So even publishers in the nineteenth century couldn’t get away with a work of non-fiction without a subtitle.

What immediately struck me when I started this book was the dedication and then constant references to Jacob Grimm, who, at the time of publication, was still alive. Grimm, along with his brother Wilhem, is famous for editing Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, or Grimm’s Fairy Tales). In philological circles, he’s far more well known for the book Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary) and as the discoverer of Grimm’s Law. Grimm’s Law is a set of correspondences detailing the development of Proto-Indo-European stops into Proto-Germanic. It comprises three main shifts: PIE voiceless stops became PGmc voiceless fricatives; PIE voiced stops became PGmc voiceless stops; PIE voiced aspirated stops became PGmc voiced fricatives, which became voiced stops in most Germanic languages.

I am only a few chapters into the book, but it is an interesting look into early forays into historical linguistics. The vocabulary at that time didn’t allow for the now accepted universals of synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistics, that is, looking at a language and its development within its own structure and vocabulary or comparing it with other languages’ structures and vocabularies. Still, the germ of these universals is there, just not the terminology. Moving beyond structure, however, the author continues to describe the then popular approach to language where words and meanings were part of some large Aristotelean porphyrian tree, or Kantian categories of linguistic “universals”.

The author also cannot avoid delving into Scriptural language (within the first few pages, I read Adamic race, tongue, etc.; antediluvian) in his discussion of global languages. These are detours, to say the least, but he is cognisant of grammatical structures and certain vocabularies, or at least individual words, of languages throughout the world, which one cannot help but admire. One passage did make me roll my eyes, however, and it reminded me why Darwin was given such a hard time:

It implies that the world contained from the beginning, not three or four, as some writers are willing to believe, but some hundreds and perhaps thousands of different human races. With respect to the latter, it seems incumbent on those who reject this passage of Sacred History on the ground of its making a reference to a supernatural, and, as it may be termed, an unknown agency, to furnish us with some account of the first existence of our species which does not imply events, at least equally miraculous. Unless the events which certainly took place can be understood in a different way from that in which the Sacred Scriptures represent them, we may rationally adhere to the whole of the same testimony, as involving the operation of no other causes, than such as are both proved and are sufficient to account for the phenomena.

The burden of proof is placed squarely on the head of the linguist who accounts for a plurality of tongues, a circuitous argument shown time and time again in world history. In proper philological fashion, he does take an ostensibly scientific approach to the comparison and categorization of Indo-European languages in later chapters, but language like this in the introductory remarks reminds me of the constant barrage of religious discourse in works that really should have done away with it altogether.

Then there is the matter of race. From what I have read, the entire book pairs language with race, a common approach in early philology. While despots and the culturally insane still make this comparison, it has been wholly rejected by the entire linguistic field for decades. The genetic make-up of a person has no bearing whatsoever on the mind’s ability to create language. The only ways where genetics plays a role are in the unfortunate circumstances of birth defects or genetic disorders where certain parts of the brain make it impossible for an individual to construct, comprehend, and communicate language. These are anomalies and do not extend to a language group as a whole. Bringing racial questions up at all, never mind in the language of philology, is infuriating, and again, we are better for having done away with it.

Despite these cultural criticisms of a group of men long dead, the book is worth a look if this sort of thing is of interest. It’s also free (in electronic form, at any rate), and the scans are quite legible and easy to read. The typography of the foreign characters, particularly the Sanskrit, is a marvel, and I shudder to think what the poor typesetter had to do with hot metal type to get such lovely figures. Many a hand was scorched, I imagine.

The book might have cringe-worthy moments, but to use a tired, but remember useful, expression: those who deny history are doomed to repeat it. It behooves us to remember our past, even in peripheral academic treatises on comparative grammars.