Part 3 (2/2)

Plato, indeed, in his Cratylus (c 36), throws out a hint that the Greeks ht have received their oords fro older than the Greeks But he was not able to see the full bearing of this remark He only points out that so_, were the saian and Greek; and he supposes that the Greeks borrowed thee and that of the barbarians could have had a coe that even so comprehensive a mind as that of Aristotle should have failed to perceive in languages some of that law and order which he tried to discover in every realm of nature As Aristotle, however, did not attempt this, we need not wonder that it was not attempted by any one else for the next two thousand years The Romans, in all scientificthemselves been called barbarians, they soon learnt to apply the same name to all other nations, except, of course, to their masters, the Greeks Now _barbarian_ is one of those lazy expressions which see It was applied as recklessly as the word _heretic_ during the Middle Ages If the Romans had not received this convenient name of barbarian ready hbors, the Celts and Germans, with more respect and sympathy: they would, at all events, have looked at the eye And, if they had done so, they would have discovered, in spite of outward differences, that these barbarians were, after all, not very distant cousins There was as e of Caesar and the barbarians against whouage and that of Hoacity would have seen this, if he had not been blinded by traditional phraseology I a For let us look at one instance only If we take a verb of such constant occurrence as _to have_, we shall find the paradigms almost identical in Latin and Gothic:-

I have in Latin is habeo, in Gothic haba

Thou hast in Latin is habes, in Gothic habais

He has in Latin is habet, in Gothic habai

We have in Latin is habemus, in Gothic habam

You have in Latin is habetis, in Gothic habai

They have in Latin is habent, in Gothic habant

It surely required a certain amount of blindness, or rather of deafness, not to perceive such similarity, and that blindness or deafness arose, I believe, entirely frole word _barbarian_ Not till that word barbarian was struck out of the dictionary of ht of all nations of the world to be classed as nized, can we look even for the first beginnings of our science This change was effected by Christianity

To the Hindu, every man not twice-born was a Mlechha; to the Greek, everyGreek was a barbarian; to the Jew, every person not circumcised was a Gentile; to the Moha in the prophet is a Giaur or Kaffir It was Christianity which first broke down the barriers between Jew and Gentile, between Greek and barbarian, between the white and the black _Humanity_ is a hich you look for in vain in Plato or Aristotle; the idea of mankind as one farowth; and the science of es of mankind, is a science which, without Christianity, would never have sprung into life When people had been taught to look upon all men as brethren, then, and then only, did the variety of human speech present itself as a problehtful observers; and I, therefore, date the real beginning of the science of language from the first day of Pentecost

After that day of cloven tongues a new light is spreading over the world, and objects rise into viehich had been hidden from the eyes of the nations of antiquity Old words assu, old problein of e, the susceptibility of all nations of the highest mental culture, these become, in the neorld in which we live, problems of scientific, because of more than scientific, interest It is no valid objection that so many centuries should have elapsed before the spirit which Christianity infused into every branch of scientific inquiry produced visible results We see in the oaken fleet which rides the ocean the so, and we recognize in the philosophy of Albertus Magnus,(107) though nearly 1200 years after the death of Christ, in the aspirations of Kepler,(108) and in the researches of the greatest philosophers of our own age, the sound of that key-note of thought which had been struck for the first time by the apostle of the Gentiles:(109) ”_For the invisible things of Hi understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead_”

But we shall see that the science of language owes more than its first impulse to Christianity The pioneers of our science were those very apostles ere coo into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature,” and their true successors, the missionaries of the whole Christian Church Translations of the Lord's Prayer or of the Bible into every dialect of the world, form even now the ist As long as the nues was sested itself

The mind must be bewildered by the multiplicity of facts before it has recourse to division As long as the only languages studied were Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, the simple division into sacred and profane, or classical and oriental, sufficed But when theologians extended their studies to Arabic, Chaldee, and Syriac, a step, and a very important step, was uages(110) No one could help seeing that these languages were most intimately related to each other, and that they differed fro themselves As early as 1606 we find _Guichard_,(111) in his ”Har Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac as a class of languages by the besides between the Romance and Teutonic dialects

What prevented, however, for a long tie was the idea that Hebreas the pries must be derived from Hebrew The fathers of the Church never expressed any doubt on this point St Jerome, in one of his epistles to Damasus,(112) writes: ”the whole of antiquity (universa antiquitas) affirms that Hebrew, in which the Old Testaen, in his eleventh Homily on the book of Nuinally given through Adam, remained in that part of the world which was the chosen portion of God, not left like the rest to one of His angels(113) When, therefore, the first attees were made, the problem, as it presented itself to scholars such as Guichard and Thomassin, was this: ”As Hebrew is undoubtedly the es, how are we to explain the process by which Hebrew became split into so many dialects, and how can these numerous dialects, such as Greek, and Latin, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, be traced back to their co what an aenuity asted on this question during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries It finds, perhaps, but one parallel in the laborious calculations and constructions of early astronomers, who had to account for the ranted that the earth h we kno that the labors of such scholars as Thomassin were, and could not be otherwise than fruitless, it would be a ress of the human race, e to look upon the exertions of eh theydirection, as et that the very fact of the failure of such eneral conviction that therein the probleenius inverted the problem and thereby solved it When books after books had been written to sho Greek and Latin and all other languages were derived frole system proved satisfactory, people asked at last-”Why then _should_ all languages be derived froht have been natural for theologians in the fourth and fifth centuries, e except their own, to take it for granted that Hebreas the source of all languages, but there is neither in the Old nor the New Testae of Ada; but if Hebrew, as we know it, was one of the languages that sprang froues at Babel, it could not well have been the language of Adam or of the whole earth, ”when the whole earth was still of one speech”(115)

Although, therefore, a certain advance was es by the Semitic scholars of the seventeenth century, yet this partial advance became in other respects an ies according to their characteristic features was lost sight of, and erroneous ideas were propagated, the influence of which has even now not quite subsided

The first who really conquered the prejudice that Hebreas the source of all language was Leibniz, the cotemporary and rival of Newton ”There is asHebrew to have been the pri the view of Goropius, who published a work at Antwerp, in 1580, to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in Paradise”(116) In a letter to Tenzel, Leibniz writes: ”To call Hebrew the pri branches of a tree pri that in sorow instead of trees Such ideas ree with the laws of nature, and with the harmony of the universe, that is to say with the Divine Wisdoreat stue He was the first to apply the principle of sound inductive reasoning to a subject which before him had only been treated at rando, first of all, as large a number of facts as possible(118) He appealed to missionaries, travellers, ambassadors, princes, and emperors, to help him in a hich he had so much at heart The Jesuits in China had to work for him Witsen,(119) the traveller, sent him a most precious present, a translation of the Lord's Prayer into the jargon of the Hottentots ”My friend,” writes Leibniz in thanking him, ”remember, I implore you, and remind your Muscovite friends, to make researches in order to procure species, the Sausians, and others” Having made the acquaintance of Peter the Great, Leibniz wrote to hi letter, dated Vienna, October the 26th, 1713:-

”I have suggested that the nues, hitherto almost entirely unknown and unstudied, which are current in the empire of your Majesty and on its frontiers, should be reduced to writing; also that dictionaries, or at least small vocabularies, should be collected, and translations be procured in such languages of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostolic Syua laudet Dolory of your Majesty, who reigns over so many nations, and is so anxious to improve thees, enable us to discover the origin of those nations who from Scythia, which is subject to your Majesty, advanced into other countries But principally it would help to plant Christianity a those dialects, and I have, therefore, addressed the Most Rev Metropolitan on the same subject”(120)

Leibniz drew up a list of the most simple and necessary teres At hoed in historical researches, he collected whatever could throw light on the origin of the Gered others, such as Eccard, to do the same He pointed out the importance of dialects, and even of provincial and local teres(121) Leibniz never undertook a systee, nor was he successful in classing the dialects hich he had becouished between a japhetic and Ara the north, the latter the south, of the continent of Asia and Europe He believed in a coration of the huuish the exact degrees of relationshi+p in which languages stood to each other, and he mixed up some of the Turanian dialects, such as Finnish and Tataric, with the japhetic family of speech If Leibniz had found time to work out all the plans which his fertile and coenius conceived, or if he had been understood and supported by cotee, as one of the inductive sciences, ht have been established a century earlier But a uished as a scholar, a theologian, a lawyer, an historian, and a e ought to be studied Leibniz was not only the discoverer of the differential calculus He was one of the first to watch the geological stratification of the earth He was engaged in constructing a calculating machine, the idea of which he first conceived as a boy He drew up an elaborate plan of an expedition to Egypt, which he submitted to Louis XIV in order to avert his attention froed in a long correspondence with Bossuet to bring about a reconciliation between Protestants and Romanists, and he endeavored, in his Theodicee and other works, to defend the cause of truth and religion against the inroads of the land and France It has been said, indeed, that the discoveries of Leibniz produced but little effect, and that ain This is not the case, however, with regard to the science of language The new interest in languages, which Leibniz had called into life, did not die again After it had once been recognized as a desideratues of mankind, missionaries and travellers felt it their duty to collect lists of words, and draw up grareat works in which, at the beginning of our century, the results of these researches were sues by Hervas, and the Mithridates of Adelung, can both be traced back directly to the influence of Leibniz As to Hervas, he had read Leibniz carefully, and though he differs froes his es Of Adelung's Mithridates and his obligations to Leibniz we shall have to speak presently

Hervas lived from 1735 to 1809 He was a Spaniard by birth, and a Jesuit by profession While working as a lottous tribes of Auages

After his return, he lived chiefly at Rome in the midst of the numerous Jesuit missionaries who had been recalled from all parts of the world, and who, by their co whoreatly in his researches

Most of his works ritten in Italian, and were afterwards translated into Spanish We cannot enter into the general scope of his literary labors, which are of the most comprehensive character They were intended to form a kind of Kosmos, for which he chose the title of ”_Idea del Universo_” What is of interest to us is that portion which treats of ain, chiefly his Catalogue of Languages, in six volumes, published in Spanish in the year 1800

If we compare the work of Hervas with a similar hich excited much attention towards the end of the last century, and is even now more widely known than Hervas, I mean Court de Gebelin's ”Monde Primitif,”(122) we shall see at once how far superior the Spanish Jesuit is to the French philosopher Gebelin treats Persian, Armenian, Malay, and Coptic as dialects of Hebrew; he speaks of Bask as a dialect of Celtic, and he tries to discover Hebrew, Greek, English, and French words in the idio in his catalogue five ties that were known to Gebelin, is most careful not to allow himself to be carried away by theories not warranted by the evidence before him It is easy now to point out mistakes and inaccuracies in Hervas, but I think that those who have blaed their obligations to him To have collected species is no sraes(123) He was the first to point out that the true affinities of languages rammatical evidence, not by mere similarity of words(124) He proved, by a coations, that Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Ae, and constitute one family of speech, the Sees of mankind froarian, Lapponian, and Finnish, three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian family(126) He had proved that Bask was not, as was coe, spoken by the earliest inhabitants of Spain, as proved by the names of the Spanish mountains and rivers(127) Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of the science of language, the establish frorees of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of A before it was announced to the world by Hurammatical similarity between Sanskrit and Greek, but the imperfect information which he received from his friend, the Carmelite missionary, Fra Paolino de San Bartolora the full rammatical similarity How near Hervas was to the discovery of the truthsuch words as _theos_, God, in Greek, with _Deva_, God, in Sanskrit He identified the Greek auxiliary verb _eimi_, _eis_, _esti_, I am, thou art, he is, with the Sanskrit _asmi_, _asi_, _asti_ He even pointed out that the terenders(129) in Greek, _os_, _e_, _on_, are the sa, as he did, that the Greeks derived their philosophy and y from India,(130) he supposed that they had likewise borrowed frouishi+ng the gender of words

The second hich represents the science of language at the beginning of this century, and which is, to a still greater extent, the result of the i(131) Adelung's work depends partly on Hervas, partly on the collections of words which had been overnment

Now these collections are clearly due to Leibniz Although Peter the Great had no tiovernes of the Russian ereater luck was in store for the science of language