Images de page
PDF
ePub

William elicited from his imaginary Hiberno-Phoenician,-nay, real sense, for in the jargon quoted above there is obviously no sense at all. In submitting the following sample of what might be done for the Teutonic family, he assumed only, with more modesty than Sir William, that the Eugubian tables are written in a primitive, but still intelligible, Anglo-Saxon dialect; and that the second table contains, not a log-book of voyages to Erin, but a commercial treaty between the Etruscans and the Phoenicians; one written in current grammatical sense, without Ulsterian transpositions, and with vastly less than Ulsterian corruption of the original Umbrian text:'

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Bi ok u kum iu bi o Pune o bef for fat drov bi tal of Tur of Mart Ethruria fed o pupl u pa her tute as iu bi in as &c.

By oak you come, you buy, O Phoenician, o' beef, four fat "drove, by tale of Tyre, of the Mart of Etruria; feed, O people! you pay her duty, as you buy, in asses, &c.'

In "oak," for oaken ship, the correspondence with the Latin terms, abies, trabs, and the modern Italian legno, is remarkable; both probably traceable to the same Etruscan usage. The "tale" (perhaps toll?) of Tyre, specifies doubtless the number of oxen in each drove contracted for, according to some conventional Phoenician standard. The apostrophe, “feed O people," is a fine sample of the combination of the poetical with the practical, common in such documents among a primitive race. The as, we need scarcely add, was the current Etruscan coin. The commencement of the first table reads equally well. It specifies the different prices or duties of

corn:

"Punic corn is paid, o' rye, at a higher, yea a bye code; no reclaim (drawback?) &c."'

We shall close our list with Mrs. Hamilton Gray, who, unhappily for her literary fame, imbibed all the prejudices of the old Egyptian school. She assumed Etruscan emigration from a certain Mesopotamian city, whose Scriptural name was Resen, and whose Egyptian title she conveniently supposes to have been Ludim. Hence, of course, their designations, Rasena and Lydian. From Resen she transports them to Egypt, whence they are expelled by the native powers, and accordingly cross to the Italian coast. Had she but made them,' says the reviewer alluded to above, 'on traversing the Mediterranean, land first in Gaul, and cross the Rhætian Alps into Lombardy, she would have had the merit of blending the Phoenician, Egyptian, Lydian, Libyan, and Celtic systems into one.' Having, in a recent article upon Mr. Dennis's work, adverted in some detail to that exploded superstition, the Egypto-Oriental mania, we are sure our readers will readily dispense with any refutation of Mrs. H. Gray's theory here; the more, as its features present scarcely any variation from those in which it has long been familiar to the public in the pages of the Universal History.

[ocr errors]

We have no intention of plunging our readers into M. Bunsen's voluminous researches, further than is necessary to reflect the few additional rays of light which they cast upon the problem before us. Before, however, the Chevalier records the latest results of comparative philology, in reference to the Etruscan enigma, there are several interesting pages, in which he traces the gradual development of the philosophy of language from the earliest era of critical inquiry; the contents of which, especially as they bear closely upon the subject at issue, will probably be acceptable to many of our readers.

In laying them before the public, we must revert to the old style of reviewing that of citation at length-in the assurance that it would be impossible to condense them with effect. An outline of the history of philological science from the era of Pythagoras and Plato to that of Leibnitz, the author of the Comparative Philosophy of Language,' and the first successful classifier of the languages then known, is given in the following

terms:

"The profound passage in Genesis (ii. 19), "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," finds its philosophical echo in Pythagoras. Jamblichus and Proclus report the following as one of his sayings: Having been asked What was the wisest among things? he answered, " Number;" and, What next in wisdom? "The Name-giver." This is explained by the account preserved in Clemens of Alexandria (Ecl. Proph. i. 32), that Pythagoras thought of all wise men he was not only the most rational, but also the most ancient, who gave the names to things, Pythagoras, as well as the Bible, supposes man to have formed language, and both consider this act as primitive, and analogous to that of the Divine mind, by which there is order and measure in the universe. With Heraclitus, "the dark," and Democritus, his contemporary, begins the antagonism which pervades the whole Greek and Latin philosophy of language. Heraclitus considered the words of language as the shadow of bodies, or the image reflected in the mirror-types of objective reality; whereas the other school saw in them products of convention. According to one, language existed by nature (objectively); according to the other, by a positive arbitrary act of man (subjectively). The first were, according to another term, analogists; the others, anomalists. Plato, in his "Cratylus," and Aristotle in his "Organon," may be said, however, to be the men who, upon the traces of their predecessors, have laid the foundations of the philosophy of language. Plato, following Pythagoras and Socrates, is an analogist; Aristotle tends to anomalism; but as Plato acknowledges the positive or conventional element, so Aristotle does not deny the objectivity which lies at the bottom of language. He is startled by the fact that the languages of men are so many and so different, and, therefore, places the conventional element first; but, as he expressly says (De Animá, c. i.) that the sounds of the voice are symbolical of the affections of the soul, we must not interpret this only of the interjectional sounds, but also of the words expressing things and thought, or real lanage. The speculations of Plato, when rightly understood, bear upon the hest problems of the philosophy of language; the categories and defini

tions of Aristotle lay the logical foundations of our grammatical system, and establish by themselves the great principle, that language is the immediate product and expression-as it were—the mirror of logic and thought. In the speculations of both we see the entire want of an abstract knowledge of the etymological rules of their own language, and still more of a system, or even a tendency, to compare the Greek tongue with those of the barbarians. Nor did the later philosophers and philologers of Greece and Rome pursue such a course. Epicurus acknowledges expressly the two elements, and places that which comes from nature through the affections of the soul first; the positive element second. The Stoics originated the grammar, and, in particular, proposed the first theory of the Greek verb and its conjugation. Aristophanes, Aristarchus, and Crates, and, at a later period, Apollonius Dyscolus, were the acute and learned members of the Alexandrian Academy who erected that fabric of grammatical definitions and terms which, brought nearer to us by Varro and the later Latin grammarians, has formed the basis of our grammatical system, and, through the Syrian Christians, of that of the Arabs. The Indian grammar, however, is original and ancient.

2

As to the lexicographical' inquiries and speculations of the ancients, their blunders in both are proverbial, and constitute an important fact in the history of the human mind. Their absurd etymologies are the most striking proof of the impossibility of man becoming conscious of his peculiarities, except by contrast and comparison with those of others. If the Roman world did little for the philosophy of language, though even Cæsar speculated and wrote upon it, the Byzantine age, in this branch also, did nothing but preserve the corpse of ancient science, reduced to formularies and epitomes, such as ages sinking into materialism, or any other form of barbarism, generally prefer to scientific and learned investigations.

'The Germanic middle ages had not the means, and did not feel the vocation, for inquiring into realities; although Christianity had given them the idea of humanity as distinct from nationality; and although the study of Latin, and afterwards of Greek, and the acquaintance with the Saracens, led them naturally to a greater knowledge of the properties and diversities of language. The genial and free philosophy of the fifteenth century,

1 This censure is far too indiscriminate. In some respects the Greek lexicographers surpassed our own in the extent and variety of their researches. We have no vocabularies specially devoted to the phraseology of our great writers,-of Chaucer, of Milton, of Shakspeare; whereas Grecian literature possessed, from the times of Gorgias (440 B c.) various collections of Homeric, Platonic, and other elegant phraseology. Shortly after the era of salvation, a voluminous library of glossaries and onomastica, lexica of rare terms, classical terms, idiomatic terms, appeared under the auspices of Tryphon (30 B.C.), Diogenianus (130 B.C.), Pamphi lus, Julius Pollux (A.D. 180), and, at a later period, Hesychius and Suidas. Their great defect, however, was that they had no complete dictionary in a comprehensive form; that the philological, and the historical, or descriptive departments were often confused; and that they were by no means uniformly arranged in alphabetical order.

2 The ridiculous etymologies so gravely authorized by Quintilian are probably familiar to every scholar. The celebrated lucus a non lucendo he is responsible for. On the same principle-the cool prefix of a negation-he derives ludus (a school), quia longissimè a lusu!' verbum he deduces ab aere verberato; but his bachelor prejudices are ludicrously evinced in the account he gives of the term calibes, which he connects with cælites, quod onere gravissimo vacant,' in his own gallant explanation. He might have been a better etymologist had he been a worse naturalist: aware of the solitary propensities of the blackbird, he ingeniously derives merula from mera (sola) volans!

which, on the one hand, prepared the way for the great Reformation of the sixteenth, gained, on the other, by this most memorable event of modern history, an unrestrained liberty of inquiry, and the feeling of the sacredness of national tongues. It thus opened the way to wider researches, at the same time that the discoveries of the Spaniards and Portuguese laid a new world open before the awakening European mind. Antonio Pignafetta, an Italian, collected lists of words out of the tongues of the tribes and nations through which he travelled.

But the only effective progress in linguistic philosophy and knowledge made by the sixteenth century, was due to classical philology, combined with the study of Hebrew. The necessity of explaining the Old Testament from its original language led to the study and comparison of Arabic, Syriac, and Aramaic; and it is only necessary to know the two great luminaries of France, Scaliger and Bochart, to form an idea of the extent and importance of the progress made in this field of science.

On this foundation the seventeenth century attempted to build, so far as its struggles for religious and civil liberty would allow. But, owing to the overwhelming power of the political and ecclesiastical reaction in the greater part of that century, all it achieved in this field was a cumbrous, uncritical superstructure of lexicography. There was no philosophical principle in the speculation of that century, nor any great historical problem to guide its philology, which could have led either towards physiological or philological discoveries concerning the tribes and languages of mankind.

"The mighty genius of Bacon was, indeed, aware of the importance and mysterious nature of language. The first chapter of the sixth book De Augmentis Scientiarum contains ample proofs of both. He there enumerates among the desiderata, as a portion of the doctrine De Organo Sermonis, a treatise De Notis Rerum, by which he means a philosophical catalogue of real signs (characteres reales), corresponding with the number of radical words, and also a philosophical grammar. There is enough for centuries in both these problems. There is also much of wisdom implied in his general invaluable principles of induction and analogy; and it is to be regretted that these germs have not been hitherto fully developed. But Bacon himself did nothing towards that object, with respect to language. He neither developed the principles of grammar, nor of the formation of words; still less did he attempt a classification of languages, or try to establish a method of inquiry into their nature and origin.'-Vol. i. pp. 39–43.

The Chevalier then illustrates the further development of philological science, from the Baconian era to our own. The great object of Leibnitz, in the foundation of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, as his memoir of 1700 proves, was to establish the study of the comparative philosophy of language; and to classify the then known languages in order to trace the genealogy of mankind. The torch, as it fell from the hands of Leibnitz, was rekindled, with additional lustre, by Blumenbach and Prichard. Previous to their researches, the philosophers of the eighteenth century had scorned the idea of the unity of the human race; and theologians had unhappily assisted them in making the Bible say, that God had created language as he had created man, and that language was not the act and work of man. Under the auspices of these eminent contributors to science,

the combined light of philology, physiology, ethnology and geography, was brought to bear upon the problem; and science supported the Scriptural theory of the original unity of the human species. There were, however, several stages of the philological arena yet to be traversed. What was the method of defining near or more distant relationship, and of distinguishing between historical and accidental, original and subsequent connexion between the languages of the earth? In the solution of these questions, the next step was taken by a German and it was India, and the English researches into Sanskrit, which elicited that step. In 1808, Frederic Schlegel, in his Essay on the Language and Philosophy of the Hindoos," fully established the decisive importance and precedence which grammatical forms ought to have over single words, in proving the affinities of language. By an application of his method, he triumphantly showed the intimate historical connexion between the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Roman and Germanic languages. The new linguistic school of Germany followed up the impulse given by Schlegel; a host of writers successively traced the different branches of languages connected with the Sanskrit ; the unscientific expression of Eastern languages' was abandoned by the learned; the circle of Indo-Germanic tongues was gradually enlarged, till it embraced the Lithuanian, the Slavonic, and, finally, all the languages of Celtic origin. It was thus that the desiderata of Bacon, and the fundamental idea of Leibnitz, had, to a considerable degree, been carried out by the gradual establishment of a method for analyzing a given language, and detecting its affinities with another of the same family. The next step was to unite, and examine philosophically and methodically, all the different forms of human language, with a full knowledge of all the modern discoveries. It was achieved in the posthumous work of Humboldt (1836), ‘On 'the Diversity of the Formation of Human Language, and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind.' Commencing with the simplest elements of speech, he gradually proceeds to the construction of a sentence, as the expression of intellect and thought. He then shows that the Chinese-the opposite pole to the Sanskrit-is a perfect form in its kind. In examining, explaining, and comparing the different means used by different nations to render single words susceptible of signs, destined to mark their position in a sentence, he shows that all accomplish this more or less imperfectly, with the exception of the Sanskritic family, in which he gives the prize to the language of the Hellenes. Thus he is brought irresistibly to the result, that the Chinese tongue and the Sanskritic family represent the two extremes of all known formations of speech:

[ocr errors]
« PrécédentContinuer »