Voices of Man

The Meaning and Function of Language

Mario Pei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000517255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Historische & vergleichende Sprachwissenschaften

Originally published in 1964, this book examines where and how the pattern and texture of speech emerged and whether language is logical. It looks at linguistics from both the historical and descriptive points of view, as a physical science and as a social science. It also discusses the problem of aesthetics in language and what happens when different languages come into contact with each other. The book concludes with a discussion of the possibility of an international language, and indeed whether such a development would be progress or something that is needed or wanted.

introduction A Brief History of Linguistics

SPEECH is basically an automatic, unconscious process. It is therefore natural to assume that it must have been in use for thousands of years before any conscious thought about it arose.

Since our records of language necessarily cannot go back beyond the invention of writing and the first written documents, the only chronological link we can establish between language and the consciousness of language is to be sought in our earliest written records. The latter display an awareness of certain phases of language that indicates the possibility of an earlier linguistic consciousness, of which we cannot have direct proof.

The First Book of Genesis in the Bible, with its reference to the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues, shows that there was a realization of the diversity of tongues, coupled with clear appreciation of the all-important role that language plays in human coordinated activity, and even a longing for universal linguistic understanding.

In addition, bilingual glossaries, in Sumerian and Assyrian, are historically attested, while Egyptian hieroglyphic carvings show the arrival at the court of the Pharaohs of foreign ambassadors accompanied by interpreters.

Can all this be said to indicate the presence of a true linguistic consciousness in remote antiquity? Or merely awareness of language diversity and its inconveniences?¹

At all events, it is not until the fourth century b.c. that we have, from ancient India and ancient Greece, records of an awareness of some, though by no means all, the problems posed by language. Panini’s grammar of the Sanskrit language is a highly analytic, descriptive work, in which the sounds, system of accentuation and grammatical structure of India’s ancient tongue are accurately and painstakingly presented. What is missing from the Indian picture is any attempt at comparison with other tongues, description of historical development, and philosophical or psychological interpretation. It may also be worth noting that at the time of the appearance of Panini’s Sanskrit grammar the Sanskrit language had already flourished as a literary tongue for over fifteen hundred years, and that Panini himself makes reference to earlier grammatical works not available to us.

The Greeks, being primarily philosophers, were the first to enter into a full discussion of the nature of language, as distinguished from its physical, outward, observable features. In Plato’s Cratylus, one of the disputants, Cratylus, favors the view that language is a natural phenomenon (physis), a gift that the gods have bestowed on man, and that the names of things are not mere symbols, but an inherent and essential part of the objects they stand for. Another participant, Hermogenes, holds that language is a matter of convention (nomos, thesis), and that a thing or action has a given name solely because men have agreed to accept the name as the symbol of the object in question. This idea of language as arbitrary convention today has general acceptance, and colors the thinking of most descriptive linguists. Aristotle later sponsored it by presenting language as a social contract. In the second century b.c., the grammarians Aristarchus and Crates held diverging views concerning language as a coherent system governed by laws (analogy), or as marked by irregularities ungoverned by laws (anomaly). Hence it may be said that two of the most controversial points of present-day linguistics had their inception with the Greeks.

But if the Greeks were the first to discuss the philosophy of language, they were much slower than the Indians in coming to a satisfactory classification of the parts of speech in their language. It was not until the Alexandrine period (second century b.c.) that Dionysius Thrax presented the grammatical categories and terminology in the form that prevails today, and considering the precise formal distinctions that appear among the parts of speech in Greek, this slowness is surprising, as is Plato’s initial error of classifying the adjective with the verb rather than with the noun (this on the “logical” ground that the noun represents the subject, and anything else is the predicate). But by the time the Stoics and the Alexandrians had finished their tasks, the grammatical outline of the Greek language was substantially what it is today, and it was this concept of grammar and the grammatical categories that persisted through Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the modern centuries, to be challenged only in very recent times.

Both Indian and Greek grammarians were completely uninterested in comparing their languages with the numerous other languages of their period. Significant is the fact that the Greeks labeled the speakers of all languages but Greek as barbaroi, or “babblers.” The greatest concession made by the Greeks to the comparative principle was to establish a distinction among the chief literary dialects of Greece. At a much later period (fifth century a.d.) the lexicographer Hesychius cites many dialectal and foreign forms, but this at a time when many of the languages he mentions were already extinct.

The Romans, slavishly imitating the grammatical models set by the Greeks, displayed a similar mentality. They also allowed languages like Punic, Etruscan, Gaulish, Iberian to go unrecorded and uncompared. There was philosophical speculation of sorts, exemplified in Lucretius (first century b.c.), who attempted to explain language as arising from animal cries (the beginning of onomatopoetic theories), and in Varro (also first century b.c.), who claimed that language is basically utilitarian. Varro is also said to be responsible for the first erroneous attempt at language classification, by his implication that Latin is descended from, rather than a sister language of Greek.

Both Greece and Rome produced numerous grammars of the Greek and Latin languages, all of the prescriptive, normative type, describing the language as it should be rather than as it is (that the spoken tongue differed considerably from the prescriptions of the grammarians and the language of literature is abundantly proved by textual and epigraphic evidence). One of the earliest indications of a consciousness of diversity between the grammatical and the spoken tongue is the statement of the rhetorician Quintilian (first century a.d.) that “aliud esse latine loqui, aliud grammatice” (“It is one thing to speak Latin, something else to speak grammatically”). This reveals, if not a condonation of divergences from the standard, at least a consciousness of their existence.

From here, testimonies of awareness begin to abound. Livy makes reference to Etruscan as the cultural language of an earlier period (fourth century b.c.). Cicero speaks at length of “rustic and archaic” forms of Latin, and of the use of interpreters in Rome for visitors from such outlying provinces as Spain and Africa. Other writers inform us that Latin was spoken with local accents not only in these provinces, but in Italy itself. Perhaps our best illustration of the spoken Latin of the period appears in the Appendix to the grammar of Probus, a grammarian who lived in the third century a.d., which lists over three hundred words and forms commonly mispronounced or otherwise mishandled. To the present-day linguist, the value of Probus’ contribution is that he gives both the “correct” and the “incorrect” forms (sometimes he reverses them), and the “incorrect” versions are often the direct and immediate forerunners of later Romance forms. To the philosopher and student of social phenomena, his contribution lies in his awareness, even though coupled with condemnation, of the divergences from the language standard.

In the matter of linguistic consciousness, Priscian, a grammarian of the sixth century a.d., offers a division of words into roots and endings which reminds one of the present-day morphemic theory, and goes far beyond an earlier attempt by Aristotle. But for what concerns language comparison, despite the awareness of the existence of foreign tongues, there seems to have been very little inclination to study or record them.

At the beginning of the fifth century a.d., St. Jerome, who was enough of a language scholar to realize that the language of the Galatians in Asia Minor was very close to that of the Gauls who inhabited Treviri, also makes the statement that “ipso latinitas et regionibus quotidie mutetur et tempore” (“The Latin language itself is changing daily, both region by region and with the passing of time”). His contemporary, St. Augustine, irked perhaps by carping criticisms concerning his use of vulgarisms in addressing his congregations, stated that “melius est reprehendant grammatici quam non intellegant populi” (“It is better that the grammarians should chide than that the people should not understand”).

Christianity and the barbarian invasions had the effect of imparting dignity to non-Classical languages. The newcomers had to be converted, and conversion called for a direct propaganda effort in the languages of those to be propagandized. Numerous Bible translations began to appear, along with language aids for pilgrims and travelers, some of which are forerunners of the modern tourist or military phrase book. There are also numerous glosses (interlinear and marginal translations into the current spoken tongue) of words and phrases from an older Latin that was beginning to be forgotten.²

At the same time, philosophical and speculative interest in language and its problems waned. There is very little in the way of linguistic thought during the early Middle Ages, save for constant and boresome restatements of the positions established by Plato and Aristotle centuries before. Greek had been practically forgotten in the West. (The expression “Graecum est, non legitur,” ancestor of the modern “It’s Greek to me,” came into vogue at this period.) Such comparison as there was lay between the Latin of the Vulgate and that of the grammarians. Utilitarian grammars of a few languages appeared. (Aelfric’s Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon, around the year 1000, is one of the earliest.) Still, it occurred to no one to make direct comparisons. The two principal Semitic languages in use, Hebrew and Arabic, were codified by their own grammarians between the seventh and tenth centuries, but these grammarians were steeped in Greek tradition, and followed the model of the Alexandrian school.

It was not until the thirteenth century that a new interest in philosophical speculation about the nature of language appeared. It began with the concept of a “universal grammar,” valid for all tongues, though with minor variations. Roger Bacon expressed the concept in these words: “Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur” (“Grammar is one and the same in all languages so far as substance is concerned, but it may vary in particular details”) .³

The Greeks and Romans, deliberately ignoring all languages but their own, had implied, without affirming it, the existence of such a universal grammar. The medieval grammarians, more keenly aware of language differences, tried to reconcile them with their great concept of universality. This idea of a universal grammar into which all tongues must fit was not finally rejected until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then, curiously enough, only to be revived by one of the greatest proponents of structural diversity, Benjamin Lee Whorf.⁴

Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia of 1305 marked, in some ways, the beginning of modern linguistic thought. Dante made a true attempt at language derivation and language comparison, correctly describing Italian and its sister Romance languages as stemming from Latin. He offered a basically correct enumeration and classification of the Italian dialects, thus getting linguistic geography off to an early start. His description of the ideal Italian literary tongue as a conglomeration of dialects rather than a simple outgrowth of his own Florentine Tuscan is still open to controversy, and he oversimplifies when he defines the Italian Volgare as Latin without the rules of grammar. ...