HISTORICAL SURVEY LECTURE 1

TOPIC TWO LINGUISTIC ACTIVITY DURING THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD The spread of Christianity has as one of its secular benefits a vast widening of linguistic horizon. In accordance with Christ’s commission to the Apostles to go into the entire world and preach the Gospel to every creature, missionaries ventured far beyond the boundaries of the Greco-Roman World. Translating the Bible into the vernaculars became a principal task for Christian scholars, with the results we can date many of the great Bible translations from these centuries: the Armenian (5th century) the Gothic (4th century), the Old Church Slavonic (9th century). From these centuries, too, are dated many of the collections or paraphrasing into some vernaculars of Latin words and expressions intended to help, presumably a priest, in his preaching and catechizing. Indeed glossaries such as these occasionally constitute some of our oldest records of certain languages, for example, the Germanic languages. Training the clergy involved of course the teaching of Latin for which Priscian was the principal authority, although a text book written in 1199 by ALEXANDER DE VILLA DEI entitled “Doctrinale puerorum” became the standard school grammar of the middle ages. Above and beyond the practical goal of becoming literature, Latin grammar was studied in its relation to philosophy constituting as it did one of the branches (along with logic and rhetoric) of the trivium – the basic curriculum established by scholaristics. Although a practical knowledge of diverse linguistic types gradually became available to medieval scholars, the information could not become generally accessible until the introduction of printing with movable type. It is the 16th century therefore that deserves to be called Early Modern era of Linguistics, for not until then was anything like a comprehensive survey of language possible. Almost overnight, there appeared a spate of grammars and dictionaries most of them dealing with the vernaculars rather than the classical languages. Since this was the age of geographical discoveries, it is not surprising to find among these early linguistic treatises accounts of faraway tongues, usually limited, however, to the wordlists and phrases. Some of these descriptions though meager they are extremely valuable. Our direct knowledge of Gothic as contained in the Crimea is limited, to a word list compiled by a Flemish nobleman Ogier Ghiselin Van Busbecq, who on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople in the year (1560-62) recorded and subsequently published a list of words and phrases, dictated by a native speaker of the last living dialect of an East Germanic language. From this era are also dated the early attempts to survey all the then known languages, such as C. Gesner’s Mithridates (Zurich, 1555) and Hieronymus Megiser’s specimens of forty languages (Frankfort, 1592). This sort of activity reached its zenith later on in the 18th century, resulting in such work as: A comparative vocabulary of the world languages (1786-89) by the German traveller and natural scientist called P.S. PALLAS. There is also a similar work dealing with more than eight hundred languages done by a Spanish Jesuit called LORENZO HERVAS of Pandaro in 1800-1805. The last and perhaps the best known work of this kind is the Mithridates of Johann Christoph Adetung which contains the Lord’s Prayer in over five hundred (500) languages and dialects. The monumental enterprise was published in four parts over the years 1806-17 after Adelung’s death. Of works dealing with the general nature of languages probably the most important is the famous “Port Royal Grammar” of 1660. The title which is written in Latin achieves certain grandeur. This was one of the several more or less contemporary attempts to give “reasonable explanations for the facts of language”. It was a philosophical grammar entrenched in the grand tradition. Etymology was no better off than it had been under the Greeks and Romans. Scholars assumed as an article of faith the Hebrew had been man’s first language, and most etymological studies monotonously attempt to skew the fact to fit the theory – even as did JAMES IV of Scotland (1488-1513), who like KING PSAMMETICHOS is said to have interned (isolated) two children in order to discover which was mankind first language. He is reported to have determined that the children “Spak very guild Ebrew”. A more learned Frenchman E. GUICHARD in 1606 published a complex and etymological dictionary of Hebrew, Chaldiac, Spanish, Syriac, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Flemish and English. He maintained that words could be traced from language to language by adding, subtracting, inverting and transposing letters “which is not hard to believe when we consider that the Hebrew write from right to left, and the Greeks and others from left to right”. Other scholars more patriotically inclined, proposed their own language as the original one. Probably the most celebrated linguistic Chauvinist is the Dutchman, GOROPIUS BECANUS (1518-72). A close runner-up however is the Swede, ANDREAS KEMKE who maintained that in the Garden of Eden, God spoke Swedish, Adam Danish and the serpent French. The medieval and early modern era – that is, until about the end of the 18th century – witnessed a tremendous increase in the amount of information about language. Significantly, however, the method of analysis and interpretation were still those of the ancients. A scientific approach had to wait until the 19th century, although of course, there were those whom we may appropriately call precursors. Three of these – Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Johann Gottfried Von Herder and Sir William Jones which are discussed below. Although Leibniz (1646-1716) is known to the world primarily as a philosopher and mathematician, he was in fact what the Germans call a UNIVERSALGENIC, a scholar who commanded all the formal knowledge of his time. His background and interest in linguistics were scarcely more than that of an extremely able and gifted dilettante, yet he stands at the beginning of the modern era, pointing the way towards a true science of language. He was especially interested in studying the relationship of languages and establishing a linguistic genealogy. In order to achieve anything substantial in these areas, Leibniz realized that scholars would have to abandon their sterile practice of trying to relate all languages to biblical Hebrew instead he encouraged his contemporaries to examine and describe extant languages, and on the basis of mutually shared features, seek to establish valid genealogies. He himself attempted just such a genealogy, although it must be admitted he too was not always guided by the facts. For example, he suggests a very broad grouping of the “Ewrasian” languages that derives more from intuition than from observation. Nevertheless, he is the first known scholar to propose that all these languages were derived from a common pre-historical ancestor. This thesis, in a modified form, has become the cardinal tenet of comparative linguistics. Leibniz’ classification of the languages of Europe, Asia and Egypt was printed in 1710 in the memoirs of the Berlin Academy (Phscellanea Berolinens). Another area of concern to him was the collecting and describing of living languages. As one of the leading intellectual of his age, Leibniz had a circle of acquaintances that was influential as well as cosmopolitan. For instance, he persuaded the Tsarina of Russia, CATHERINE II to subsidize P.S. Palla’s collection of specimens of two hundred languages and dialects, and he urged the Tsar, Peter the Great, to have studies made of all the languages of the Russian Empire, to have them reduced to writing, and to have dictionaries and grammar prepared. Leibniz, incidentally, was one of the earliest to champion the use of the vernacular languages as vehicles of instruction and literature. He was especially desirous that his fellow Germans take pride in their tongue, study it and cultivate it as a medium of polite and learned discourse. In what must be considered a revolutionary step for his time, he went so far as to publish several essays in German rather than in Latin or French, the only two academically accepted languages of the day. Johann Gottfried Von Herder (1744-1803) is another 18th century figure who did much to usher in the area of scientific linguistics in 1772 he wrote a prize essay entitled “Concerning the Origin of Language” (Uber den Ursprung der Sprache). In this essay, the German Clergyman attacked the orthodox view of his age that speech is the direct gift of God. Herder rejected this belief maintaining that language would be more logical if it were from God. Neither did he adopt the premise that man had invented language, but he held rather that the genesis of language was due to an impulse like that of the embryo pressing to be born” Man, he concludes is the only creature who has the ability to single out sensations. He alone is capable of conscious linguistic reflection. While accepting the belief that Hebrew was the original language he believed that it developed of necessity from man’s innermost nature. The speech – impulse itself, he concludes is from God, but man has worked out his own linguistic destiny from that point on. Not nearly so well known as Leibniz and Herder, as but with more immediate and direct influence on 19th century linguistics than either was the Englishman, Sir William Jones (1746-94). Like the other two precursors we have discussed, Jones was not a professional philologist. Educated in the law, he served from 1783 until his death as a jurist on the bench of the British court of Calcutta in India. Throughout the last nine (9) years of his brief life, Sir Williams, studied Sanskrit, acquiring in the course of time not only a remarkable command of the language, but also and of greater importance a profound insight into its relationship to certain other languages. It is in fact customary to date the beginnings of modern comparative grammar in a general way to a statement contained in a speech which Jones delivered before the “Asiatick”. Society on February 2, 1786. Like so many momentous utterance this one too is neither superficially spectacular nor obviously significant, and yet it is usually accepted as the first known printed statement of the fundamental postulate of comparative linguistics: 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 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. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit, and the old Persian might be added to the same family. Scholars before Jones had of course noticed the similarities between the various languages, but to the best of our knowledge, no one prior to him had reached the conclusion – arrived at not by intuition but by inspection of the data that these resemblances must be due to a common descent from a hypothetical earlier language “which perhaps no longer exists”. Once the conservation of tradition and literalistic theology had been overcome, the way was clear to approach the study of language scientifically. Scholars came to understand that language was in a state of constant flux, that it had a history and that its genesis and development could be studied from the historical point of view. This notion of history applied to things other than wars and dynasties was not generally appreciated until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Applied to language, it meant that scholars were now interested in tracing the records of speech as far back as possible, explaining language growth and change in the same manner as other historical phenomena, namely by establishing a casual relationship between event bound together in time and space. From 1800 on we may speak of the scientific study of language or the term in its narrower sense “linguistics”