likeness in scattered members of the same family. There are languages in which there is no trace of what we are accustomed to call grammar; for instance, ancient Chinese; there are others in which we can still watch the growth of grammar, or, more correctly, the gradual lapse of material into merely formal elements. In these languages new principles of classification will have to be applied, such as are suggested by the study of natural history; and we shall have to be satisfied with the criteria of a morphological affinity, instead of those of a genealogical relationship.

I have thus answered, I hope, some of the objections which threatened to deprive the science of language of that place which she claims in the circle of the physical sciences. We shall now see what the history of our science has been from its beginning to the present day, and how far it may be said to have passed through the three stages, the empirical, the classificatory, and the theoretical, which mark the childhood, the youth, and the manhood of every one of the natural sciences.

CHAPTER III.

THE EMPIRICAL STAGE.

TH

Language studied in India and Greece.

HOUGH as a general rule each physical science begins with analysis, proceeds to classification, and ends with theory, yet, as I pointed out before, there are exceptions to this rule, and it is by no means uncommon to find that philosophical speculations, which properly belong to the last or theoretical stage, were attempted in physical sciences long before the necessary evidence had been collected or arranged. Thus, we find that the science of language also, in the only two countries where we can watch its origin and history-in India and Greece-rushes at once into theories about the mysterious nature of speech, and cares as little for facts as the man who wrote an account of the camel without ever having seen the animal or the desert. The Brahmans, in the hymns. of the Veda, raised language to the rank of a deity, as they did with all things of which they knew not what they were. They addressed hymns to her, in which she is said to have been with the gods from the beginning, achieving wondrous things, and never revealed to man except in part. In the Brâhmanas, language is called the cow, breath the bull, and their

young is said to be the mind of man.1 Brahman, the highest being, is said to be known through speech, nay, speech itself is called the Supreme Brahman.2 At a very early period, however, the Brahmans recovered from their raptures about language, and set to work with wonderful skill dissecting her sacred body. Their achievements in grammatical analysis (vyâkarana), which date from the sixth century B.C., are still unsurpassed in the grammatical literature of any nation. The idea of reducing a whole language to a small number of roots, which in Europe was not attempted before the sixteenth century by Henry Estienne,3 was perfectly familiar to the Brahmans at least 500 B.C.

The Greeks, though they did not raise language to the rank of a deity, paid her, nevertheless, the

1 Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, i. 32. The following verses are pronounced by Vâk, the goddess of speech, in the 125th hymn of the 10th book of the Rig-veda: 'Even I myself say this (what is) welcome to gods and to men: "Whom I love, him I make strong, him I make a Brahman, him a great prophet, him I make wise. For Rudra (the god of thunder) I bend the bow, to slay the enemy, the hater of the Brah. mans. For the people I make war; I pervade heaven and earth. I bear the father on the summit of this world; my origin is in the water in the sea; from thence I go forth among all beings, and touch this heaven with my height. I myself breathe forth like the wind, embracing all beings; above this heaven, beyond this earth, such am I in greatness.” See also Atharva-veda, iv. 30; xix. 9, 3. Muir, Sanskrit Texts, part iii. pp. 108, 150.

2 Brih in Briha-spati, the same as Vâkas-pati, lord of speech, is the root of the Lat. verbum and of the English word. The Vedic brih represents vridh, from which the nominal base vridha, i. e. Gothic waúrd, Lit. vardas, name. Brah-man comes from the same root.

3 Sir John Stoddart, Glossology, p. 276. The first complete Hebrew Grammar and Dictionary of the Bible were the work of Rabbi Jonâ, or Abul Walid Merwân Ibn Djanâh, in the middle of the eleventh century. The idea of Hebrew roots was explained even before him by Abu Zacariyya 'Hayyudj, who is called the first Grammarian by Ibn Ezra. Cf. Munk, Notice sur Aboul Walid, Journal asiatique, 1850, avril.

greatest honours in their ancient schools of philosophy. There is hardly one of their representative philosophers who has not left some saying on the nature of language. The world without, or nature, and the world within, or mind, did not excite more wonder and elicit deeper oracles of wisdom from the ancient sages of Greece than language, the image of both, of nature and of mind. What is language?' was a question asked quite as early as What am I?' and 'What is all this world around me?' problem of language was in fact a recognised battlefield for the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, and we shall have to glance at their early guesses on the nature of human speech, when we come to consider the third or theoretical stage in the science of language.

Empirical Stage.

The

At present, we have to look for the early traces of the first or empirical stage. And here it might seem doubtful what was the real work to be assigned to this stage. What can be meant by the empirical treatment of language? Who were the men that did for language what the sailor did for his stars, the miner for his minerals, the gardener for his flowers? Who was the first to give any thought to language? -to distinguish between its component parts, between nouns and verbs, between articles and pronouns, between the nominative and accusative, the active and passive? Who invented these terms, and for what purpose were they invented?

We must be careful in answering these questions,

for, as I said before, the merely empirical analysis of language was preceded in Greece by more general inquiries into the nature of thought and language; and the result has been that many of the technical terms which form the nomenclature of empirical grammar, existed in the schools of philosophy long before they were handed over, ready made, to the grammarian. The distinction of noun and verb, or more correctly, of subject and predicate, was the work of philosophers. Even the technical terms for case, number, and gender were coined at a very early time for the purpose of entering into the mysteries of thought; not for the practical purpose of analysing the forms of language. This, their practical application to the spoken language of Greece, was the work of a later generation. It was the teacher of languages who first compared the categories of thought with the realities of the Greek language. Aristotle himself may have learnt many of his lessons from language, but it was the grammarian who transferred the terminology of Aristotle and the Stoics back from thought to speech, from logic to grammar; and thus opened the first roads into the impervious wilderness of spoken speech. In doing this, the grammarian had to alter the strict acceptation of many of the terms which he borrowed from the philosopher, and he had to coin others before he could lay hold of all the facts of language even in the roughest manner. For, indeed, the distinction between noun and verb, between active and passive, between nominative and accusative, does not help us much towards a scientific analysis of language. It is no more than a first grasp, and it