Part 3 (1/2)

When the Romans, in 454 B C, wanted to establish a code of laws, the first thing they did was to send commissioners to Greece to report on the laws of Solon at Athens and the laws of other Greek towns(78) As Rome rose in political power, Greek e and literature found ready ad of the Punic wars, many of the Roman statesmen were able to understand, and even to speak Greek Boys were not only taught the Roman letters by their masters, the _literatores_, but they had to learn at the saht Greek at Rorammatici_, and they wereup at Roentleman They read Greek books, they conversed in Greek, they even wrote in Greek Tiberius Gracchus, consul in 177, made a speech in Greek at Rhodes, which he afterwards published(80) Flaminius, when addressed by the Greeks in Latin, returned the co Greek verses in honor of their Gods The first history of Rome ritten at Rome in Greek, by Fabius Pictor,(81) about 200 B C; and it was probably in opposition to this work, and to those of Lucius Cincius Alimentus, and Publius Scipio, that Cato wrote his own history of Roerly followed by the lowest The plays of Plautus are the best proof; for the affectation of using Greek words is as evident in some of his characters as the foolish display of French in the Gerhteenth century There was both loss and gain in the inheritance which Rome received from Greece; but ould Rome have been without her Greek masters? The very fathers of Roman literature were Greeks, private teachers,school-books and plays Livius Andronicus, sent as prisoner of war from Tarentum (272 B C), established himself at Rome as professor of Greek His translation of the Odyssey into Latin verse, whichof Roman literature, was evidently written by hih clumsy and wooden in the extre poets of the capital Naevius and Plautus were his cotemporaries and immediate successors All the plays of Plautus were translations and adaptations of Greek originals; and Plautus was not even allowed to transfer the scene from Greece to Rome The Roman public wanted to see Greek life and Greek depravity; it would have stoned the poet who had ventured to bring on the stage a Roedies, also, were translated into Latin Ennius, the coteer (239-169), was the first to translate Euripides

Ennius, like Andronicus, was an Italian Greek, who settled at Roes and translator of Greek He was patronized by the liberal party, by Publius Scipio, titus Flaminius, and Marcus Fulvius nobilior(82) He became a Roman citizen But Ennius was es He has been called a neologian, and to a certain extent he deserved that naainst the religion of Greece, and against the very existence of the Greek Gods, were translated by him into Latin(83) One was the philosophy of _Epichar but the air, and other Gods but names of the powers of nature; the other the work of _Euhemerus_, of Messene (300 B C), who proved, in the form of a novel, that the Greek Gods had never existed, and that those ere believed in as Gods had been men These torks were not translated without a purpose; and though themselves shallow in the extreme, they proved destructive to the still shallower systey Greek became synonymous with infidel; and Ennius would hardly have escaped the punishment inflicted on Naevius for his political satires, had he not enjoyed the patronage and esteem of the most influential statesmen at Rome Even Cato, the stubborn enemy of Greek philosophy(84) and rhetoric, was a friend of the dangerous Ennius; and such was the growing influence of Greek at Roe, in order to teach his boy what he considered, if not useful, at least harh at Cato for his dogged opposition to everything Greek; but there wasBengal-young Hindus who read Byron and Voltaire, play at billiards, drive tandeh at their priests, patronizeThe description which Cato gives of the young idlers at Roal

When Ro hands of Greece, that torch was not burning with its brightest light Plato and Aristotle had been succeeded by Chrysippus and Carneades; Euripides and Menander had taken the place of aeschylus and Sophocles In becohted in Greece, and intended hereafter to illuminate not only Italy, but every country of Europe, Roreatness Roravity, Roman citizenshi+p and patriotism, Roman purity and piety, were driven away by Greek luxury and levity, Greek intriguing and self-seeking, Greek vice and infidelity Restrictions and anathemas were of no avail; and Greek ideas were never so attractive as when they had been reprobated by Cato and his friends Every new generation becanated with Greek In 131(85) we hear of a consul (Publius Crassus) who, like another Mezzofanti, was able to converse in the various dialects of Greek Sulla allowed foreign ambassadors to speak Greek before the Roman senate(86) The Stoic philosopher Panaetius(87) lived in the house of the Scipios, which was for a long time the rendezvous of all the literary celebrities at Rome Here the Greek historian Polybius, and the philosopher Cleitomachus, Lucilius the satirist, Terence the African poet (196-159), and the iuests(88) In this select circle the master-works of Greek literature were read and criticised; the problehest interests of huh no poet of original genius arose from this society, it exercised a ress of Roood taste; and much of the correctness, simplicity, and manliness of the classical Latin is due to that ”Cosmopolitan Club,” which ious life of Roman society at the close of the Punic as more Greek than Roious questions were either Stoics or followers of Epicurus; or they e the possibility of any knowledge of the Infinite, and putting opinion in the place of truth(89) Though the doctrines of Epicurus and the New Acadeerous and heretical, the philosophy of the Stoics was tolerated, and a kind of coion There was a state-philosophy as well as a state-religion The Ro all Greek rhetors and philosophers expelled from Rome, perceived that a cohtened classes(90) philosophy ion, but that a belief in e masses in order Even Cato,(91) the leader of the orthodox, national, and conservative party, expressed his surprise that a haruspex, whenMen like Scipio aemilianus and Laelius professed to believe in the popular Gods; but with them Jupiter was the soul of the universe, the statues of the Gods mere works of art(92) Their Gods, as the people complained, had neither body, parts, nor passions Peace, however, was preserved between the Stoic philosopher and the orthodox priest Both parties professed to believe in the same Gods, but they claimed the liberty to believe in theth on the changes in the intellectual atmosphere of Rome at the end of the Punic wars, and I have endeavored to sho conated with Greek ideas in order to explain, what otherould seem almost inexplicable, the zeal and earnestness hich 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 ender, on regular and irregular conjugation, retain always so of the tedious character which these subjects had at school, and we can hardly understand how at Roraeneral interest, and a topic of fashi+onable conversation When one of the first graa Attalus, he was received with the greatest distinction by all the literary states 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 Roive sorammar; and frorammar 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 Ro by Cato After these lectures of Crates, graical studies became extremely popular at Rome We hear of Lucius aelius Stilo,(93) who lectured on Latin as Crates had lectured on Greek A his pupils were Varro, Lucilius, and Cicero

Varro coe, four of which were dedicated to Cicero Cicero, hirah we know of no special work of his on grammar Lucilius devoted the ninth book of his satires to the refor shows rammatical studies had then excited in the forera the Gallic war, and dedicated to Cicero, who reat general and statese of them only by ia_, 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 narammarians, as they ad the barbarians of Gaul and Ger frorasp the sceptre of the world, and at the saraether with his secretary, the Greek Didyives us a ne both of that extraordinary man, and of the time in which he lived After Caesar had triumphed, one of his favorite plans was to found a Greek and Latin library at Rome, and he offered the librarianshi+p 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, asin an earlier part of this lecture, Dionysius Thrax published the first eleraray 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 terray in some respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Roender_, 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 soovernenitive case of Siva,” seele sentence How did these words, genitive case, coland from Rome, to Rome from Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens At Athens, the ter; at Roinalof _fall_ was lost, and the word dwindled down to a e was a counterpart of the philosophy of the raic 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 _ptosis_, 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 _ptosis_, or fall, was applicable to the nominative; and every true Stoic would have scouted the expression of _casus rectus_, because the subject or the no else, but stood erect, the other words of a sentence leaning or depending on it All this is lost to us e speak of cases

And how are the dark scholars in the governenitive_? The Latin _genitivus_ is a enitivus_ _Genitivus_, if it is in or birth, would in Greek have been called _gennetike_, not _genike_ 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” _Genike_, in Greek, had a (98) It eneral 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 sa of the son or of the father; and if we distinguished between the sons of the father, and the sons of the enus to which the sons respectively belonged They would answer the same purpose as the adjectives, paternal and ically that the terenitive 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 ee, beyond Rorammar was finished Later writers have i really new and original We can follow the strearammatical 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 rammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople

There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held professorshi+ps at Constantinople Under Justinian, in the sixth century, the nara the Middle Ages to nearly our own ti 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 systerammars used at our public schools are e, 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 ees from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days We sahat tirae took place; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were nay, half philosophical and half ees 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 systeraive us an insight into the nature of language The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the scheation, were a uage We rammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of hu coincidences between the gray of the Greeks and the Hindus, which would seem to prove that there rammatical system of the schools The Hindus are the only nation that cultivated the science of gra 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 sara to pieces As Greek grain to the critical study of Horammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most ancient poetry of the Brahmans The differences between the dialect of these sacred hyes were noted and preserved with a religious care We still possess the first essays in the grammatical science of the Brahh they ive rules on the proper pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the sarammatical character, and particularly with those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable, the Ganas These supplied that solid basis on which successive generations of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection in the graular, in the whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of Panini and his commentators It is the perfection of a e, 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 grae which correspond to certain forht 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 enitive 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 ??, in Latin by _is_ But what this ?? and _is_ represent, why they should have the power of changing a noenitive, a subject into a predicate, ree, in order to be a language, uish the subject from the object, the noe 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 forht Even in Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the noe, it is corammar 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 nobetween ”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 sa the subject before, and the object after the verb, or by e 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 noem_ in the accusative, is simply a practical rule We knohen to say _rex_, and when to say _rege as a subject should be called _rex_, and as an object _regem_, remains entirely unexplained In the same manner we learn that _ae from _love_ to _no love_ should be represented by the silish, 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 ms and rules, if the terminations of nouns and verbs must be looked upon either as conventional contrivances or asas a science of language, and we must be satisfied hat has been called the art (t????) of language, or grammar

Before we either accept or decline the solution of any proble it Beginning with English we should ask, whatout why _I love_ should , 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 circuh the er _I love_, but _I aations bud forth like the blossoms of a tree? Were they imparted to man ready made by some ning certain letters to certain phases of thought, as matheebraic exponents? We are here brought at once face to face with the highest and e

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 erammar, 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 theindifferent, the first thing we have to do, before atte any explanation, would be to establish the earliest and inal fornized in his philosophy of language, though, we must confess, he seldom obeyed it

We knohat havoc phonetic corruption e, and it would be a pity to waste our conjectures on fore would suffice to explain Now a very slight acquaintance with the history of the English language teaches us that the graraain may be traced back to what, with Sir Frederick Madden, we lish to Early English, frolish to Selo-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 inal form of that syllable wherever we can find it We should never have known that _priest_ inally _an elder_, unless we had traced it back to its original fornizes the colish alone, we _, but we should not thus arrive at its true derivation Theat all As soon as we trace it back to the original _Goddspell_, we see that it is a literal translation of _Evangeliu but an einal foriver of bread, froive

But even after this is done, after we have traced a lo-Saxon, it follows by no inal for it to disclose its original intention Anglo-Saxon is not an original or aboriginal language It points by its very nales of the continent We have, therefore, to follow our word froh the various Saxon and Low-Gere 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 h nurowth 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 e have to deal with the es 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, ere 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 relationshi+p 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 h more like _feu_ than the Italian _fuoco_, could never have assuain, in the case of the preposition _hors_, which in French in after we have found that _hors_ corresponds with the Italian _fuora_, the Spanish _fuera_ The French _froht froio_,(104) we see that _forthe 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 etyin, 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 Provencal we actually find the two forar_ clearly points back to Latin _pacare_, which means _to pacify_, _to appease_ To appease a creditor meant to pay him; in the sainally _quietantia_, a quieting, from _quietus_, quiet

If, therefore, ish to follow up our researches,-if, not satisfied with having traced an English word back to Gothic, ant to knohat it was at a still earlier period of its groe es that stand to Gothic in the same relation in which Italian and Spanish stand to French;-we ical tree of the various fa 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 nuht of applying the principle of classification to the varieties of huuished between Greek on one side, and all other languages on the other, comprehended under the convenient na four of their own dialects with tolerable correctness,(105) but they applied the term ”barbarous” so promiscuously to the other ians, Carians, Macedonians, Thracians, and Illyrians,) that, for the purposes of scientific classification, it is almost impossible to make any use of the statements of ancient writers about these so-called barbarous idioms(106)