FIRST SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE.

39

collections made by the indefatigable missionaries of our day the same subjects form the groundwork. It is not enough to say that considerations of economy, health and usefulness concurred, from the beginning, in recommending to them a knowledge of the idioms of those nations whom they labored to win back to their God. They soon found out and appreciated the necessity of acquiring not merely an empirical knowledge of these languages, but such an acquaintance as would enable them to understand the hereditary modes of thought, feeling and contemplation of their new children-points which could, of course, be discovered only through the corresponding words of expression in their language. Thus only could they hope fully to penetrate into the spirit of the people they wished to improve and convert; thus only could they hope to imitate the unsurpassed triumph of Paul in Athens, to fathom the depths of the metaphysical abstraction "Om" of the Hindoo, or to find means. to convey to the apparently inaccessible mind of the Chinese. the idea of a Christian God. It was with such enlightened views that the early missionaries of the church were the first to study the idioms of other races. They did this, let it be remembered, whilst they penetrated into the fearful wilds of South America, or, following the illustrious example of Xavier and Loyola, preached the One God of the Christian to the most barbarous and secluded regions of the earth, and endured hardships and suffered martyrdom without any hope of earthly reward. The success which crowned their labors and the greater interest now felt in the cause of missions, has but deepened the conviction of the necessity to study the languages of our distant, benighted fellow-men. Neither expense nor labor have been spared

to learn to know and to elucidate such idioms and to develop, as it were, languages scarcely known beyond the precincts of their own country, and for the greater part previously unwritten. The almost gigantic labors of the indefatigable German messenger of the Church Missionary Society of England, the Rev. John L. Krapf, in African languages, the noble work of the great missionary institution of Basle, the munificent expenditures of the English Baptists, who in one year (1845) spent fifteen thousand dollars for translations into thirty-two as yet unknown and unwritten languages of India and Polynesia, are but detached instances of that notable zeal which has furnished science so vast an amount of valuable philological knowledge.

It is to these missionaries, also, that we must look for that most desirable aid in philological researches, a system of common rules for reducing newly discovered languages to writing. As yet, foreign names reach us only through the medium of individuals belonging to different nations, each one of whom spells them according to the laws of his own mother-tongue. The same letters thus convey to each nation a different sound, and often to none the pronunciation it has in the vernacular. Thus the "Cyrus" of Europe is in Assyria “Khoresh” or “Khosrou,' and Darius "Dareoush" or "Dariavesh." This difficulty which modern science finds in the attempt to express new sounds and words of as yet unwritten tongues, even with the aid of the various and apparently excellent alphabets at its command, might give us a juster idea of the importance of the first invention of the art of writing. We might be less disposed to reject as futile and absurd the views of the ancients, who valued this discovery so highly as to ascribe it to nothing less than the su

NEW SYSTEMS OF WRITING FOREIGN IDIOMS. 41

perior wisdom of God, and bless the memory of the first of all missionaries, peace-loving Ulfilas, to whom the Goths owe their Bible and Germans their letters. The enlightened policy of some of the great missionary bodies of our day has led them to attempt to obviate this difficulty by the adoption of a uniform mode of expressing foreign sounds in European languages. Two systems, that suggested by Mr. Pickering for the study of Indian languages, and a more recent one, probably first adopted and recommended by Sir R. H. Schomburgk, have, of late, been applied in several translations of sacred works from and for languages not before written. They have apparently succeeded well, and promise to prove useful, not in such versions only, but also in preventing the serious errors which must necessarily have constantly arisen from the inexperience of pious but not scientific missionaries in analyzing unknown sounds and in comparing and identifying new linguistic material.

CHAPTER VI.

FIRST ATTEMPTS IN COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.

Greek in England-Erasmus-Hebrew, &c., for Bible Researches-Modern Languages for Reformation-Forgery of Psalmanazaar-Present Position of Comparative Philology.

THE precious material thus furnished by the praiseworthy labors of mariners and colonists, missionaries and Bible societies, becomes valuable only when science deduces from it great principles and thus adds to our knowledge of truth. Not only the ancients, but even Christian Europe for more than a thousand years, considered languages as little more than accidental varieties of sound, and researches into their nature as a fertile field for the employment of ingenuity and wit. It ought, however, to be borne in mind, that the nations of Europe bore, in their youth, a greater resemblance to each other in their form of government, their moral character and their languages, than now. It was only when they grew to manly age that their character unfolded itself more distinctly, and differences in language began to represent corresponding differences in national modes of thought and feeling. This alone can explain the astonishing ignorance which scholars and philosophers, even of later ages, exhibited in their attempt to study other languages than their own. It was perhaps but natural that the first introduc

tion of Greek should have been received with some distrust, when it is remembered that western Europe knew nothing of it until the fall of Constantinople, and that even the learned of England, before the sixteenth century, were so ignorant of it as to be satisfied with Latin versions of Aristotle, made, not from the original, but from Arabic translations! Greek quotations, which, it seems, would occur now and then, were summarily dismissed with a marginal note: "Graecum est, legi non potest.' When the erudite William Grocyn first taught Greek at Oxford, under Henry VIII., his lectures, delivered with great pomp, were thought a highly dangerous and alarming innovation. The very sound of Greek appeared to the fastidious ear of Englishmen, abominable, and such as "no Christian ear can endure to hear." Oxford was divided into Greeks and Trojans, who waged a fierce warfare against each other, and even exposed the great Erasmus, who had been a pupil of Grocyn and then taught Greek himself, to personal insults and gross misrepresentations. Nor was the great philosopher in his own mind quite free from the effects of this general ignorance, for he mentions in his works his fear "that the study of Hebrew might promote Judaism and the study of philology might revive Paganism!"

In spite of such apprehensions, however, Hebrew was studied, and with it other Shemitic idioms, like Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic, when the spirit of free inquiry, which so largely contributed to the great work of the Reformation, led to the comparative study of the languages in which our sacred writings were first written. Then were produced works like those of the great scholars Scaliger and Bochart. The Refor