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members or forms, which were originally significant, but have gradually become a more external mass.

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This sentence introduces us to two new trains of thought. In the first place, I would call the attention of the reader to the remark that language in the course of time loses consciousness of its own nature. Here a mental activity is ascribed to language; it is referred to as if it were a thinking being. Nor is this an isolated instance. In other passages BOPP speaks of the spirit or genius of language, and recognizes in its procedure certain tendencies and aims. Sometimes, instead of language as a whole, an individual form is regarded as a thinking being. So for example in the Vgl. Gr., 1st edition, page 516, the Slavonic stem sjo is said to be "no longer conscious of its composition, which was handed down from the primitive period of the language." These expressions are metaphors,

very natural ones, too, and probably, if any one had called his attention to the point, BOPP would have acknowledged that in reality these psychical activities take place, not in language, but in speaking individuals; yet it is important to call attention here to the first beginnings of a mode of view which with SCHLEICHER rose to a conscious hypostasizing of the notion “language”.

In the next place, in the sentence above quoted the expression "die out" is noteworthy. According to BOPP, all external changes which we observe in the Indo-European languages betoken not development, but disease, mutilation and decline. We become acquainted with languages, not in their ascending development, but after they have passed the goal set for them. That is, we find them in a state "where they might still perfect themselves syntactically, but where, grammatically considered, they have lost more or less of what belonged to that perfect arrangement, in virtue of which the separate members were in accurate proportion to each other, and all derivative formations were still connected, by a visible and unimpaired bond, with that from which they originated." (Vocalismus, page 2.) As long as the meaning of the composition continues to be felt in a grammatical form, it offers opposition to any change. But the farther languages are separated from their source, the more love of euphony gains

in influence. (Abh. der Berl. Akad., 1824, page 119.) This view has also been extended and systematized by SCHLEICHER.

Having thus briefly characterized BOPP's fundamental views, I will now give a more detailed account of his ideas concerning changes in language, and will classify them in accordance with the categories introduced by BOPP himself: mechanical and physical laws.

The effect of BOPP's so-called "mechanical laws" is especially visible in the changes which the weight of the personal endings produces in the stem. A light ending follows a heavy form of the stem, e. g. émi "I go", from i "go"; but before a heavy ending a light stem-form alone is permitted, e. g. imás "we go". The same law accounts for the German Ablaut, which is preserved to the present day in weiss and wissen. These facts, which were first formulated by Bopp, we now explain in a different manner, by ascribing the weakening of certain syllables no longer to a law of relative weight, but to the power exercised by the accent of the following syllable.

Beside the influence of the weight of the personal endings, BOPP recognizes another action of this law of gravity, which will be apparent from the following examples. It is the task of the stem-syllables to carry the formative syllables, and it sometimes happens that a stem-syllable is not strong enough for this purpose. We have such an instance in the Sanskrit imperative cinú "gather", from ci; Bopp here remarks that the sign nu is only able to carry the ending hi when the u is supported by two preceding consonants, as for example in apnuhi. "But where the u is only preceded by a single consonant, it has become incapable of carrying the ending hi, hence cinú gather', from ci." (§ 451.) In a similar manner BOPP explains the circumstance that the perfect endings appear greatly mutilated in comparison with those of the present. Since in the perfect the root has also the reduplication-syllable to carry, it is, so to speak, claimed by both sides at once, and is therefore no longer in a condition to lift a heavy ending. It is clear that this second law of gravity, whose action BOPP discovers in several other instances, is in direct contradiction to the first, and it

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is now universally acknowledged that the idea expressed in this law suffers from a metaphorical obscurity.

I have intimated above that the mechanical laws can no longer be understood and accepted by us in the same manner as by Bopp, and will pass to the "physical laws", which we are now accustomed to call "phonetic laws". In order to appreciate BOPP's stand-point in this connection, it is important to come to a clear understanding of the possible method of establishing phonetic laws. Whoever compared Sanskrit with another Indo-European tongue, the Greek, for instance, was of necessity impressed with the fact that there exist in both languages words and formations which completely coïncide. No one could avoid noticing, for example, that the Skr. matár and Gr. up, Skr. dáma and Gr. dóuos, Skr. pitár and Gr. Tatρ were the same words, and that the inflectional endings of the verb agree in the main in the two languages. The recognition of this agreement rested upon immediate evidence, and could not be further demonstrated. From comparison it was possible to deduce the rule that certain sounds of the Greek corresponded to certain sounds of the Sanskrit, m to μ, t to ʊ, etc. Yet after collecting a very few words, it immediately became plain that the same sound of the Sanskrit was not always represented by the same sound of the Greek. So for example in dama δόμος, dadami δίδωμι, the Greek & corresponded to the Sanskrit d; but in the pair duhitár dvɣátyp, which no one wished to separate, the Sanskrit d was represented by a Greek 9. As a result of such observations, it was necessary to adopt the conclusion that these rules admit of exceptions, and to say accordingly: "Usually Sanskrit d corresponds to a Greek 8, but often also to a Greek 9."` Now two positions are conceivable in relation to such a rule. We can either start with the theoretical conviction that laws admit of no exceptions, and feel ourselves bound to investigate the causes which produce the so-called "exceptions"; or we can content ourselves in the wording of our rules with the expressions "usually" and "often". And this latter is on the whole Bopp's stand-point. "We must expect to find no laws in language", he remarks, "which offer more resistance than the shores of rivers and seas". (Vocalismus, page 15.) In other passages he

adopts the same convenient view, at least for part of the phonetic processes observed by him, his opinion being that there are two sorts of euphonic change in language; "one, which is elevated to a universal law, appears in like form on every like provocation, while the other, which has not become a law, occurs only occasionally." (Vgl. Gr., 1st edition, § 236, note.) That the latter class of phenomena in Bopp's opinion covers a broader ground than the former, is soon evident. He frequently claims for language the right to depart from the existing law with "a certain freedom". That vowels should be lengthened without cause, extensive mutilations take place without conceivable provocation (as for example that tóny should be a mutilated form of stóçün), and that the same phonetic group should pass into widely differing formations in the same linguistic period, appears to him not at all extraordinary. For instance, he assumes that the pronominal stem sma in Gothic appears in six different forms, as nsa, sva, nka, nqva, mma and s. (§ 167.) When he was unable to find in the same language an analogy for a phonetic change which seemed probable to him, he had recourse to another; for example, in order to confirm the assertion that the 7 of the Slavonic participles was derived from t, he referred to the Bengali. The x of déòwxa he traces back to an s, but in tétʊpa this x has become h, "as it were in the spirit of the Germanic Law of Permutation of Consonants [Lautverschiebungsgesetz]”, and this h together with the preceding tenuis or media has become an aspirate. (§ 569.) Even the admission of wholly isolated cases of change does not terrify him. BOPP but seldom claims infallibility for a phonetic law. An interesting example of the sort occurs in his article on the demonstrative pronoun and the origin of case-signs. (Abh. der Berl. Akad., 1826.) There it is of great importance to him to prove that the article sa, ò, can never have had a nominative -s, and while rejecting the assumption that the s could have fallen away in Sanskrit and Greek, he adduces the infallibility of certain phonetic laws in the following expressive terms:

"But we must not overlook the fact that such eliminations [Abschleifungen] usually, if not always, occur in numbers and according to rule, rather than in single instances and arbi

trarily; and if the spirit of a language at any period of its history conceives a hatred for any letter as the terminal pillar of a word, it removes it wherever it occurs, so that not a single such letter remains to give ground for the supposition that a similar one ever existed. In this way a phonetic law raged in Greek against the letter t, and eradicated it in every case where it stood as 'final consonant, in spite of the importance and extent of its grammatical rôle, which we can clearly recognize by comparison with the kindred languages. On the other hand, has always been a favorite final letter to Greek ears, and as readily as it has allowed itself to be dropped out in the middle between two vowels, just so persistently does it appear at the end, wherever the researches of comparative philology lead us to expect it."

We see from these quotations, which could be increased ad infinitum, that Bopp did ascribe infallibility to a phonetic law in single cases, where the facts seemed to prompt it, but by no means as a general rule; on the contrary, he granted to language the freedom of occasionally emancipating itself from the existing laws. It is universally acknowledged (even by those scholars who do not advocate the principle that phonetic laws admit of no exception) that BOPP has left the greatest task for his successors in the department of phonetics. The impression that the words compared were identical was, as already intimated, always decisive for him, and the sounds had to adapt themselves to this impression; in his assertions about sounds, he did not give sufficient weight to the modifying influence arising from a comparison of the fate of the same sounds witnessed elsewhere. It is to AUGUST FRIEDRICH POTT that the great credit is due of having filled up

this gap.

This want of method in BoPP's investigations was not so palpably evident in the Indo-European domain, because there a great number of forms and words really exist in which the same sound appears in the same position, and because in the discovery of hidden resemblances BOPP was guided with wonderful correctness by the deep insight of his genius; it became very conspicuous, however, when Bopp undertook to introduce into his comparison languages whose relationship

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