Historical Linguistics. Concern for historical per-
spective is undoubtedly one of the chief characteristics
of the nineteenth-century intellectual scene. Geology,
paleontology, archaeology, political history, literary
history—all of these branches of learning were either
born, or thoroughly reformed, in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Darwinian evolution theory may be seen as
the culmination of this trend. Thus the historical per-
spective introduced into linguistics was due not only
to the discovery of Sanskrit but also to the general
historical trend of the age, especially in Germany,
which was to dominate the linguistic scene throughout
the nineteenth century. The Romantic movement, with
its veneration for what was old, organic, and of popular
origin, and its rejection of what was new, artificial, and
cultivated, strongly encouraged those who turned their
attention to the past. In Germany particularly there
was also a nostalgia for a great heroic antiquity, to
compensate for the national setbacks in the Napoleonic
era.
All of these factors were of importance for Jacob
Grimm, who may be looked upon as the founder of
historical linguistics. His imagination was caught when
he discovered that the language of the medieval Ger-
man texts contained many inflectional forms of the kind
for which “the Germans used to envy the Greeks and
the Romans.” In other words, German might once have
been as “perfect” as Greek. The belief in the superi-
ority of the past, and the hope to establish a connection
with the glorious classical languages provided the im-
petus. Important discoveries followed. Grimm's main
contribution was to insist on the systematic nature of
the sound correspondences between the Germanic lan-
guages and the classical ones. That there were fairly
regular such correspondences had been pointed out
before, for instance, by one Kaspar Cruciger as early
as 1616. What Grimm did was to reveal the pattern
in the correspondences. There was a common factor
in the change of
p to
f, of
t to þ, and of
k to
h, namely,
that the unvoiced plosives had become spirants, while
retaining the same place of articulation. And there was
a further pattern in the fact that as the original
p, t,
and
k disappeared, the voiced plosives
b, d, and
g
moved into their place by simply losing their voicing.
Finally, all the aspirated plosives, represented in Greek
by φ, θ, χ , lost their aspiration to become
b, d, and
g in the Germanic languages.
All of these correspondences had been pointed out
by the Dane, Rasmus Rask, in a prize essay of 1814.
But it was Grimm, in 1822, who brought out and
stressed the beautiful symmetry, the movement of the
sounds, as it were, in a perfect circle, one set moving
out of a place which was then taken by another set.
Moreover Grimm showed that a similar movement
took place later in the development of High German.
Thus the “sound law” was born. Grimm did not use
that term himself, though the developments he de-
scribed have later been summarized as “Grimm's law.”
It was Franz Bopp, the writer of an epoch-making
treatise on the Conjugation System of Sanskrit (1816),
and of a Comparative Grammar of the main Indo-
European languages (1833-52) who made the concepts
of “sound law” the central one of historical linguistics.
Bopp consciously tried to adapt the method of linguis-
tics to what he conceived to be that of the natural
sciences. He hypostatized language as an independent
organism, developing according to equally hyposta-
tized laws, independently of the speakers. The contrast
with the ancient view, where the speaker had full
control, could not have been greater.
In Grimm's “sound law” the linguists had an orga-
nizing principle with which to master the masses of
material that they collected. By comparing languages
with one another and looking for systematic corre-
spondences, the whole linguistic history of the Indo-
European nations was to be written. In that way the
mechanism of language and language development was
to be laid bare.
The study of Sanskrit had taught the Westerners how
to analyze an individual language accurately. The
notion of “sound law” introduced the same demand
for strict accuracy in the comparison of languages.
After two thousand years of etymological speculation
they could begin to argue from facts and principles.
An important event in the development of the con-
cept of “sound law” was the publication of the article
by the Dane Karl Verner on what he called an “excep-
tion” to Grimm's law (1876). Grimm himself had noted
that the change of p, t, k to f, þ, h did not always
take place: the result was sometimes b, d, g instead.
Verner managed to show that the exceptions were
themselves systematic. The exceptional sounds only
occurred under certain specified conditions, having to
do with the old Indo-European accentuation. Encour-
aged by Verner's success, some brilliant young linguists
(among them Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff)
chose to lay down as a postulate that the laws of sounds
admit no exceptions. Apparent exceptions only proved
that the “laws” were not stated accurately enough.
The Junggrammatiker (“young grammarians”), as
they were called, met with strong opposition: it was
the ancient struggle between anomalists and analogists
all over again. Above all, several linguists were loath
to accept the theory that the “sound laws” were com-
pletely autonomous, independent of the will—or the
whims—of the speakers. But however justified the
objections, it is obvious that the postulate of the Jung-
grammatiker led to a considerable tightening of the
methodological discipline of the linguists.
The raising of the standards led to further progress
in several directions. The search for the detailed mech-
anism of the “sound laws” led to advances in descrip-
tive phonetics. The necessity for explaining apparent
exceptions led to an intensified study of dialects. The
creation of linguistic atlases, like Jules Gilliéron's Atlas
linguistique de la France (1902-12) was one of the
results. The focusing of interest on the detailed mecha-
nism of linguistic change thus led to an intensified study
of the living languages, which alone afford a full view
of all the possible factors influencing language change.
