It is hardly necessary to trace the history of what I call the empirical study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With Dionysius Thrax the framework of grammar was finished. Later writers have improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman writers. We find Quintilian in the first century; Scaurus, Apollonius Dyscolus, and his son, Herodianus, in the second; Probus and Donatus in the fourth. by the terminations of the nominative singular, which was again an original pronoun, âptyas would mean âp-tya-s, i.e., waterthere-he. Now, it makes little difference whether I say an aquatic bird or a bird of the water. In Sanskrit the genitive of water would be, if we take udaka, udaka-sya. This sya is the same pronominal base as the adjective termination tya, only that the former takes no sign for the gender, like the adjective. The genitive udakasya is therefore the same as an adjective without gender. Now let us look to Greek. We there form adjectives by σos, which is the same as the Sanskrit tya or sya. For instance, from duos, people, the Greeks formed inμórios, belonging to the people. Here os, a, or, mark the gender. Leave the gender out, and you get dnporto. Now, there is a rule in Greek that an between two vowels, in grammatical terminations, is elided. Thus the genitive of γένος is not γένεσος, but γένεος, οι γένους ; hence δεμόσιο would necessarily become δεμοῖο. And what is δεμοῖο but the regular Homeric genitive of δῆμος, which in later Greek was replaced by dýμov? Thus we see that the same principles which governed the formation of adjectives and genitives in Tibetan, in Garo, and Hindústání, were at work in the primitive stages of Sanskrit and Greek; and we perceive how accurately the real power of the genitive was determined by the ancient Greek grammarians, who called it the general or predicative case, whereas the Romans spoiled the term by wrongly translating it into genitivus. After Constantine had moved the seat of government from Rome, grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople. There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century, the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his work remained an authority during the middle ages to nearly our own times. We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome. 106 LECTURE IV. THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE. WE traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly intended. Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences between the grammatical terminology of the Greeks and the Hindús, which would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation for the much-abused gram matical system of the schools. The Hindús are the only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in Sanskrit too the same system of cases, called vibhakti, or inflections, the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons, divided not exactly, but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.* In Sanskrit, grammar is called vyâkaraṇa, which means analysis or taking to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The differences between the dialect of these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and preserved with a religious care. We still possess the first essays in the grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called prâtisâkhyas. These works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same time with observations of a grammatical character, and particularly with those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable, the Ganas. These supplied that solid basis on which successive generations of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection in the grammar of Pânini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of Pânini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything * See M. M.'s History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 158. in the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet of the real nature, and natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing. What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar to our own tongue? We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative, the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form, may be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas in English the genitive is marked by a final s, or by the preposition of, it is in Greek expressed by a final os, in Latin by is. But what this os or is represents, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a distinction would seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages which have distinct forms for these two categories of thought. Even in Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the nominative and accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, it is commonly said, has no grammar at all, that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and conjugation, in our sense of these words; it makes no formal distinction of the various |