Lectures on the Science of Language ...Scribner, 1869 - 416 pages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
agglutinative ancient Anglo-Saxon Arabic Armenia Arya Aryan and Semitic Aryan family Aryan languages Asia beginning Brahmans branch brutes Burnouf called Celtic Celts century Chinese common origin dative declension derived dialects Dionysius Thrax discovered distinct doubt elements empire English express family of speech Finnic formation French genitive German Gothic grammarians grammatical forms Greek and Latin growth guage Hebrew Hervas High-German human speech idea India inflectional instance Italian Latin Lectures Leibniz likewise literary literature look means modern Mongolic nature never nouns origin of language Persian philology philosophers phonetic corruption physical sciences plough plural predicative preserved primitive pronouns Provençal race Roman Rome root Sanskrit Saxon scholars science of language sense skrit Slavonic speak spoken stage Stanislas Julien Strabo supposed Tataric terminations Teutonic tion translated tribes Tungusic Turanian Turanian family Turanian languages Turkic Turkish Ulfilas Veda verb vowels words Zend Zend-avesta Zoroaster
Popular passages
Page 35 - And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
Page 379 - If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas that way, to any degree: this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas, is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes; and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to.
Page 367 - of particular names to denote particular objects, that is, the institution of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps towards the formation of language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other by uttering certain sounds whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which...
Page 155 - The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists...
Page 82 - English amounts to only 13,330, against 29,354 words which can either mediately or immediately be traced to a Latin source.* On the evidence of its dictionary, therefore, and treating English as a mixed language, it would have to be classified together with French, Italian, and Spanish, as one of the Romance or Neo-Latin dialects. Languages, however, though mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their grammar.
Page 289 - I am. Thou art. He is. We are. You are. They are. I was. Thou wast He was. We were. You were. They were.
Page 62 - ... livelong day, become habituated to a language of their own. The more voluble condescend to the less precocious, and thus, from this infant Babel, proceeds a dialect...
Page 350 - Language is something more palpable than a fold of the brain, or an angle of the skull. It admits of no cavilling, and no process of natural selection will ever distil significant words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts.
Page 368 - Could we suppose any person living on the banks of the Thames so ignorant as not to know the general word river but to be acquainted only with the particular word Thames, if he was brought to any other river, would he not readily call it a Thames?
Page 82 - There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources, as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of England. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German — nay, even Hindustani, Malay, and Chinese words— lie mixed together in the English dictionary.