Lesson 3: THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
As we have seen, the human mind has been speculating for hundreds of years on
the origin and relationship of languages. But the solution to all these problems was far
from being correct because no linguistic material was available. It was not until the
Renaissance that material was gathered for
later investigators to work on, and
they could not help being struck by the amazing similarity between some languages.
Even in the sixteenth century, an Italian missionary called Filippo Sassetti had
noted the similarity between the Italian numerals from six to nine -
sei, sette, otto, nove
,
and their Sanskrit counterparts -
sas, saptd, astau, nova..
An attempt to classify known
languages according to the resemblance between them was made by the thinker
Scaliger in 1599, when he grouped the chief languages after their wont for God,
calling them respectively the
deus-theos
(i.e. Latin Greek),
goit
(Germanic), and
bog
(Slavonic) languages.
This classification,
however intelligent, might have continued blindly along
these lines for ages, were it not for the discovery of Sanskrit.
In the history of language, the discovery of Sanskrit is often compared to the
discovery of America in the history of Mankind. It altered at
a single stroke the whole
field of linguistic research.
William Jones, an English lawyer in India, wrote in 1786: "The Sanskrit
language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the
Greek, more copious than the Latin and more acquisitively 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 possibly be produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no
philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from
some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is similar reason, though
not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended
with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit."
In
these often quoted lines, Jones announced clearly and unequivocally the
relationship between three of the great languages of antiquity-Sanskrit, Greek and
Latin-and at the same time anticipated the reconstruction of that common source which,
it seems, no longer exists-the parent Indo-European language itself.
This climax of language research in the 18th
century heralded the full
blossoming of philology in the 19th century. We have good grounds for saying that
linguistics as a science was created in the 19th century, especially comparative
linguistics.
The first of the great pioneers in comparative linguistics of the last century in
Western Europe was the Danish Rasmus Rask (1787-1832). His major work
Undersagelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (In-
vestigation on the Origin of Old Norse or Icelandic (1818)
may be called a
comparative Indo-European Grammar. In this book
Rask clearly demonstrated
the significance of laws of sounds as a proof of linguistic kinship, although he added
that they were especially convincing when supported by grammatical similarities.
Thus, in Rask we find the whole kernel from which modern linguistic comparative
methods have been developed.
Rask introduced the idea that the comparison not only of inflectional systems,
but also of phonetic characteristics, constituted a scientific approach to the examination
of linguistic relationships; in other words, when properly examined, phonetics could
provide clues as well as grammar.
Rask examined all the languages bordering geographically on Norse to discover
whether they were related, and where he found a relationship he followed it up. He was
the first to recognize the relationship between the languages now called Germanic. The
scheme of genetic relations between these languages which Rask drew up was quite
correct.
Rask's great merit was not merely that his scheme of linguistic relationships was
correct, but that his reasoning in substantiating them was soundly based. He was quite
right to state in his book that in the comparison of languages the grammatical side
should never
be forgotten, for the coincidence of words was extremely unreliable.
Even without the use of Sanskrit, Rask hit upon the two sound shifts in
the history of the Germanic languages. It should be added that he did not see
the complete regularity of the development of sounds. For example, he did not look for
the reasons for the exceptions to his main rules. It remained for later generations of
linguists to make discoveries that introduced a new conception
of regularity and
"law" into the evolution of sounds.
It was spokesmen for the German linguistic tendency called the Young
Grammarians who insisted in the 1880's on the remarkable regularity of sound-changes
and proclaimed the principle that phonetic laws admit of no exceptions. If the law did
not operate in some instances, they said, this was because they had been broken by
analogy, e.g. by resemblances of sound or meaning which join different words together
in the speaker's mind. The Young Grammarians believed
that these blind fatalistic
sound laws were purely destructive, breaking the systematic structure of a language
until the irregularities caused by them had to be remedied by analogous formations.
The two concepts of sound laws and analogy were considered enough to explain
practically everything in the development of language.
Some years later objections were raised to inviolable sound laws theory, and
linguistic facts made students admit the existence of other circumstances which made
these sound laws more flexible. Exceptions to the rules were explained with reference
to hitherto unsuspected determining factors. (See Verner's Law below.)
For example, we find in Modern English f as the representative of Middle
English
f
in such words as
fox, foot,
and
full
. But in the word
vixen
-"
female
fox"-we
find
