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was the first practical teacher of languages, and if we want to know the beginnings of the science of language, we must try to find out at what time in the history of the world, and under what circumstances, people first thought of learning any language besides their own. At that time we shall find the first practical grammar, and not till then. Much may have been ready at hand through the less interested researches of philosophers, and likewise through the critical studies of the scholars of Alexandria on the ancient forms of their language as preserved in the Homeric poems. But rules of declension and conjugation, paradigms of regular and irregular nouns and verbs, observations on syntax, and the like, these are the work of the teachers of languages, and of no one else.

Now, the teaching of languages, though at present so large a profession, is comparatively a very modern invention. No ancient Greek ever thought of learning a foreign language. Why should he? He divided the whole world into Greeks and Barbarians, and he would have felt himself degraded by adopting either the dress or the manners or the language of his barbarian neighbors. He considered it a privilege to speak Greek, and even dialects closely related to his own, were treated by him as mere jargons. It takes time before people conceive the idea that it is possible to express oneself in any but one's own language. The Poles called their neighbors, the Germans, Niemiec, niemy meaning dumb;1 just as the Greeks called the Barbarians

1 The Turks applied the Polish name Niemiec to the Austrians. As early as Constantinus Porphyrogeneta, cap. 30, Nɛμétioɩ was used for the German race of the Bavarians. (Pott, Indo-Germ. Sp. s. 44. Leo, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung, b. ii. s. 258.) Russian, njemez'; Slo

Aglossoi, or speechless.

The name which the Germans gave to their neighbors, the Celts, Walh in old High German, vealh in Anglo-Saxon, the modern Welsh, is supposed to be the same as the Sanskrit mlechha, and means a person who talks indistinctly.1

Even when the Greeks began to feel the necessity of communicating with foreign nations, when they felt a desire of learning their idioms, the problem was by no means solved. For how was a foreign language to be learnt as long as either party could only speak their own? The problem was almost as difficult as when, as we are told by some persons, the first men, as yet speechless, came together in order to invent speech, and to discuss the most appropriate names that should be given to the perceptions of the senses and the abstractions of the mind. At first, it must

be supposed that the Greek learned foreign languages very much as children learn their own. The interpreters mentioned by ancient historians were probably children of parents speaking different languages. The son of a Scythian and a Greek would naturally learn the utterances both of his father and mother, and the lucrative nature of his services would not fail to increase the supply. We are told, though on rather mythical authority, that the Greeks were astonished at the multiplicity of languages which they encountered during the Argonautic expedition, and that they were much inconvenienced by the want of skilful interpreters.2 We need not wonder at this, for the

venian, němec; Bulgarian, némec; Polish, niemiec; Lusatian, njemc, mean German. Russian, njemo, indistinct; njemyi, dumb; Slovenian, něm, dumb; Bulgarian, nêm, dumb; Polish, njemy, dumb; Lusatian, njemy, dumb.

1 Leo, Zeitschrift, für Vergl. Sprachf. b. ii. s. 252.

2 Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 141.

English army was hardly better off than the army of Jason; and such is the variety of dialects spoken in the Caucasian Isthmus, that it is still called by the inhabitants "the Mountain of Languages." If we turn our eyes from these mythical ages to the historical times. of Greece, we find that trade gave the first encouragement to the profession of interpreters. Herodotus tells us (iv. 24), that caravans of Greek merchants, following the course of the Volga upwards to the Oural mountains, were accompanied by seven interpreters, speaking seven different languages. These must have comprised Slavonic, Tataric, and Finnic dialects, spoken in those countries in the time of Herodotus, as they are at the present day. The wars with Persia first familiarized the Greeks with the idea that other nations also possessed real languages. Themistocles studied Persian, and is said to have spoken it fluently. The expedition of Alexander contributed still more powerfully to a knowledge of other nations and languages. But when Alexander went to converse with the Brahmans, who were even then considered by the Greeks as the guardians of a most ancient and mysterious wisdom, their answers had to be translated by so many interpreters that one of the Brahmans remarked, they must become like water that had passed through many impure channels. We hear, indeed, of more ancient

1 This shows how difficult it would be to admit that any influence was exercised by Indian on Greek philosophers. Pyrrhon, if we may believe Alexander Polyhistor, seems indeed to have accompanied Alexander on his expedition to India, and one feels tempted to connect the scepticism of Pyrrhon with the system of Buddhist philosophy then current in India. But the ignorance of the language on both sides must have been an insurmountable barrier between the Greek and the Indian thinkers. (Fragmenta Histor. Græc., ed. Müller, t. iii. p. 243, b.; Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, b. iii. s. 380.)

Greek travellers, and it is difficult to understand how, in those early times, anybody could have travelled without a certain knowledge of the language of the people through whose camps and villages and towns he had to pass. Many of these travels, however, particularly those which are said to have extended as far as India, are mere inventions of later writers.1 Lycurgus may have travelled to Spain and Africa, he certainly did not proceed to India, nor is there any mention of his intercourse with the Indian Gymnosophists before Aristocrates, who lived about 100 B. c. The travels of Pythagoras are equally mythical; they are inventions of Alexandrian writers, who believed that all wisdom must have flowed from the East. There is better authority for believing that Democritus went to Egypt and Babylon, but his more distant travels to India are likewise legendary. Herodotus, though he travelled in Egypt and Persia, never gives us to understand that he was able to converse in any but his own language.

As far as we can tell, the barbarians seem to have possessed a greater facility for acquiring languages than either Greeks or Romans. Soon after the Macedonian conquest, we find 2 Berosus in Babylon, Menander in Tyre, and Manetho in Egypt, compiling, from original sources, the annals of their countries.3 Their works

1 On the supposed travels of Greek philosophers to India, see Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, b. iii. s. 379; Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, b. i. s. 425. The opinion of D. Stewart and Niebuhr that the Indian philosophers borrowed from the Greeks, and that of Görres and others that the Greeks borrowed from the Brahmans, are examined in my Essay on Indian Logic, in Thomson's Laws of Thought.

2 See Niebuhr, Vorlesungen über Alte Geschichte, b. i. s. 17.

8 The translation of Mago's work on agriculture belongs to a later time. There is no proof that Mago, who wrote twenty-eight books on agriculture

The na

were written in Greek, and for the Greeks. tive language of Berosus was Babylonian, of Menander Phenician, of Manetho Egyptian. Berosus was able to read the cuneiform documents of Babylonia with the same ease with which Manetho read the papyri of Egypt. The almost contemporaneous appearance of three such men, barbarians by birth and language, who were anxious to save the histories of their countries from total oblivion, by entrusting them to the keeping of their conquerors, the Greeks, is highly significant. But what is likewise significant, and by no means creditable to the Greek or Macedonian conquerors, is the small value which they seem to have set on these works. They have all been lost, and are known to us by fragments only, though there can be little doubt that the work of Berosus would have been an invaluable guide to the student of the cuneiform inscriptions and of Babylonian history, and that Manetho, if preserved complete, would have saved us volumes of controversy on Egyptian chronology. We learn, however, from the almost simultaneous appearance of these works, that soon after the epoch marked by Alexander's conquests in the East, the Greek language was studied and cultivated by literary men of barbarian origin, though we should look in vain for any Greek

in the Punic language, lived, as Humboldt supposes (Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 184), 500 B. C. Varro de R. R. i. 1, says: "Hos nobilitate Mago Carthaginiensis præteriit Pœnica lingua, quod res dispersas comprehendit libris xxix., quos Cassius Dionysius Uticensis vertit libris xx., Græca lingua, ac Sextilio prætori misit: in quæ volumina de Græcis libris eorum quos dixi adjecit non pauca, et de Magonis dempsit instar librorum viii. Hosce ipsos utiliter ad vi. libros redegit Diophanes in Bithynia, et misit Dejotaro regi." This Cassius Dionysius Uticencis lived about 40 B. C. The translation into Latin was made at the command of the Senate, shortly after the third Punic war.

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