The Principles of Comparative PhilologyTrübner & Company, 1874 - 381 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
Accadian accent affix agglutinative analogy aorist Aramaic Aryan Aryan family Assyrian Babylonia Basque become borrowed Buddhism Chinese civilisation common Comparative Philology comparison compound conception Curtius dative denote derived dialects distinction dual ence English Etruscan existence explain expression fact Finnic flection gender generalisations genitive Glottology grammar Greek Grimm's law guage Hebrew idea idioms implies individual inflection influence instance instinct isolating Latin laws lexicon linguistic Max Müller meaning mind modern monosyllabic myth mythology nature never nominative noun object origin outward period personal pronoun phenomena philologist phonetic decay plural postposition primitive Aryan principle pronominal pronunciation race radical reduplicated relations religion Sanskrit savage scientific Semitic sentence side signification singular society sound speech stage substantive suffixes syllable tense Teutonic theory thought tion tive tongue trace tribes triliteral Turanian verb verbal vocable vowel whic words
Popular passages
Page 105 - The reason why scholars have discovered no more than these two or three great families of speech is very simple. There were no more, and we cannot make more. Families of languages are very peculiar formations ; they are, and they must be, the exception, not the rule, in the growth of language.
Page 276 - ... early stage the myth is part and parcel of the current mode of philosophizing ; the explanation which it offers is, for the time, the natural one, the one which would most readily occur to any one thinking on the theme with which the myth is concerned. But by and by the mode of philosophizing has changed ; explanations which formerly seemed quite obvious no longer occur to any one, but the myth has acquired an independent substantive existence, and continues to be handed down from parents to...
Page 324 - water glide away, And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea. The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome, In search of mischief still on earth to roam. The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair, And sport and flutter in the fields of air.
Page 310 - Issi assented, and henceforth Koit handed the torch every evening 'to Ammarik, and Ammarik took it and extinguished it. Only during four weeks in summer they remain together at midnight ; Koit hands the dying torch to Ammarik, but Ammarik does not let it die, but lights it again with her breath. Then their hands are stretched out, and their lips meet, and the blush of the face of Ammarik colours the midnight sky.
Page 136 - The power which the human mind has over its instruments, and independent of their imperfections, is strikingly illustrated by the history of this form of speech, which has successfully answered all the purposes of a cultivated, reflecting, studious, and ingenious people throughout a career of unequalled duration ; which has been put to far higher and more varied uses than most of the multitude of highly organized dialects spoken among men — dialects rich in flexibility, adaptiveness, and power...
Page 80 - A German colony in Pennsylvania was cut off from frequent communication with Europe for about a quarter of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution between 1792 and 1815. So marked had been the effect even of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard of Saxe Weimar travelled among them a few years after the peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in Germany in the preceding century,* and retaining a dialect which at home had already become obsolete.
Page 78 - neither could they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round, &c. ; for "hard" they would say "like a stone;" for "tall" they would say " long legs," &c. ; for " round " they said
Page 157 - In fact, we may lay it down as a general rule, that whenever two nations, equally advanced in civilisation, are brought into close contact, the language of the most numerous will prevail. Where, however, a small body of invaders brings a higher civilisation with them, the converse is the more likely to happen.
Page 78 - like a stone ; ' for ' tall,' they would say ' long legs,' etc. ; and for ' round,' they said ' like a ball,'
Page 149 - Indo-European language, with all its fulness and inflective suppleness, is descended from an original monosyllabic tongue; that our ancestors talked with one another in single syllables, indicative of the ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations...