Oriental and linguistic studies :
the Veda, the Avesta, The science of language.
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| Summary: | "It is at the suggestion and by the advice of friends in whose judgment I have more confidence than in my own, that I put forth this volume of collected essays. The subjects of which they treat are now engaging not a little attention from scholars and from men of reading, and, although much written upon, are yet very far from being exhausted. The paper on the Vedas was, so far as I know, the very first in which the main results of modern study respecting the most ancient period in Indian history were made accessible in English. When it was prepared, I had been attending during two seasons upon the lectures and, other instructions of Professor Roth, of Tubingen, and, to an extent so considerable that it calls for special acknowledgment here, the exhibition of the subject was a digest of his teachings. It, as well as the essays that follow it, is left in the main as it was originally drawn up; although there are, naturally enough, passages to which, if the essays were to be produced anew, I should give a somewhat different coloring. The Avestan article has been rewritten, especially in its bibliographical portion, so as to be brought down to the present time as regards the notices of European scholars and their works. The essays bearing upon the science of language will be found, I trust, not less called for than the rest by the circumstances of the time. Notwithstanding all that has been doing of late for the furtherance of this science, even its fundamental principles are still subjects of the widest difference of opinion, and of lively controversy. In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible. The main truths--that, on the one hand, the capacity of speech is an endowment of human nature, not, however, the only characteristic one, nor a simple one, but the sum and combined effect of qualities which have other and hardly less characteristic modes of exhibition; that every language, on the other hand, is a concrete result of the working out of that capacity, an institution of gradual historic growth, a part of the culture of the race to which it belongs, and handed down by tradition, from teacher to learner, like every other part of culture; and hence, that the study of language is a historical science, to be pursued by historical methods--these truths I have attempted to inculcate, persuaded that there is no other sound and defensible basis for linguistic science"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). |
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York, N.Y. :
Scribner, Armstrong & Co.,
1873, 1872.
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| Notes: | Includes index. Reprint. Physical description: ix, 417 p. ; cm. more |
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404 w 1 |
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