So fang as the view prevailed that language was a human invention, anything like it science of it was impo5sible. According to that view, which was early started, and was especially elabora;ed.aed discussed by Locke, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart, it was only after men folind that their rapidly increasing ideas could be no longer conveyed by gestures of the body and changes of the countenance, that they set about: inventing: it set of artificial vocal signs, the meaning of which was fixed by mutual agreement. On this theory, there might he a history of the subsequent course of the different languages, but inquiries into the nature fluid laws of language after the manner of the physical sciences would be absurd. In opposition to the philosophers who attributed the origin c f lan guage to human invention. some tbeologians claimed a divine origin for it, representing the deity having created the !Mlles of things, and directly taught them to Adam. Both these theories may now he considered as given up by all who are entitled to speak on the subject. Everything, in fact, tends to show that language spontancons prod uct of haman natare—a necessary result of man's physical and mental constitution (itteludiag his social instincts). as natural to him as to walk, eat, or sleep, and as inde pendent of his will as his stature or the color of his hair.
Langaage was ati object of speculation among the Greek philosophers; but as was the case with their inquiries into the outward world generally. they began at the wrong end; they sge;atlated on the origin of things before they had examined the things them selves. They knew no language their own, and all others were classyd as" ha•barous" or foreign: they had no test of affinity among, tongues except tonal intelligibility. The theories of the modern philosophens of the 18th c. were nearly as tr"Sh':..ti: I hey were mere a priori speculations, akin to Burnet's (q.v.) " theory of the earth." which was constructed before the strata of the earth's crust had been explored. The great obstruction 10 the true course of inquiry was the assumption, first made by the church fathers, and for a long time unquestioned, that Hebrew was the primitive laugh lee of Man, and that therefore all languages must be derived front Hebrew. A prodigious amount of learning and labor was wasted during the 17th and 18th centuries, in trying to trace this imaginary connection. Leibnitz was the first to set aside this notion, and to establish the principle that the study of languages must be conducted in the same way as that of the exact sciences, by first'collecting as ninny facts as possible, and then proceeding by inductive reasoning. It was owing to his appeals and exertions that missionaries, travelers, and others, now began making those collec tions of vocabularies and specimens of languages and dialects which form the/Mar/von, as it were, of human speech. A valuable catalogue of languages in six volumes was published in Spanish hi 1800 by Hervas, a Jesuit missionary. It contains specimens and notices of more thai• 300 languages, and many of the true affinities are happily traced. A similar work was Adelung's Mithridates (4 vols. Berlin, 1806-17), based on the cata logue of Ilervas, and also on the collections which the Russian government had caused to he made. In none of these efforts, however, although much truth was struck out, were Mere anything like fixed principles of scientific classification. The light that brought order into the chaos rose with the study of Sanscrit (q.v.), first made accessible to European scholars by sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and other members of the Asiatic society, founded in Calcutta in 1784. The similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin,
especially in the grammatical forms, struck every one with surprise. Sir William Jones declared that " no philologer could examine the Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin with out believing them to have sprung from the same source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family." Rather than admit this relation, which it was seen would involve also ethnological affinities, some, as Dugald Stewart, denied that Sanscrit had ever been the language of a people, and held that it was an invcnticn of time Brahmans, who had constructed it on the model of the Greek and Latin. Fr. Schlegel's work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808), although defective and erigasotus in point of scholarship, has the merit of boldly embracing the languages of India, Persia, and Europe in one family group, by the comprehensive name of Indo-Germanic. It was this work that called the attention of German scholars to a field of labor which they have since made specially their own.
The successive publications of Bopp (q.v.), beginning in 1816, and culminating in his great work on the grammar of the Aryan languages, Verglciehende GraanootiI (Berl. 1803-52; a 2d ed. recast and enlarged, 3 vols., Berl. 1857; an English translation of 1st ed. was published in 3 vols., 1845-50, and revised in 1854), created the new science of comparative grammar, and laid a sure and broad foundation for the science of language generally. Concurrent with the labors of Popp were those of Pott in his etymological researches (Etymologische Forschungen, 2 vols., 1833-36; 2d ed. 1859) and other works. Not less important, though confined to one stock of the Aryan family, the Teutonic, was the great German gramtniff (Deutsche Grammatik, 4 vols. 1818-37) of J. Grimm (q.v.). William von Humboldt (q.v.) did much to establish a philosophy of language--the rela tions and interactions of mind and speech; a department of the subject which has been further cultivated in recent years by Steinthal. The method of investigation, thus invented and perfected in the field of the Aryan tongues, has been applied to other lan guages, and considerable progress has been made in gron;ing the principal varieties of human speech into families, which again fall into subdivisions or branches, according to the different degrees of nearness in the relationship. In establishing these relationships, although a comparison of the vocabularies—the numerals, pron.muns, and more essential nouns and verbs—may establish a general affinity, and render a common origin proba ble; yet the surer test lies in the grammatical forms. For when those elements of a lan guage which express the relations of things—case, number, tense—have once become mere terminations, and lost their original form and independent meaning, they can only be transmitted by tradition; and when the same grammatical forms are found possessed in common by two or more tongues, they must be an inheritance from a common ances tor. It follows from this that the "genealogical" classification, as it is called, cannot be carried out with great surety or rigor except in the case of languages in which grammati cal forms had become in some degree fixed before their divergence—in other words, of the inflectional languages. Accordingly, the only two well defined genealogical fami lies are the Aryan and the Semitic, which embrace the whole of the languages of the inflectional type.