7fr KOT-I 
 YV5W 
 
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 Wheeler 
 
 Whence and Whither of the 
 Modern Science of Language
 
 y 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY 
 
 Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 95-109 May 19, 1905 
 
 THE WHENCE AND WHITHER OF THE 
 MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 
 
 BENJ. IDE WHEELER 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS 
 CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY 
 
 Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 95-109 May 19, 1905 
 
 THE WHENCE AND WHITHER OF THE 
 MODERN SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 1 
 
 nv 
 BENJ. IDE WHEELER. 
 
 It cannot In' the purpose of Ihis brief paper to present even 
 in outline a history <>t' the science of language in the century 
 past: it can undertake only to set forth tin- chief motives and 
 directions of its development. 
 
 A hundred years ago this year Friedrich von Schlegel was 
 in Paris studying Persian and the mysterious, new-found San- 
 skrit : Franz Bopp was a thirteen-year old student in the gymna- 
 sium at Aschaffenburg ; Jacob Grimm was studying law in the 
 University of Marburg. And yet these three were to be the men 
 who should find the paths by which the study of human speech 
 might escape from its age-long wanderings in a wilderness with- 
 out track or cairn or clue, and issue forth upon oriented high- 
 ways as a veritable science. 
 
 Schlegel the Romanticist, who had peered into Sanskrit litera- 
 ture in the interest of the fantastic humanism modish in his day, 
 happened to demonstrate in Ueber di< Spraclu und Weisheit <l< r 
 Inder, 1808, beyond cavil the existence of a genetic relationship 
 between the chief members of what we now know as the Indo- 
 European family of languages. Bopp 2 found a way to utilize 
 this demonstrated fact in a quest which, though now recognized 
 as mostly vain, incidentally set in operation the mechanism of 
 
 comparative grammar. Gri i, ! under the promptings of a 
 
 national enthusiasm, sought after the sources of the German 
 
 'Address delivered at the St. Louis Congress of Aits and Sciences, 
 October, 1904. 
 
 'First \Mirk: Conjiigationssystem ■ '■ r Sansiritsprache, lsiii. 
 'Deutsche Grammatik, Vol. 1 i 1819). 
 
 705012
 
 96 University of California Publications! [Ci^ass. Phu* 
 
 national life, and, finding in language as in lore the roots of the 
 present deep planted in the past, laid the Foundations and sel 
 forth the method of historical grammar. The grafting of com- 
 parative grammar upon the stuck of historical grammar gave it 
 
 w ider range and yielded the scientific '_ r r; ar of the nineteenth 
 
 century. The method of comparative grammar is merely auxil- 
 iary i" historical grammar; it establishes determinations of fad 
 Car behind the poinl of earliesl record and enables historical 
 grammar to push its Inns of descenl in the form of 'dotted lines' 
 far bach into the unwritten past. 
 
 It was the discovery of Sanskrit to the attention and use of 
 European scholars a1 the close of the eighteenth century that 
 
 gav< casion to an effective use of the comparative method and 
 
 a consequent establishment of ;i veritable comparative grammar. 
 
 Bu1 in two other distinct ways it exercised a notable inline ■ 
 
 upon the study of language. First, it offered to observation a 
 
 language whose Structure yielded itself readily to analysis ill 
 
 terms of the adaptation of its formal mechanism to the expres- 
 sion of modifications of thought, and thus cave an encourage- 
 ment to a dissection of words in the interest of tracing the 
 
 principles of their formation. St d, the Hindoo national 
 
 grammar itself presented to Western scholars an illustration of 
 accuracy and completeness in collecting, lifying, and report- 
 ing the facts of ;i language, especially such as related to phon- 
 ology, inflexion, and word-formation, that involved the i ssity 
 
 of .-i complete revolution in the whole attitude of grammatical 
 procedure. The discovery of Panini and the Praticakhyas meant 
 far more to the science of Language than the discovery of the 
 Vedas. The grammar of the Greeks had marked a path so clear 
 and established ;i tradition so strong, guaranteed in a prestige so 
 high, that the linguist ics of the West through all the generations 
 faithfully abode in the way. The grammatical categories once 
 taught and established became the irrefragable moulds of gram- 
 matical thought, and constituted a system so complete in its 
 enslaving power that if any man ever suspected himself in bond- 
 age he was yet unable to identify his bonds. 
 
 The Creeks had addressed themselves to linguistic reflexion 
 in connection with their study of tin- content and the forms of
 
 Vol. ij Wheeler. Tht Modern Scienct of Language. 97 
 
 thought ; grammar arose as the handmaiden of philosophy. They 
 assumed, without consciously and expressly formulating it as a 
 doctrine, that language is the inseparable shadow of thought, 
 and therefore proceeded without more ado to find in its structure 
 and parts replicas of the substances and moulds of thought. 
 They sought among the facts of language for illustrations of 
 theories; it did not occur to them to collect the facts and organize 
 them to yield their own doctrine. Two distinct practical uses 
 finally brought the chief materials of rules and principles to 
 formulation in the guise of a system of descriptive grammar; 
 first, the interpretation of Homer and the establishment of a 
 correct text ; second, the teaching of Greek to aliens, and the 
 establishment of a standard by which to teach. These practical 
 uses came in however rather as fortunate opportunities for prac- 
 tical application of an established discipline than as the motives 
 to its creation. With the Hindoos it was the direct reverse. 
 They had a sacred language and sacred texts rescued from ear- 
 lier days by means of oral tradition. The meaning of the texts 
 had grown hazy, but the word was holy, and even though it 
 remained but an empty shell to human understanding, it was 
 pleasing to the gods and had served its purpose through the 
 generations to bring gods and men into accord, and must be pre- 
 served : likewise the language of ritual and comment thereon, 
 which, as the possession of a limited class, required not only to be 
 protected from overwhelming beneath the floods of the vernac- 
 ular but demanded to be extended to the use of wider circles in 
 the dominant castes. Sanskrit had already become a moribund 
 or semi-artificial language, before grammar laid hold upon it to 
 continue and extend it. But from the outstart the Hindoo gram- 
 marian sat humbly at the feet of language to learn of it, and 
 never assumed to lie its master or its guide. Inasmuch as the 
 language had existed and been perpetuated primarily as a thing 
 of the living voice and not of ink and paper, and had been used 
 to reach the ears rather than the eyes of the divine, it followed 
 in a measure remotely true of no other grammatical endeavor 
 that the Hindoo grammar was compelled to devote itself to the 
 most exactingly accurate report upon the sounds of the language. 
 The niceties of phonetic discrimination represented in the alpha-
 
 'is University of California Publications. [Class. Phil. 
 
 bel itself, the refinements of observation involved in the reports 
 on accenl and the phenomenon of pluti; the formulation of the 
 principles of sentence phonetics in the rules <>l' sandhi ; the obser- 
 vations on the physiology of speech scattered through the Prdti- 
 cdkhyas are all brillianl illustrations of the Hindoo's direct 
 
 approach to the real substance of living s|m h. None of the 
 
 aational systems of grammar, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the 
 Assyrian, the Greek, or the Arabic had anything to show remotely 
 comparable to this; and up to the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century, despite all the long endeavors expended on Greek and 
 
 Hebrew and Latin, nothing remotely like it had I n known to 
 
 the Western world. The Greek gri larians had really never 
 
 stunned the barriers of written language; they were mostly con- 
 cerned with establishing and teaching literary forms of the lan- 
 guage. Even when they dealt with the dialects, they had the 
 Standardized literary types thereof before their eyes rather than 
 the spoken forms ringing in their ears. When the einmmars of 
 Colebrooke (1805), of Carej (1806), and of Wilkins (1808) 
 opened the knowledge of Sanskrrl to European scholars, it 
 involved nothing short of a grammal ical revelation, and prepared 
 the way for an ultimate remodeling of language-study nothing 
 short of a revolution. Though these Hindoo lessons in accurate 
 phonetics as the hasis of sure knowledge and safe procedure had 
 their immediate and unmistakable influence upon Hie scientific 
 work id' the first half-century, their 1 full acceptance tarried until 
 the second half was well on its way. Even Jakob Grimm, whose 
 
 service in promoting the historical study of pi logy must he 
 
 rated with the highest, was si ill so Mind to the necessity of pho 
 netics as to express Hie view that historical grai ar could he 
 
 excused from much attention to tin- "hunte win-war mundart- 
 licher lautverhaltnisse, " and though von Raumer in his />/< Aspi- 
 ration mill dti Lii ill n rsrliii hit nil (1837) had not only set forth 
 in all clearness the theoretical necessity of a phonetic hasis. hut 
 given practical illustration thereof in the material with which he 
 
 was dealing, it still was possible as late as 1868 for Scherer in his 
 GeschichU der deutschen Sprache justly to deplore that "only 
 rarely is a philologist found who is willing to enter upon phonetic 
 
 'Cf. H. Oertel, Lectures on the Study of Language, pp. 30 IV ( 1901 |.
 
 Vol. i.| Wheeler. — The Modern Science of Language. 99 
 
 discussion." The phonetic treatises of Briicke 1 (1849 and 1866) 
 and of Merkel (185*5 and 1866) 2 failed, though excellent of their 
 kind, to bring the subject within the range of philological inter- 
 est and it remained for Eduard Sievers in his Grundzugt der 
 LautphysioUgie (1876) and Grundzuge der Phonetik (1881) by 
 stating- phonetics more in terms of phonology to bridge the gap 
 and establish phonetics as a constituent and fundamental por- 
 tion of the science of language. The radical change of character 
 assumed by the science in the last quarter of the century is due 
 as much to the consummation of this union as to any one influ- 
 ence. 
 
 But it was not phonetics alone that the Indian grammarians 
 were able to teach to the West; they had developed in their 
 processes of identifying the roots of words a scientific phonology 
 that was all but an historical phonology. In some of its appli- 
 cations it was that already, for in explaining the relations to 
 each other of various forms of a given root as employed in dif- 
 ferent words, even though the explanation was intended to serve 
 the purposes of word analysis and not of sound-theory, the gram- 
 marians virtually formulated in repeated instances what we now 
 know as "phonetic laws." 'Flu- recognition of gum and vrddhi, 
 which antedates Panini, must, rank as one of the most brilliant 
 inductive discoveries in the history of linguistic science. The 
 theory involved became the basis of the treatment of the Indo- 
 European vocalism. The first thorough-going formulation, that 
 of Schleicher in his Compendium (1861 ). was conceived entirely 
 in the Hindoo sense, and it was to the opportunity which this 
 formulation offered of overseeing- the material and the problems 
 involved that we owe the brilliant series of investigations by Georg 
 Curtius (Spaltung <l<s a-Lautes, 1864), Amelung 3 (1871, ls?:<. 
 1875), Osthoff (N-Declination, 1876), Brugmann (Nasalis sonans. 
 
 E. Brucke, Untersuehungen iiber die Lautbadung un<l das riaturliche 
 
 System der Sprachlaute (1849); Griindzuge der Physiologic mid Kvstematik 
 der Sprachlaute (1856). 
 
 : C. L. Merkel, Anatomie und Physiologie des mensc lilu-lien Stinnn-und 
 Sprachorgana (1856); Physiologie der nieiis.-liliehen Sprache (1866). 
 
 A. Amelung: Die Bildung der Tempusstamme durcb Vbcalsteigerung 
 mi Deutsehen, Berlin, 1871. Erwiderung. KZ. XXII, 361 IV. completed July, 
 
 1873, published 1874, after the author's death. Der TJrsprung der deutsehen 
 
 a Voeale, Haupt's Zeitsehr. XVI11. 161 ff. (is;:,).
 
 100 University of California Publications. [Class.Pito. 
 
 1-Tii; GeschichU der stammabstufenden Declination, 1876), Col- 
 lit/. (Veber du Annahnu mehrerer grundsprachUchen a-Laute, 
 1878), Joh. Scluiiiilt (Zwei ariscJu a-Laute, 1 V T:» . which led n|> 
 step by step steadily and unerringly to the definite proof thai the 
 [ndo-European vocalism was to be understood in terms of the 
 Greek rather than the Sanskrit. These articles, written in the 
 period of intensest creative activity the science has known, rep- 
 resenl in the cases of four of the scholars mentioned, viz.. Cur- 
 tius. Amelung, Brugmann, Collitz, the masterpii s of the scien- 
 tific lit''' of each. Though dealing with a single problem, they 
 combined both through the results they achieved and the method 
 and outlook they embodied to give character and direction to 
 the science of the next quarter-century. Karl Verner's famous 
 article, Eini Ausnahmt der ersten Lautverschiebung, KX. 
 XXIII, 97 IV. July, 1875), which proved of great importance 
 
 among other things in establishing i onection between I. E. 
 
 ablaut and accent, belongs to this period; and Brugmann 's arti- 
 cle, Nasalis sonans, which served more than any other work to 
 clear the way for the now prevailing view of ablaut, was influ- 
 enced by Verner's article, which was by a few months its prede- 
 cessor. Hot li articles, it is worthy of noting, were distinctly influ- 
 enced by the new phonetic: Verner's, it would appear, chiefly by 
 Briicke, Brugmann 's, through a suggestion of Osthoff's, by Sie- 
 vers. whose Lautphysiologit had .just appeared within the same 
 year. The full effect upon Western science of the introduction 
 of the Indian attitude toward language study appears therefore 
 to have been realized only with the last quarter of the century. 
 
 More prompt than the response of European science to the 
 teachings of Hindoo phonetics and phonology had been the 
 acceptance of the Hindoo procedure in word analysis, especially 
 with relation to suffixes and inflexional endings. The centuries 
 
 id' study of Creek and Latin had yielded no clue to any classifi- 
 cation or assorting of this material according to meaning or func- 
 tion. The medieval explanation of dominicus as domini custos 
 was as good a-> any. Besnier in his essay. /,</ scienci des Ety- 
 mologies i 1694), counted it the mark of a sound etymologist that 
 lie restrict his attention to the roots id' words, for to bother with 
 tin' other parts would he "useless and ludicrous." And when
 
 Vni.. i| Wheeler. — Tin Modern Srif-iia. of Language. 101 
 
 Home Took.- in the Diversions of Purley. II. 429 1786-1805), 
 just before the sunrise, wrote the startling words: "All those 
 common terminations in any Language . . . are themselves 
 separate words with distinct meanings," and i II, 454 : "Adjec- 
 tives with such terminations (i.e., ly, ous, ful, some, ish, etc. i arc. 
 in truth, all compound words" ; and when he flung out like a chal- 
 lenge the analysis of Latin ibo, 'I shall go.' as three letters con- 
 taining three words, viz. i, 'go,' 6 (jSo«5X.o/uai)'will,' o(ego) 'I.' qo 
 one seems to have been near enough to the need of such instruc- 
 tion to know whether or not he was to be taken seriously: for the 
 words bore no fruit, and only years afterward, when Bopp's doc- 
 trine had been recognized, were they disinterred as antiquarian 
 curiosities. Eleven years later, in the full light of the Sanskrit 
 grammar, Bopp published his Conjugationssystem, and the clue 
 had been found. To be sure. Bopp was misguided in his belief 
 that he could identify each element of a word-ending with a 
 significant word, and assign to it a distinct meaning, but he had 
 found the key to an analysis having definite historical value and 
 permitting the identification of such entities as mode-sign, tense- 
 sign, personal-endings, etc. The erroneous portion of his doc- 
 trine, based upon his conception of the Indo-European as an 
 agglutinative type of speech, dragged itself as an encumbrance 
 through the first half-century of the science, and. though gasping, 
 still lived in the second edition of Curtius' Verbum ; 1877 I. This. 
 along with many other mechanical monstrosities of its kind, was 
 gradually banished from the linguistic arena by the saner views 
 of the life-habits of language which had their rise from linguistic 
 psychology as a study of the relations of language to the hearing 
 as well as speaking individual and the relations of the individual 
 to the speech community, and which asserted themselves with 
 full power in the seventies. 
 
 Bopp had from the beginning devoted himself to language- 
 study, not as an end in itself, but. as we know from his teacher 
 and sponsor Windischmann, 1 as well as infer from the direction 
 anil spirit of his work, he hoped to be able •"in this way to pene- 
 trate into the mysteries of the human mind and learn something 
 
 'Introduction to Bopp's Conjugationssystem iter Sanskritsprache, p. iv. 
 I W6).
 
 102 University of California Publications. [Class.Phil. 
 
 of its nature and its laws." Se was therefore unmistakably of 
 the school of the < (reeks, oot of the Hindoos; for the Gi k gram- 
 marian in facing language asks the question 'why,' grammar 
 being to him philosophy, whereas the 1 1 i ■ i < ]< >• • asks the question 
 'what,' grammar being to him ;i science after 1 1 1 * - manner of whal 
 we call the 'natural sciences.' There is indeed but slight reason 
 for the common practice of dating the beginning of the modern 
 science of language with Bopp, aside from the one simple result 
 lit' his activity, which must in stricl logic be treated as merely 
 incidental thereto, namely, thai he gave a practical illustration of 
 the possibility of applying the comparative method for widening 
 the scope and enriching the results of historical grammar. 
 
 As Bopp had tried to use tin mparative method in deter- 
 mining the true and original meanings of the formative elements. 
 so iliil liis later contemporary, Augusl Friedrich Pott 1 (1802- 
 1887) undertake to use it in finding out the original meaning 
 of words. The search for the etymology or real meaning of words 
 had been a favorite and mostly bootless exercise of all European 
 grammarians from the Greek philosophers down, having its orig- 
 inal animus ami more or less confessedly its continuing power in 
 the broadly human, though barely on occasion half-formulated 
 conviction, that words and their values belong by some mysteri- 
 ous tie naturally to each other. In the instinet to begin his task 
 
 Pott was still with the traditions of the Greeks ami the Greco- 
 Europeans, bul in developing it he was guided into new paths 
 
 by two forces that had arisen since tin ntury opened. Under 
 
 the guidance of the comparative method, whereby the vocabu- 
 laries of demonstrably cognate languages now assumed a deter- 
 minate relation to each other, he came unavoidably to the recog- 
 nition of certain normal correspondences of sounds between the 
 different tongues. < >n the other hand, in almost entire indepen 
 dence hereof. Jakob Grimm in the pursuit of his historical 
 method had formulated the regularities of the mutation of eon- 
 sonants in the Teutonic dialects and had set them forth in a 
 second edition of the first volume of his grammar, appearing in 
 1822, In all this was contained a strong encourage nt as well 
 
 K. I'. Pott : Etymologische ForschuDgen, l' vols. Lenigo, 1833-3t>; 2nd 
 
 .-■lit. (J M.ls.. ]s5!»-7G.
 
 Vol.11 Wheeler. — Tin Modern Scienct of Language. 103 
 
 as warning to apply these new definite tests to every etymological 
 postulate, and therewith arose under Pott's hands the beginnings 
 
 of a scientific etymology. It was a first promise of deliverance 
 from a long wilderness of caprice. 
 
 The positivistie attitude which had been gradually infused 
 into language-study under the influence of the Hindoo grammar 
 anally readied its extremesl expression in the works of August 
 Schleicher 1821-1868). The science of language he treated 
 under the guise of a natural science. Language became isolated 
 from the speaking individual or the speaking community to an 
 extenl unparalleled in any of his predecessors or successors, and 
 was viewed as an organism having a life of its own and laws of 
 growth or decline within itself. Following the analogies of the 
 natural sciences and trusting to the inferred laws of growth, he 
 ventured to reconstruct from the scattered data of the cognate 
 Indo-European languages the visible form of the mother speech. 
 His confidence in the character of language as a natural growth 
 made him the first great systematizer and organizer of the mate- 
 rials of Indo-European comparative grammar {Compendium il< r 
 vt rgli "In ndt n (hunt/until;, 1861 i ; as confidence in the unerring 
 uniformity of the action of the laws of sound made Karl Brug- 
 mann the second [Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik, 
 1886-1892). 
 
 It is not by accident that the first one to voice outright the 
 dogma of the absoluteness (Ausnahmslosigkeit) of the laws of 
 sound was a pupil of Schleicher, August Leskien (Die Declina- 
 tion in Slavisch-litauisch&n und Germanisclien xxviii. 1876). 
 The use of this dogma as a norm and test in the hands of a sie- 
 nally active and gifted body of scholars who followed the leader- 
 ship of Leskien and were known under the title of the Leipziger 
 Srliuli or the Junggrammatiker, and the adherence to it in 
 practice of many others who did not accept the theory involved, 
 — a use which was undoubtedly greatly stimulated by Verner's 
 discovery (1875) that a great body of supposed exceptions to 
 Grimm's law were in reality obedient to law. gave t" the science 
 in the two following decades, along with abundance of results, 
 an objectivity of attitude and procedure and a firmness of struc- 
 ture that may fairly be said to represent the consummation of
 
 In} I niversity of California Publications. [Clabb.Phil. 
 
 thai positivisl tendency which we have soughl to identify with 
 the influence of Hindoo grammar. This movement, however, 
 derived its impulse by do means exclusively through Schleicher. 
 A new stream had meanwhile blended its waters with the current. 
 The psychology of language as 8 study of the relations of Language 
 to the speaking individual, thai is. of the conditions under which 
 language is received, retained, and reproduced, and of the rela- 
 tions of the individual to his speech community, had been brought 
 into play preeminently through the lahorsof Heymann Steinthal, 
 who, though as a psychologisl a follower of Herbart, must be 
 felt in represent in general .-is ;i linguisl the attitude toward 
 Language stud} firsl established by Willi. •Im v. Humboldt. Wil- 
 liam D. Whitney shows in his writings on general linguistics the 
 
 indue if Steinthal, as well as good schooling in the grammar 
 
 of the Hindoos and much good common ^nsr. His Lectures on 
 Languagt and tin Study of Languagt (1867) and tin- Lift and 
 Growth of Languagi (1875) 1 helped chase many a goblin from 
 the sky. Scherer's OeschichU der deutschen Spracht (1868), 
 
 combined more than any book of its day the influe b of new 
 
 lines of endeavor, and especially gave hearing in the new work 
 in the psychology ;is well as the physiology of speech. To this 
 period (1865-1880), under the influence of the combination of 
 the psychological with ihr physiological point of view, belongs 
 the establishmenl of scientific common sense in the treatmenl of 
 Language. By virtue of this. ;is it were, binocular vision, lan- 
 guage was thrown up into relief, isolated, and object ivised as it 
 had never been before. Old half-mystical notions, such as the 
 belief in a period of upbuilding in language and a period of 
 decay, — all savoring of Hegel, and the consequenl fallacy that 
 
 ancient lamjmeje^ display a keener speech consciousness than the 
 modern, — S] dily faded away. The center of interest trans- 
 ferred itself from ancient and written types of speech to the 
 modern and Living. .Men came to see that vivisection rather than 
 
 II. Steinthal: Der I rsprung det Sprache, im Zusammenhang mil den 
 
 I aUes Wissens, 1851; Characteristil der hauptsachlichsten 
 
 Typen des Sprocft&awes, L860; Einleitvng in die Psychology* und Sprach- 
 
 nschaft, 1881; Gesch, der Sprocket!., h, i ,i, n Griechen und Somern, 
 
 1863, L890-91. AJbo editor «itli Lazarus of the Zeitschrifi fur Votker- 
 
 psychologit un,i Sprachwissenechaft, from 1859.
 
 vol.1] Wheeler.— Tht Modern Science of Language. 105 
 
 morbid anatomy must supply the method and spirit of linguistic 
 research. The germs of a new idea affecting the conditions under 
 which cognate languages may be supposed to have differentiated 
 out of a mother speech, and conceived in terms of the observed 
 relations of dialects to languages, were infused by Johannes 
 Schmidt's Venuandtschaftsverhaltnisse der mdogerman. Sprach- 
 •■//(1872). The rigid formulas of Schleicher's Stammbuum melted 
 away before Schmidt's Wellentheorit and its line of successors 
 down to the destructive theories of Kretschmer's Einleitung in 
 ili, Geschichtt der griech. Sprache (1896). Herein as in many 
 another movement of the period we trace the results of applying 
 the lessons of living languages to the understanding of the old. 
 A remarkable document thoroughly indicative of what was mov- 
 ing in the spirit of the times was the Introduction to Osthoff and 
 Brugmann's Morphologische Untersuchungen, Vol. I (1878). But 
 the gospel of the period, and its theology for that matter, was 
 most effectively set forth in Hermann Paul's Principien der 
 Sprachgeschichte (1st edit., 1880), a work that has had more 
 influence upon the science than any since Jakob Grimm's 
 Deutsche Grammatik. Paul was the real successor of Steinthal. 
 He also represented the strictest sect of the positivists in histor- 
 ical grammar. As a consequence of the union in Paul of the two 
 tendencies, his work acquires its high significance. He estab- 
 lished the reaction from Schleicher's treatment of language sci- 
 ence as a natural science; he showed it to be beyond peradven- 
 t n it* one of the social sciences, and set forth the life conditions of 
 Language as a socio-historical product. 
 
 The work of the period dominated by Paul and the neo-gram- 
 marians, as well as the theories of method proclaimed, show, how- 
 ever, that the two factors just referred to had not reached in the 
 scientific thought and practice of the day a perfect blending. A 
 well-known book of Osthoff's bears the title Das physiologischi 
 mill psychologist Moment in der sprachlichen Formenbildung 
 (1879). The title is symptomatic of the times. The physiolog- 
 ical and the psychological were treated as two rival interests 
 vying for the control of language. What did not conform to the 
 phonetic laws, in case it were not a phenomenon of mixture, was 
 to be explained if possible as due to analogy. This dualism could
 
 106 University of California Publications. [Class.Phil. 
 
 be expected i" be bul a temporary device like the Betting up of 
 
 Satan over againsl God, in order to accounl for the existen P. 
 
 sin. A temporary device it has proved itself to be. The close 
 of the firsl century of the modern science of language is tending 
 toward a unitary conception of the various forms of historical 
 change in language. The process by which the language of the 
 
 individual adjusts itself to tl mnity s] eh differs in kind 
 
 mi whit from thai by which dialed yi< Ids to the standard lan- 
 guage of the larger community. The process by which the 
 products of form-association or analogy establish themselves in 
 language differ in no whit in land from thai by which new pro- 
 nunciations of words, i.i . new sounds make their way to general 
 
 acceptance. The pi ss by which loan-elements from an alien 
 
 tongue adjust themselves to use in a given language differs psj 
 
 chologically and fundamentally no whit fro ither of the four 
 
 pr ssses mentioned. In fad they all, all five, are phenomena 
 
 of 'mixture in language. 11 The process, furthermore, by which a 
 sound-change in one word tends to spread from word to word 
 
 and displace the old throughoul the entire vocalinlary of the lan- 
 guage is also a process of 'mixture.'-' and depends for its mo- 
 mentum in last analysis upon a proportionate analogy after the 
 same essential model as that by which an added sound or a suffix 
 is carried by analogy from word to word. All the movements 
 
 of historical chance in language respond to the social motive; 
 they .ill represent in some form the absorption of the individual 
 into the community mass. It has therewith become evident that 
 there is nothing physiological in language thai is not psycholog- 
 ically conditioned and controlled. So then it appears that the 
 
 ■See O. Bremer. Deutsche Phonetik, Vorworl \ It. L893) ; 1'.. I. Wheeler, 
 Causes of Oniformitj in Phonetic Change; Transac. Amer. Philol. Ai 
 XXIII, 1 ff. ( 190] I. 
 
 ,\ point oi view involving the recognition of ■ < more recondite form of 
 speech-mixture is that first suggested by '•■ I. Ascoli (Sprachwissensch 
 l,,!,, Briefe, pp. 17 ff., Issi 86; trsl. 1887), nbereby the initiation of pho 
 netie and syntactical changes in language, and ultimately the differentia 
 
 tii. ii ni' dialects .-in. I even of languages may :i tion to languages oi 
 
 ili.' substratum, .-is they may !"■ termed, i.e., prior and ■ I isus.-. I languages of 
 
 peoples or tribes who have through the tut.' of conquest or assunilal b< 
 
 absorbed int.. another s| Ii community. Notably has this poinl of view 
 
 urged by II. Ilirt (Indog. I ■. l\'. :'.''. ff., 1894), and by 
 
 We, •:■ pp. 99 it. i With this poinl of view the 
 
 science of language will have largely to deal, we arc persuaded, in the sec 
 ond century of its existei
 
 Vol. 11 Wheeler. — Tin Modern Scienct of Language. 1 < >T 
 
 modern science of language has fairly shaken itself free again 
 from the natural sciences and from such influences of their 
 method and analogies as were intruded upon it by Schleicher and 
 his period lSfiO-Ml . and after a century of groping and experi- 
 ment has definitely oriented and found itself as a social science 
 
 dealing with an institution which represents i •>■ intimately ami 
 
 exactly than any other the total life of man in the historically 
 determined society of men. 
 
 Within the history of the science of language the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century establishes beyond doubt a most impor- 
 tant frontier. To appreciate how sharp is the contrast between 
 hither ami yonder we have only to turn to any part or phase of 
 the work yonder. — the derivation of Latin from Greek, or may- 
 hap, to be most utterly scientific, from the Aeolic dialect of Greek, 
 the sane libration of the claims of Dutch as against Hebrew to 
 be the original language of mankind, the bondage to the forms of 
 Greek and Latin grammar as well as to the traditional point of 
 view of the philosophical grammar of the Greeks, the snbordina- 
 nation of grammar to logic, the hopeless etymologies and form 
 analyses culminating in the phantasies of Hemsterhuis and 
 Valckenaeer, the lack of any guiding clue for the explanation of 
 how sound or form came to be what it is. and the curse of arid 
 sterility that rested upon every effort. All the ways were blind and 
 all the toil was vain. On the hither side, however, there is every- 
 where a new leaven working in the mass. What was that leaven .' 
 To identify if possible what it was has been the purpose of this 
 review. I think we have seen it was not the influence of the 
 natural sciences, certainly not directly; wherever that infiuenci 
 found direct application it led astray. It was not in itself the 
 discovery of the comparative method, for that proved but an 
 auxiliary to a greater. If a founder must lie proclaimed for the 
 model n science of language, that founder was clearly Jakob 
 ( irimm. not Franz Bopp. 
 
 The leaven in question was comprised of two elements. One 
 was found in the establishment of historical grammar, for this 
 furnished the long-needed elm-: the other was found in the dis- 
 covery of Hindoo grammar, for this disclosed the fruitful atti- 
 tude for linguistic observation. Historical grammar furnished
 
 108 University of California Publications. [Clabs.Phil. 
 
 the missing clue, because it represented the Form of language as 
 created, whal it is. nol by the thought struggling for expression, 
 
 bul by historical conditions anl Ien1 to it. Hindoo grammar 
 
 Furnished the method of observation because by its Fundamental 
 instinct it asked the question how in a given language does one 
 say a given thing, ratlin- than why does a given form embodj the 
 thoughl it dues. 
 
 The germinal forces which have made this century of the sci 
 ence of Language are aol withoul their parallels in the century 
 of American national life we arc me1 to celebrate today Jakob 
 Grimm was of the school of the Romanticists and he gained his 
 conception of historical grammar from his ardor to derive the 
 
 institutions of his | pie direct from their sources in the national 
 
 life. The acquaintance of European scholars with the grammar 
 
 of India arose from a counter-spirit in the world of the day 
 whereby an expansion of intercourse and rule was bringing to the 
 wine-press fruits plucked in many various fields of national life. 
 Thus diil the spirit of national particularism reconcile itself, in 
 the experience of a science, with tile fruits of national expansion. 
 After like sort has tin' American nation in its development for 
 tin' century following Upon the typical event of l.-li:; coiiihined 
 the widening of peaceful interchange and common standards of 
 order with strong insistence upon the righl of separate cm uni- 
 ties in things pertaining separately to them to determine their 
 lives out of the sources thereof. Then in has the nation given 
 fuliilliiient to the prophetic hope of its -real democratic imperial- 
 ist, Thomas Jefferson, 1 "] am persuaded no constitution was ever 
 
 before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self- 
 government. " 
 
 The linguistic science of the second century will build upon 
 
 the plateau leveled by the varied toils and experiences of the 
 
 first. More than ever those who are to read I lie lessons of human 
 speech will gain their power through intimate sympathetic 
 acquaintance with the historically conceived material of the indi- 
 vidual language. Hut though the wide rangings of the compara- 
 tive method have for the time abated somewhat of their interest 
 
 ■Letter t.. Mr. M.i.lis. i
 
 Vol. i] Wheeler.— The Moduli Science of Language. I 1 '!• 
 
 and their yield, it will remain that he who would have Larges! 
 vision must gain perspective by frequent resort to the extra-mural 
 lookouts. Language is an offprint of human life, and to the 
 student of human speech nothing linguistic can be ever foreign
 
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