Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/817

PHILOLOGY PART II. COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES. 781 Histor ical sketch. Bopp and J. Grimm. The study of Aryan comparative philology has from its outset necessarily been in close connexion with the study of Sanskrit, a language unparalleled amongst its cognates in antiquity and distinctness of structure, and consequently the natural basis of comparison in this field. It is there fore not to be wondered at that we find no clear views of the mutual relationship of the individual members of the Aryan family or their position with regard to other lan guages until Sanskrit began to attract the attention of European philologists, or that the introduction of Sanskrit as an object of study was closely followed by the discovery of the original community of a vast range of languages and dialects hitherto not brought into connexion at all, or only made the objects of baseless speculations. We meet with the first clear conception of this idea of an Indo-European community of languages in the distinguished English scholar Sir William Jones, who, as early as 1786, expressed himself as follows : " The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of 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 have been produced by accident ; so strong that no philologer could examine all the 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 Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit." 1 But neither Sir William Jones nor any of his older contemporaries who had arrived at similar con clusions ever raised this important discovery from a brilliant aperfu into a valid scientific theory through a detailed and systematic comparison of the languages in question. To have achieved this is the undoubted merit of the German, Franz BOPP ( /.v.), the founder of scientific philo logy of the Aryan languages, and subsequently through this example also the founder of comparative philology in general. Next to him Jacob GRIMM (y.v.) must be men tioned here as the father of historical grammar. The first part of his famous Deutsche Grammatik appeared in 1819, three years after Bopp had published his first epoch-making book, Ueber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache. Bopp s results were here at once utilized, yet Grimm s whole system was entirely independent of that of Bopp, and had no doubt been worked out before Grimm knew of his illustrious predecessor. In fact, their scientific aims and methods were totally different. Bopp s interest was not concentrated in comparison as such, but chiefly inclined towards the explanation of the origin of gram matical forms, and comparison to him was only a means of approaching that end. In this more or less speculative turn of his interest Bopp showed bin 1 , jelf the true son of a philosophical period when general linguistics received its characteristic stamp from the labours and endeavours of men like the two Schlegels and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Jacob Grimm s aims were of a less lofty character than those of Bopp, whose work, to his own mind, was crowned by his theory of the origin of inflexion through agglutination. In con fining his task to a more limited range than the vast field of Aryan languages embraced in Bopp s researches, and thus fixing his attention on a group of idioms exhibiting a striking regularity in their mutual relationship, both where 1 For this quotation and the following historical sketch in general .see Th. Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachivissenschaft, p. 438, Munich, 1869, and especially B. Delbriick, Introduction to the Study of Lan guage, p. 1, Leipsic, 1882 (a second German edition appeared in 1884). they coincide and where they differ, he made it his foremost object to investigate and illustrate the continuous progress, subject to definite laws, by which these languages had been developed from their common source. He thus raised the hitherto neglected study of the development of sounds to an equal level with the study of grammatical forms, which had so far almost exclusively absorbed all the interest of linguistic research. Grimm s discovery of the so-called "Lautverschiebung," or Law of the Permutation of Conson ants in the Teutonic languages (which, however, had been partly found and proclaimed before Grimm by the Danish scholar Rask), became especially important as a stimulus for further investigation in this line. Grimm s influence on comparative philology (which is secondary only to that of Bopp, although he was never a comparative philologist in the sense that Bopp was, and did not always derive the benefit from Bopp s Avorks which they might have afforded him) is clearly traceable in the work of Bopp s successors, amongst whom Friedrich August Pott is universally judged to hold the foremost rank. In his great work, Etymoloyische Forschungen aufdem Gebieteder indo-germanischenSprachen, mit besonderem Bezug auf die Lautumwandlung im Sans krit, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Littauischen, und Gothischcn (Lemgo, 1833-36), we find Indo-Germanic etymology for the first time based on a scientific investigation of general Indo-Germanic phonology. Amongst Pott s contemporaries Theodor Benfey 2 deserves mention on account of his Griech- Benfe; 2 Theodor Benfey was born on 28th January 1809 at No rten, Hanover, the son of a Jewish tradesman who had gained some reputa tion as an acute and learned Talmudic scholar. At the early age of sixteen he entered the university of Gottingeu (which he afterwards exchanged for Munich) to devote himself to the study of classical philology. It was not until after 1830, when he had settled in Frank - Ibrt-on-the-Main as a private teacher, that his attention was drawn towards the study of Sanskrit. In 1834 he went back to Gottingen and began lecturing as a privat-docent. For some time his lectures extended over various branches of classical philology as well as of Oriental and comparative philology, but he soon began to concentrate himself on the latter departments. After he had joined the Christian church he received, in 1848, an extraordinary professorship, and in 1862 he was appointed ordinary professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. He died on 26th June 1881. Benfey also began his long and brilliant literary career in the field of classics. Besides his dis sertation Observationes ad Anacreontis fmymenta genuina (Gottingen, 1829), his translation of the comedies of Terence (Stuttgart, 1837) deserves special notice. This was followed by his Wurzellexikon in 1839, and his quarto volume on "India" in Ersch and Gruber s Encyklopiidie, 1840. Through these he at once gained a position of authority both in comparative and Indian philology. Of his other writings the more important are, Ueber die Monatnamen einiger alien Viilker, insbesondt-re der Perser, C appadocier, Juden, Syrer (written in conjunction with A. Stern), Berlin, 1836 ; Ueber das Verlialtniss der iigypt. Sprache zum semit. Sjjrachstamm, Leipsic, 1844 ; Diepers. Keilinschriften, mit Uebersetzung und Glossar, Leipsic, 1847 ; Die Hymnen des Samaveda, Leipsic, 1848 ; Vollstdndige Grammatik der Sanskritsprache, Leipsic, 1852 ; Chrcslomathie aus Sanskritwerken, Leipsic, 1853; Pantschatantra, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1859; Geschichte der Sprachivissenschaft und oriental. Philologie in Deutschland, Munich, 1869. Of his numerous contributions to the various scientific periodicals of the time, those published in the Abhandlungen der Gottinger Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften are especially meritorious : " Ueber die indog. Endungen des Gen. Sing.," vol. xix. ; "Einleitung in die Grammatik der ved. Sprache," vol. xix. ; "Die quantitatsver- schiedenheiten in den Samhita-und Padatexten der Veden," vols. xix. - xxvii. ; "Das indog. Thema des Zahlworts Zwei ist du, " vol. xxi. ; "Hermes, Minos, Tartaros," vol. xxii. ; "Altpers. mnzda.]i = Zcnd mazdaonh = >. medhas," vol. xxiii. ; " Einige Derivate des indog. Verbums anbh = nabh," and "Ueber einige "Wdrter mit deni Binde- vocal i im Rigveda," vol. xxiv. ; " Behandlung des auslautenden a in na wie und na nicht im Rigveda, nebst Bemerkungen liber die urspr. Anssprache und Accentuierung der Wo rter im Veda," vol. xxvi. Some of his smaller articles in the Gottinger Gelehrte Anzeigen were reprinted under the titles of Vedica und Verwandtcs, Strasburg, 1877, and Vedica und Linguistica, ibid., 18SO. As the preceding list shows, Benfey s interest had become more and more concentrated on Vedic studies towards the end of his days, and indeed he had planned, as the crowning work of his life, an extensive grammar of Vedic Sans-