Founding Grammars (26 page)

The authors say that they would be happy to see a trustworthy work on disputed usages. However, to be of value, it would need to be based on “the principle that correct usage is not something to be proved by processes of logic, or something to be evolved from the depths of one's consciousness, but something to be found out by the patient, and careful, and wide-reaching study of the language itself.” They doubt that such a book will appear soon. Writing it would take time-consuming “labor, and thought, and research.” Also, as White and other verbal critics became more knowledgeable about English, they would inevitably be less inclined to critique it as they do now.
10

White, always feisty, responds defiantly to this bludgeoning in his
Galaxy
article, published several months later. He realizes that the purpose of these attacks is to expose him as “a shallow pretender to knowledge which I did not possess.” This criticism gives him little concern. It has never been his intention, he says, to lay claim to philological scholarship—he makes no pretensions to learning. He feels compelled to point out, however, that all except one of the many Anglo-Saxon examples scattered through the
Courant
articles are familiar to him. He has no doubt that he could find just as many others that would support his own position rather than theirs.

These are minor issues. White devotes most of his attention to answering the heart of their criticism—his position that reason always trumps illogical forms, even those adopted by eminent writers. Here White remains adamant. He says, “I believe, assert, and endeavor to maintain that in language, as in morals, there is a higher law than mere usage.… This is the law of reason.”

He argues that producing examples of certain usages from Chaucer and Shakespeare, as his opponents have done, is beside the point. They obviously believe that eminent writers give a word or phrase authority, but he doesn't, so there is really no basis for discussion. He goes further—“This citing of poets as authority on the
correct
use of language is to me one of the most amazing of the aberrations of the professorial mind.… There is no monstrosity, no extravagance in the use of words, no verbal outrage of the laws of reason … that could not be justified by their example.” He still firmly believes that great writers sometimes make usage mistakes.
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Not unnaturally, White felt deeply insulted by the contemptuous tone of the
Courant
articles. He describes one comment as “at best rather worthy of a cheap and lively newspaper than of a Yale professor.” Of another criticism he says, “If this is a fair mode of argument or attack at Yale, I am very glad that I was bred in another school.” He calls the articles “a fine example” of “malicious … and destructive criticism.” Nonetheless the authors have not shaken White from his point of view. He remains tenaciously committed to the claims in his book in spite of all the arguments against them that the
Courant
articles provide. He doesn't accept Lounsbury and Whitney's premises, so their conclusions are irrelevant to him. White and his critics are traveling along paths too widely divergent ever to intersect.
12

*   *   *

The clash between White and the Yale professors is similar in some ways to earlier grammar conflicts. Previous disagreements between orthodox grammarians and their critics also hinged on issues such as the histories of words and the legitimacy of popular usages. Nearly one hundred years before the
College Courant
articles appeared, Webster was lambasting other grammarians for their dismissal of Horne Tooke's etymologies, as well as attacking them for their refusal to accept common locutions like
Who did she speak to?
Nor was it remarkable that Lounsbury and Whitney justified their position by claiming to be more knowledgeable and more sensible than their opponent. Nearly every grammar book writer after Lowth made some such statement in his preface.

The Yale professors, however, gave this familiar attitude a new spin. They didn't just attack White's conclusions—they questioned his right to speak on the subject at all. Throughout the
Courant
articles, they repeatedly suggest that White's errors stem from straying outside his area of expertise. Unlike them he has not studied or taught philology, nor has he done extensive research on the history and structure of English. They imply that he bases his linguistic judgments on his own reasoning abilities because it's easier than the “long and patient study” required to master his subject. In other words, he is an amateur, while they are professionals.

Lounsbury and Whitney were pioneering a new way of analyzing English, one that owed more to the natural sciences than the grammar writings of earlier eras. The trend toward scientific classification that influenced the rational grammarians in the 1820s had grown stronger in recent decades, especially after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species.
Scientific rigor was the new order of the day. Language scholars were now beginning to see how scientific principles of careful observation and description could also benefit grammar and usage studies. These new methods called for specialized knowledge, however. The Yale professors had it and White did not.

Thirty-two-year-old Thomas Lounsbury, an 1859 graduate of Yale, had recently been appointed a professor of English language and literature at that institution. Lounsbury was a burly, bearded man who resembled a soldier more than a staid college professor—he was a Union army officer during the Civil War—but the scope of his learning was impressive. His specialties ranged from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the history of the English language. As the
Courant
articles make clear, Anglo-Saxon English was one of his strengths. Later in his career, Lounsbury's interests would expand further into spelling and pronunciation issues, as well as usage standards. Among his prolific writings are books on all three topics.

William Dwight Whitney came to philology from science rather than literature. He grew up intensely interested in the natural world. As a young man, he shot and mounted a collection of New England birds that he later presented to Yale. He also accompanied his older brother Josiah (after whom California's Mount Whitney is named) on an 1849 geological survey of the area around Lake Superior. William originally planned a career in medicine, but on the first day of his apprenticeship in a doctor's office, he contracted measles. By the time he completed his convalescence, a chance discovery had sent him in a new direction. Browsing among the volumes in Josiah's library one day, William found a book about Sanskrit, the language of traditional Hindu religious and literary texts. Intrigued, he began to read it. Before long he was engrossed in the details of Sanskrit grammar, and had transferred his fascination with classifying from nature to languages.

In 1849 Whitney began training for his new career. First he enrolled in Yale for a year to study with one of the few Sanskrit specialists living in the United States. Next he traveled to Germany to learn from eminent language scholars there. Sanskrit eventually led him to comparative language studies—a key component of philology—and the historical study of English. He made quick strides in his chosen field. In 1854, when he was twenty-seven, Yale offered him a professorship of Sanskrit and related language studies.

A man of medium height who wore a long beard during most of his life, Whitney looked more like a college professor than Lounsbury and had equally impressive scholarly credentials. By 1870, when he and Lounsbury launched their attack on White, he was widely respected both for his work on Sanskrit and his writings on language study generally. In 1867 he published
Language and the Study of Language,
which introduced the latest discoveries of philology to a broad audience. In 1869 he helped found the American Philological Association and became its first president. White was familiar with Whitney's work—he cited Whitney's 1867 book admiringly in
Words and Their Uses
for its negative remarks about cheap newspapers. It was one of the two men's few areas of agreement.

*   *   *

The path from Sanskrit to English usage rules may not seem clear-cut, but in the early decades of the nineteenth century this ancient Indian tongue became the catalyst for a profoundly new approach to analyzing languages. Before then, Sanskrit had been nearly unknown to Europeans. One of the first westerners to learn it was a colonial Indian judge named Sir William Jones. A gifted language scholar, Jones was already fluent in several languages when he arrived in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 1783. He was eager to learn Sanskrit, partly because the literature attracted him, but even more because Sanskrit was the language of the Hindu law code. Most British judges in India relied on interpreters when hearing cases. Sir William wanted to read the laws for himself.

After a few months of lessons, Jones began to notice striking similarities between Sanskrit and the two classical languages of Europe, Latin and Greek. He discovered dozens of words that are similar in form and mean the same thing—Sanskrit
m
ā
tar,
Latin
m
ā
ter,
Greek
m
ē
t
ē
r,
“mother”; Sanskrit
pitar,
Latin
pater,
Greek
pat
ē
r,
“father”;
pat, p
ē
s, pous,
“foot”;
mam, m
ē
, me,
“me”; and many others. Chance resemblances can occur between words in any two languages, but the similarities in this case were too numerous to make that explanation probable. Furthermore, the words came from the most basic sections of the vocabulary—names for relatives, body parts, numbers, pronouns. Cultures rarely borrow such terms. If those words correspond closely in two languages, the languages are probably historically related.

Sir William also noticed that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek show similarities in their grammar. For instance, they conjugate verbs in a similar way. The verb
to be
is irregular in all three languages, with forms that look remarkably alike. Sanskrit
asmi, asi, asti
(“I am, you are, he/she is”) matches Latin
sum, es, est
and Greek
eimi, ei, esti.
The odds against three unrelated languages displaying such a pattern by chance are astronomical, especially when the languages share many other common features as well.

Describing Sanskrit in a 1786 presentation to fellow members of Kolkata's Asiatic Society, Sir William declared it to be “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.” He went on to surmise that the three languages were “sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He also speculated—correctly, as it would turn out—that Persian, Irish, and Gothic (an extinct German language) belonged in the same group.
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Sir William's discovery created a sensation in scientific circles. Others before him had noted that Latin and Greek share many common features, but most people attributed these resemblances to the linguistic intermingling that occurred during centuries of trade and conquest. This explanation didn't work when Sanskrit was added to the mix. Sanskrit speakers would have had little if any contact with the two western cultures of classical times, so vocabulary exchange was extremely unlikely. The simplest explanation for the host of similarities is that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek are all offshoots of a single much older tongue.

When word of Sir William's theory spread, language scholars were inspired to examine other European languages using his method. They began systematically comparing broad swaths of vocabulary in search of cross-linguistic patterns. Eventually scholars would conclude that most of the languages of Europe and western Asia are related—descended from a “common source” that scholars would name Indo-European. Indo-European originated several thousand years ago, probably in the Russian steppes or somewhere nearby. As its speakers migrated east and west, their once unified language splintered into many distinct languages, but traces of common ancestry are still apparent in the vocabulary and grammar of the descendants. English is a member of this vast language family, part of the Germanic subgroup that also includes German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.

Even more inspiring than the discovery of this hidden linguistic relationship was the way that Sir William had reached his conclusions. Word historians of the past like Horne Tooke and Webster usually proceeded with their etymologies word by word, often speculating about a word's origin, then looking for evidence to support their ideas. Sir William's method was closer to comparative anatomy. He looked at the languages in question as systems, and searched for widespread patterns rather than resemblances between specific words. Looking for broad patterns is a surer way to discover linguistic relationships than considering words one at a time because the changes that occur in languages tend to affect certain sounds or grammatical features, not just random words.

When comparing two languages for signs of a connection, the patterns of differences can be as revealing as the similarities. For instance, Latin
pater
and English
father
mean the same thing and are similar enough to be related, but with slightly mismatched sounds, such as the initial
p
and
f.
Comparing a whole range of Latin and English word pairs reveals that the
p
/
f
mismatch is not unique to
pater
and
father.
It shows up in many word pairs—
p
ē
s
/
foot, piscis
/
fish, p
Å«
lex
/
flea, pluit
/
flow.