THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

One theme of language study that the twentieth century has in common with the period up to the nineteenth century is the so-called synchronic point of view, according to which languages are described without reference to their history. The motivation for pursuing the etymology of expressions, and what understood by the term, will serve to differentiate the kinds of investigations undertaken in former eras from the historical inquiries of the nineteenth century.

The term “etymology” was coined by the stoics. They were convinced that language was, or should be, regularly regulated to its content, but the state of the Greek language at the time of their investigations was such that complete regularity could not be established. They conclude that, the language of their time had undergone a process of corruption and that the true, regular relation between language and the universe could be seen only when the original forms-the etyma.

The Etymologies of Isodore of Seville follows the same line of thought. He said that etymology is a study without a unifying principle, since it is partially historical and partially mnemonic. Europeans became acquainted with many more languages after the period of exploration and colonization, but the same opinions about the relation of languages were held. Such as, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) compared Latin and Greek.

Etienne Guichard compiled an Etymological Harmony of Languages in 1606, in this work he tried to show that all languages can be traced to Hebrew. His method is interesting, since it shows one of the fundamental confusions that dominated the work of the ancients and medieval, who knew the difference between letters and sounds, but didn’t insist on technical terms to distinguish them.

By “philosophic” Kraus meant what we should now call “scientific”. His “modern” insight was his willingness to consider each language an autonomous system, without presupposing that its unity or regularity is imposed from without, either by Hebrew or Latin or by some universal sort of grammar, since each language is a unique system, word-to-word correspondence is not to be expected. Kraus’s views are doubly remarkable considering the amount of information about language that Europeans had available to them at that time and the examples from which he had to draw in order to make his comparisons. The discovery of Sanskrit suggested that a study could be made of Eastern and Western languages which would show their familial relations.

As has been noted, students of language had become increasingly aware that similarity of grammatical structure rather than word correspondences is the more important consideration for establishing relations between languages. What was required for more rapid progress in language analysis was some system for explaining the difference among language were obvious transliterations of words from another language. The method of Guichard was based in pure semantic resemblances.

Rasmus Rask pointed out that experienced had showed lexical correspondence to be unreliable index of the common origin or relation of languages. He said that the surest way to compare languages is to attend to (1) the roots of the languages, (2) the sound of correspondences among the roots of the languages. He anticipated formulations of the so-called Grimm’s Law.

Given consistent correspondences such as those illustrated so briefly in the forms for to be (very many others could be listed), several possibilities about the languages in which they occur are related may seem plausible: (1) each of the languages is derived in turn from the other, which accounts for the resemblance; (2) each is derived from an other common language; (3) each has developed, independently, in the same way.

Reconstructing that language became the aim of the philologist. This may seem to have been rather bold, if not hopeless, task, since it was assumed that this proto-language no longer existed, and there was thus no way of checking the accuracy of such a reconstruction. The implied in the development of the comparative method, by which the sound correspondences among related languages are established, and through which the grammatical parallels can also be stated. The statement of the correspondences then, leads to the reconstruction of the original form.

The fundamental assumption of linguists after the mid nineteenth century, then, was that the language we have mentioned, along with other Europeans Languages, were derived from original, or proto, language, which is no longer exists. Reconstructing that language became the aim of the philologist. This reconstruction was to be accomplished through the establishment of the way in which the spelling of words in earlier forms could be transformed according to definite rules into the spelling of words in later attested stages of languages.

The discovery of the factor that regularizes the correspondences contains an implicit criticism of Grimm’s basic method of comparing sounds without sufficient attention to their environments, by taking further environmental factors into consideration. Herman Grassmann was able to solve other apparent exceptions to Grimm’s law. The significant advance here was that the immediate consonant clusters, thus requiring examination of successive syllables within the word.

In 1875 Carl Verner was able to dispose of the irregular status of other exceptions to Grimm’s law by showing that another conditioning factor which had to be considered was the place of the accent in IE Languages. When this elements had been included all of the factors pertinent to the phonological word had been taken into consideration not only correspondences between single sounds but also sounds in clusters, sounds in successive syllables, and sounds in relation to accentual features of the word. By identifying sounds as units in a system of systems the systematic nature of the sounds correspondences was more clearly shown. Grimm was convinced that “we speak from the letters”, he did not deny what everyone in the west had held antiquity, that letters stand for sounds and that the two are not the same thing.

Despite this weakness, however, the prodigious diligence and patient gathering of examples that resulted in his basic formulation of the notion of sound shift must be acknowledged. It laid the basis for further progress when additional conditioning factors were taken into account and when phonetic information, which was being rapidly developed all during this period. W.D.Whitney in his Language and the Study of Language (1867) used the term “false analogy” to explain the use of “bringed” and “fighted” formation. The notion, first in the sense of false analogy and then simply as analogy.

Analogy can either be considered as a static relation or as a process (multiplication). The nineteenth century linguist considered analogy as a process and thought that with this and the process of sound change they had discover the secret of life for language. Language was considered to be a kind of organism, which had its own laws of life, growth, and decline. One forced that caused language to change was an impersonal, inexorable sound law. Sound laws as such were said to be wholly without exceptions. Any apparent exception was considered to be the operation of another law as yet unobserved or the result of analogy.

From  this brief survey of the accomplishments of the nineteenth century it can appreciated that great strides were made toward the structural point of view in the description and comparison of languages. The conditions under which progress was chiefly made can be seen in the explicit affirmation of the importance of analogy in language, since this progress involves the assumption of an important resemblance among terms that differ. A voiced sound is phonetically different from a voiceless one, but the work of Grimm showed that this difference can be reduced to a significant unity by assuming a different point of view. He was able to show that in this case we do not have to do merely with two synchronic differences but a unity through historical change.