VOL. V. PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY. DECEMBER 13, 1850. No. 102. RICHARD TAYLOR, Esq., in the Chair. A paper was read- "On the position occupied by the Slavonic Dialects among the other Languages of the Indo-European family: "—Continued. By Professor Trithen. In accordance with the plan which was alluded to rather than clearly defined in the last paper, it is now proposed to examine the Russian in its relation to the other languages of modern Europe; and endeavour to account for the peculiarities which distinguish it from them, by referring to the ancient tongues of Greece, Rome and India. This it is hoped will throw some light, however limited, on those general laws which regulate the progress of human speech, and which it is the object of comparative grammar to elucidate. ་ When we compare the Russian words mat' docheri with the Engl. the mother of the daughter,' the French la mère de la fille,' and the German die Mutter von der Tochter,' we at once perceive, as was stated in the former paper, that the relation in which these two words stand to one another in the sentence, is in Russian expressed by means of an inflectional termination, e. g. docheri, like Gr. OvyaTépos; while in the modern languages of the West of Europe it is ren dered by means of the prepositions de, and of, and von. But we observe at the same time that in the Russian sentence mať' docheri, there is no word corresponding to the la in French, the die in German, and the Engl. the. The Russian, like all the synthetic languages of the ancient world-the Greek partially excepted-has no article. When towards the end of the last century the philosophy of language first began to attract the attention of the scholars of Europe, the circumstance, that the article existed in some languages, while in others no traces were to be discovered of its presence, gave rise to the theory, that those languages in which the article was employed were more perfect than those in which its use was unknown. Indeed the Russian words mat' docheri can be translated into English in four different ways; they mean equally the mother of the daughter,' a mother of a daughter,' a mother of the daughter,' or 'the mother of a daughter.' And it would seem that in this respect the Russian language is inferior to its contemporaries in the West. But the same remark applies to the Latin, the Gothic and the Sanscrit, which as we know have neither the so-called definite nor the indefinite article. There are, no doubt, many cases in which the use of the article seems to conduce to greater perspicuity in language. The following remark of Le Clerc (in his book De Arte Critica') will afford us an instance: The Latin word Deus can be translated into French in VOL. V. 66 с three different ways: 1. Dieu without the article, in which sense it signifies the only true God, the Creator of the universe; 2. un Dieu, i. e. a certain God, as appears when we render the words Dei monitu of a pagan writer by par l'avertissement d'un Dieu, i. e. of some God; and 3. le Dieu; and here we understand some Deity of whom we are or have been speaking; thus for example, when we speak of some one who has been consulting the oracle and we say, 'le Dieu lui répondit,' we mean the God who was questioned, namely Apollo, &c." It is certainly true that in such cases a person who speaks Latin cannot express himself clearly without using a greater number of syllables than a Frenchman or a German who employ the article; but on the other hand it may be asked, whether any one in reading a Latin oration, or a poem, or a descriptive passage in one of the historians, has ever remarked the absence of the article in the writing of his author,-whether he has ever felt its want in the language of the Romans? Surely the inflectional terminations of the nouns and verbs, and their collocation in the sentence, are perfectly sufficient to express the requisite shades of meaning; and there is no doubt that, generally speaking, the Latin, so far from being ill-adapted for perspicuous expression, is in respect of vivacity, elegance, animation, and variety of harmony, infinitely superior to any modern language, because it is unencumbered with the luggage of particles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs and articles, with which we are embarrassed, and which tend to clog the expression and weaken the sentiment. We need only compare a Latin original with its translation into German, for instance, in order to convince ourselves how much the unavoidable presence of the definite and indefinite articles contributes to render the sentence cumbersome and heavy. The opinion therefore which prevailed for some time among a certain class of philologers, that the article was to be considered as a special sign of a highly cultivated language, may, even on these grounds, be shown to be erroneous. This opinion simply originated in the habit of judging of other languages by our own: since we cannot make ourselves perfectly understood without the use of the article, we conclude that the Romans, who had no article, must have been in the same predicament. No However, it may be that those who argue in this way, and judge of the degree of civilization attained by a people by the greater or lesser frequency of the article in their language, find an additional support in favour of their theory in the language of ancient Greece. doubt there is a Greek article: and since the Greek language has always been held to approach nearest to the ideal of a language, (as long as critics thought they could construe a language à priori; and that they were justified in indulging their fancy with the creation of such ideals,) it has been argued that languages which, like the Greek, are possessed of the article, come nearer to the standard of perfection than those which do not possess it. It is needless to observe, that though the article be part of the Greek language, it is by no means so intimately, and as it were, so inevitably mixed up with the whole of its organization, as we find to be the case in all our modern languages, the Slavonian family excepted. Nor is it necessary to remark, that the Greek orator or poet could easily dispense with its use whenever he felt it likely to impede the flow of his speech or disturb the harmony of his verse. it With regard to the fact, that the Greek philosophers made so frequent, so judicious, and so truly philosophic an use of the article, may be observed that this circumstance depends more upon the peculiar turn of their minds, upon the high degree of intellectual culture they had attained, than upon the intrinsic value of the article itself as an element of language; for in a measure, as their minds emancipated themselves from the trammels of language, they fashioned the materials it contained for their own use and dealt with them at their pleasure; and in so far as we may be justified in inferring a peculiar disposition of the character of a nation from somè peculiarity in their language, we may concede that the use of the article in the writings of the Greek philosophers may be considered as a proof of the subtlety, clearness, and logical precision to which they had brought their minds. But would any one think of accusing the Greeks of having been imperfectly civilized, because they had only one article? The fallacy, not to say the absurdity, of such arguments is apparent; and those who maintain that "languages which have no articles belong to nations of little or no civilization," should remember that, "in philology, as in physics, we can only hope to attain the truth by an accurate investigation of facts and phænomena, and not by ingenious conjectures which are independent of or opposed to them. Reasonings on language not deduced from the real history of words, are about of the same value as speculations on chemistry or astronomy unsupported by an acquaintance with the phænomena of nature." Let us now proceed to investigate the nature of the article, and endeavour to trace its history; not only because, as Horne Tooke says, the fate of this very necessary word has been most singularly hard and unfortunate; but because such an inquiry will afford us the opportunity of ascertaining the difference which exists between the synthetic languages and those which are said to have been formed on the analytic principle-the difference between the Slavonic and the Teutonic or Romance group of languages. You know that for a long time the article has been denied a place among the other parts of speech; in fact its very name, ap@pov, articulus, implies that it was considered by the Greek grammarians as a sort of joint or limb of the noun. It is amusing to see the indignation with which Horne Tooke expresses himself on this, as he considers, unjust treatment of the article: It has been considered," he says, "after Scaliger, as otiosum loquacissimæ gentis instrumentum ; or at best as a vaunt-courier to announce the coming of his master whilst the brutish inarticulate interjection, which has nothing to do with speech, and is only the miserable refuge of the speechless, has been permitted, because beautiful and gaudy, to usurp a place amongst words, and to exclude the article from its well-earned dig |