A. H. Sayce

“ The skeleton of language is formed by those phonetic utterances into which significancy must be breathed before they can become living speech. They are the outward vestment of the thought that lies within, the material in which the mind of man finds its expression. Thought, it is true, may be conveyed through gesture and picture-writing as well as through phonetic utterance, but in phonetic utterance alone does it find a vehicle sufficient and worthy of itself. Like the marble in the hands of the sculptor, however, sound not only embodies meaning ”

“ Language is the outward expression and embodiment of thought—the garment, so to speak, with which the mind clothes itself when it would reveal itself to another or even, it may be, to itself. The words of a foreign tongue form a language only for those who understand what they signify: for those who do not they are but empty sounds, the idle murmur of a “barbarous” jargon. ”

“ The priority of sounds, of words, and even of dialects, is frequently to be discovered by an appeal to the formation of the throat and lips. We may lay down the general rule that the harder sound passes into the easier, rather than the easier into the harder; but it lies with phonology and physiology to determine which is really the harder sound. It is phonology which has created the modern science of language, and phonology may therefore be forgiven if it has claimed more than rightfully belongs to it or forgotten that it is but one side and one branch of the master science itself. ”

“ On all sides we are strictly limited by the conditions which surround us, and even science, though she may assist the senses by instruments which enlarge and extend their powers, reaches at last a boundary which she cannot pass. The world is a vast sounding-board, even if we know it not; the infinitesimally small and the infinitesimally great alike lie beyond our apprehension. Above and below there is infinity, and “the music of the spheres,” of which the old Greek thinkers dreamed, is not, after all, so very far removed from the truth that science has revealed to us. ”

“ All that the vocal organs can do is to supply the skeleton into which the mind breathes the breath of life. Unmeaning sounds do not constitute language: until a signification has been put into them, the sounds that have been described and analyzed are no better than the singing of the birds, the stirring of the trees, or even the dead utterances of a machine. Phonology, like anatomy, deals only with the dry bones which have yet to be clothed upon with living flesh. ”

“ The mixture of dialects which varied as to the genders they assigned to particular nouns completed the confusion, and modern German is an instance of a language which still clings to an outward excrescence of speech which originated in childish habits of thought and has now lost all sense and reason for its existence. A mere tax upon the memory and an embarrassment to free literary expression, it is no wonder that German genders are a sore trial to the children, who are sometimes several years before they learn to use them correctly. ”

“ It is only with the growth of civilization and thought that the exertion is transferred from the muscles to the brain, that words become so many algebraic signs, and that syntax takes the place of elocution. It has been often noticed that the tendency of the modern languages of Europe is towards a monotonous level of both accent and tone; but it must be remembered that, as long as poetry exists, there will exist also a tendency in the opposite direction, as well as a protest against the reduction of all language into a mere reflection of the dry light of reason. ”

“ It is only by comparison that an object can be known, its limits marked and determined; it is equally only by comparison that an idea can be defined and made intelligible. But when this has once been done, there is no longer any need of setting genus and species side by side in speech and thought; to do so is but a survival of the early machinery of language. ”

“ Hence the importance of the science of language for the Darwinian theory. Not only do we see language developing by slow degrees from the simple to the complex by the aid of natural selection, but it is through language alone that man is separated from the brute; so that before the beginning of language—a beginning which linguistic science can demonstrate with certainty—man was in no way distinguishable from the other primates. Language thus becomes the most important, it may be said the sole, test of race and lineage. The Ethiopian can change his skin sooner than his mother-tongue. ”

“ It does not matter whether the words we are dealing with are still living and spoken, or have been dead and obsolete for thousands of years; if we can show that they fall under the action of a particular law, we can apply that law to them in either case with equal certainty. When once we have ascertained that an English d represents a Sanskrit t, only those Sanskrit words which contain a t must be compared with English words of Teutonic origin which have a d in the corresponding place, whatever their antiquity may be. ”

“ But whether it touches upon physiology or upon physics, phonology is equally one of the physical sciences, pursuing the same method and busied with the same material. So long as philological research is purely phonological, so long have we to do with a physical science; it is only when we turn to the other problems of glottology, only when we pass from the outward vesture of speech to the meaning which it clothes, that the science of language becomes a historical one. ”

“ The laws of its life and growth are really the laws which govern the action of society in a particular direction. To speak of the impossibility of thoroughly mastering a foreign language is absurd. The same difficulty a member of one community finds in transforming himself into a member of another community recurs in the case of language, but the fact that an English child born in India will speak Hindustani as his native tongue, is sufficient to show that the power of speaking a special language does not depend on a special organization and ancestry. ”

“ It is this variability of form which makes the human throat such a marvellous instrument for the production of manifold sounds. Like most chambers of resonance, it has the hollow reed-like shape which connects it most readily with the primary source of sound. In analyzing the material of language we must never forget that we have to do with the most perfect wind instrument that exists, a wind instrument, too, of infinite pliability and power of change, and thus in constant and ready sympathy with the harmonics that are struck by the other organs of speech. ”

“ It is again the struggle between the principle of emphasis and the principle of laziness, between conservatism and revolution. Only when the accent is shifted to another syllable can phonetic decay gain the victory, and the shifting of the accent is itself the work of the principle of decay.
The principle of laziness has much to do with the creation of dialects. Slight variations of pronunciation and of the usage of words are as inevitable in language as variations of species in zoology, and where there is no correcting standard these variations are perpetuated and intensified. ”

“ Grammar is no organic growth, but the mechanical invention of mankind. And just as the first men framed it in ignorance and imperfection, so the philosophers of the eighteenth century could reframe it according to the requirements of formal logic. It was the old mistake of the Greek Analogists over again, only with the difference that they thought of the grammar of a single language alone, whereas the more ambitious [35] philologists of the “Aufklärung” aimed at producing a grammar which would be applicable to all tongues. ”

“ We must begin by putting out of sight all inarticulate sounds or noises, such as the clicks of the Bushman or the Hottentot, which have entered into the composition and framework of actual speech. Such inarticulate sounds are but the stepping-stones to real language, the first steps of the ladder, as it were, which were eventually to lead to articulate words. They are the natural cries of man like the natural cries of the animals from which they in no way differ ”

“ The number of abstracts possessed by a language is a good gauge of its development. It is difficult for us to realize the mental struggles and the ages of previous preparation required for the discovery of those ideas which now seem to us so familiar. The day on which, according to the ancient legend, Pythagoras struck out the idea of the world, and named it κόσμος, summed up all the labours of Eastern philosophy and Greek thought before which the law and order of the universe at last lay revealed. ”

“ The masterpieces of Greek, or Latin, or Sanskrit literature have produced the impression that the languages which embody them must surpass all others as instruments of thought. But such an impression may, after all, be an incorrect one. English literature stands on quite as high a level as the literature of the classical tongues. The English language is quite as good an instrument of thought as Sanskrit or Greek, and yet English can hardly be said to be inflectional in the way that Sanskrit and Greek are. ”

“ It is only in Eastern Asia or in America that we can hope to discover the highest development of which an isolating or a polysynthetic language is capable, and so regard Chinese and Mexican not as “arrested growths,” but as instinct with the progressive intelligence and cultivated life of the peoples that speak them. Where no traces of a type of speech different from the prevailing one are to be found, we are justified in concluding that it never existed there. And finally the fact will correct that tendency we all have to assume a unity upon insufficient evidence. ”

“ For the purposes of phonology more especially, the study of living spoken dialects is indispensable. No doubt the historical character of glottology requires us to investigate the records of extinct languages with as much care as the facts of living ones, and it is only by learning what a language once was that we can properly know what it is now. Nevertheless, it is only in the modern languages that we can discover the nature and laws of pronunciation; it is only here, moreover, that we are brought face to face with the problems and realities of speech. ”

“ The community in which each man acts like his neighbour is not yet a civilized community; Athens is typical of all that is highest in human culture, and Athens was emphatically the State in which individuality had the freest play. It is well for the child who has to learn the language of his parents that he is rather a member of an uncivilized community than of Periklean Athens.
The love of imitation is the instrument whereby one language is able to influence another. Sometimes we find a community giving up its own tongue altogether and adopting that of his neighbours. ”

“ But what we really mean when we say that one language is more advanced than another, is that it is better adapted to express thought, and that the thought to be expressed is itself better. Now, it is a grave question whether from this point of view the three classes of language can really be set the one against the other. So long as thought is expressed clearly and intelligibly, it does not much matter how it is expressed—how, that is, the relations of the sentence or proposition are denoted. ”

“ The old attempts to compare Latin with Greek, or both with Hebrew, were failures because the test applied was a capricious one, depending on the subjective fancies and prejudices of the inquirer. We cannot compare two things together without having a third term—a common standard by which to measure them. We must not have one rule and measure for one set of words or languages and another rule and measure for another set. The comparative method we employ must be alike in all cases.
Language is a social product, at once the creation and the creator of society. ”

“ It is civilization which counteracts the natural tendency to multiply dialects, and which is ever striving to absorb the manifold dialects that exist into a single tongue. All the social conditions of civilized life tend to break down dialects, to assimilate languages, and to create a common medium of intercourse. A common government, a common literature, a common history and a common law, all require a common language. The Macedonian Empire made Greek the language of the East, and Rome effectually stamped out the various idioms of its subjects in the West. ”

“ What we know is that dialects precede languages, that out of the many comes the one, and that in the drifting desert of human speech, only three or four families, like the Aryan, the Semitic, or the Ugro-Altaic, have been able to establish themselves. At the bottom of Max Müller’s theory of language seems to lie the philosophic postulate that the universal precedes the particular; the roots of language are so many “phonetic types,” so many universals, out of which the manifold forms and words of living speech have been developed. ”

“ It is, therefore, of the highest importance to comparative philology that the decaying dialects of our own or other countries should be observed and written down before they have perished. The history of a language can be traced only by a comparison of its dialects, which often preserve words and forms that have become obscure and inexplicable in the standard dialect itself. Where the allied dialects have disappeared, the chasm that divides the language we are studying from those with which it was once connected may be too wide to be easily spanned. ”