language. Thus, for instance, the sound of the short so-called Italian a in English has become exchanged for the peculiarly English sound in man, hat, &c., which is so exclusively used and practised now by English speakers that they feel great difficulty in pronouncing the Italian sound, which at an earlier period was almost as frequent in English as in any other language that has preserved the Italian sound up to the present day. Again, the sound of the so-called long English a in make, paper, &c., although once a monophthongs, is now pronounced as a diphthong, combining the sounds of the English short e and i, and no trace of the old monophthongs is left, except where it was followed by r, as in hare, mare (also air, their, where, &c), where the a has a broader sound somewhat approaching that of the short a in hat. This last instance may at the same time serve to illustrate the restrictions made above as to sounds changing their pronunciation in certain groups or combinations, or under given circumstances only. We may learn from it that phonetic change need not always affect the same original sound in the same way in all its combinations, but that neighbouring sounds often influence the special direction in which the sound is modified. The different sounds of the English a in make and hare are both equivalents of the same Old English sound ri (=the Italian short a) in macian, hara. The latter sound has been split in two, but this process again has taken place with perfect regularity, the one sound appearing before r, the other before all other consonants. It is easy to see that the common practice of comprising the history of the Old English a in the one rule-that it was changed into the sound of the ri in make except when followed by an r-can only be defended on the practical ground that this rule is convenient to remember, because the words exhibiting the former change are more numerous than the instances of the latter, apart from this there is nothing to justify the assumption that one of these changes is the rule and the other the exception. The fact is, that we have two independent cases of change, which ought to be stated in two distinct and independent rules according to the different positions in which the original a stood before the splitting began. It is also easy to observe that the variety of modifying influences may be much more manifold than in the present instance of make and hare, and that the number of special phonetic rules in such cases must be increased in proportion to the progress made in the investigation of the said modifying powers
In truth, however, the study of phonetic laws falls into several different stages, and the meaning attached to the phrase phonetzc law has varied at each of these stages. Moreover, the sweeping nature of the original generalizations has become so hedged in and contracted by limitations that a recent writer has been compelled once more to formulate the question whether phonetic laws actually exist. It must be admitted in the first place that the word law has been ill chosen for use in this connexion. In phonetic laws there is no element which can be identified as coming under the definition of a law as propounded by a jurist like John Austin. There is no authority which enunciates the law, there is no penalty for the breach of it. But the philologists who first used the term were not thinking of law in its strict signification, but of its use in such metaphorical expressions as scientific laws, for, as already mentioned, Schleicher and his followers in the middle of the 19th century had taken a keen interest in the development of the natural sciences, and had to some extent assimilated their terminology to that employed in those sciences. It was, however, soon recognized that the laws of language and those of natural science were not really alike or akin. A scientific “ law ” is only a brief method of expressing the fact that universal experience shows that certain causes universally produce certain effects. In chemistry two atoms of
