Course in General Linguistics

and neglects the living language.Moreover, it is concerned with little except Greek and Latin antiquity.The third stage began when scholars discovered that languages can be compared with one another.This discovery was the origin of "comparative philology."In 1816, in a work entitled tJher das Conjugationssijstem der Sanskritsprache, Franz Bopp compared Sanskrit with German, Greek, Latin, etc. Bopp was not the first to record their similarities and state that all these languages belong to a single family.That had been done before him, notably by the English orientalist W. Jones (died in 1794) ; but Jones' few isolated statements do not prove that the significance and importance of comparison had been generally understood before 1816.While Bopp cannot be credited with the discovery that Sanskrit is re- lated to certain languages of Europe and Asia, he did realize that the comparison of related languages could become the subject matter of an independent science.To illuminate one language by means of another, to explain the forms of one through the forms of the other, that is what no one had done before him.Whether Bopp could have created his science-so quickly at least-without the prior discovery of Sanskrit is doubtful.With Sanskrit as a third witness beside Latin and Greek, Bopp had a larger and firmer basis for his studies.Fortunately, Sanskrit was exceptionally well-fitted to the role of illuminating the comparison.For example, a comparison of the paradigms of Latin genus (genus, generis, genere, genera, generum, etc.) and Greek (genos, gineos, genei, genea, geneon, etc.) reveals nothing.But the picture changes as soon as we add the corresponding Sanskrit series (ganas, ganasas, ganasi, ganasu, ^anasdm, etc.).A glance reveals the simi- larity between the Greek forms and the Latin forms.If we accept tentatively the hypothesis that ^anas represents the primi- tive state-and this step facilitates explanation-then we conclude that s must have fallen in Greek forms wherever it occurred be- tween two vowels.Next we conclude that s became r in Latin under the same conditions.Grammatically, then, the Sanskrit paradigm exemplifies the concept of radical, a unit (ganas) that is quite definite and stable.Latin and Greek had the same forms as San- skrit only in their earlier stages.Here Sanskrit is instructive pre- cisely because it has preserved all the Indo-European s's.Of course A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS 5 proper place, owes its origin to the study of the Romance and Germanic languages.Romance studies, begun by Diez-his Gram- matik der romanischen Sprachen dates from 1836-38-were instrumental in bringing linguistics nearer to its true object.For Romance scholars enjoyed privileged conditions that were un- known to Indo-European scholars.They had direct access to Latin, the prototype of the Romance languages, and an abundance of texts allowed them to trace in detail the evolution of the different dialects; these two circumstances narrowed the field of conjecture and provided a remarkably solid frame for all their research.Germanic scholars were in a similar situation.Though they could not study the prototype directly, numerous texts enabled them to trace the history of the languages derived from Proto-Germanic through the course of many centuries.The Germanic scholars, coming to closer grips with reality than had the first Indo-Euro- pean scholars, reached different conclusions.