Progress in Language; With Special Reference to English
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you c …… [ 展开全部 ]an read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX. ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. I. METHOD. 256. GOETHE, in his Dichtung und Wahrheit, relates how in Strasburg he was in constant intercourse with Herder at the time when the latter was engaged in ...(展开全部)
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX. ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. I. METHOD. 256. GOETHE, in his Dichtung und Wahrheit, relates how in Strasburg he was in constant intercourse with Herder at the time when the latter was engaged in writing his prize essay for the Berlin Academy on the origin of language; and how he read the manuscript, although, as he confesses himself, he was very little prepared to deal with that subject; " I had," he says, " never bestowed much thought on that kind of thing; I was still too much engrossed by present things (zu sehr in der mitte der dinge befangen) to think about their beginning or end ." If it is not presuming too much to compare oneself with Goethe, even in so small a matter, and one, moreover, of so negative a character, I must confess that I too, like Goethe, have given most study to languages as they are now-a-days, to the " middle " of languages; the earlier stages I have studied mainly, if not exclusively, in so far as they are capable of throwing light upon the languages which are still living: I have therefore only an imperfect and sporadie knowledge of the vast literature which deals with the origin of speech; and the impressions left by occasionally reading some book or short paper on the subject have not encouraged me to master that literature more systematically. Under these circumstances I felt greatly relieved to come across the following verdict of WHITNEY'S: "No theme in linguistic science is more often and more voluminously treated than this, and by scholars of every grade and tendency; nor any, it may be added, with less profitable result in proportion to the labour expended; the greater part of what is said and written upon it is mere windy talk, the assertion of subjective views which commend themselves to no mind save the one that produces them... [ 收起 ]
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