Unit 2 Major Issues of Language Study in Early Periods

I. Outline

1. Ancient interpretations of language

2. Panini and his contribution into language study

3. The issue of origin

II. Objectives

After completing this unit, you should be able to:

1. Comment on the ancient views of language and its role in human life.

2 Identify the most important accomplishments of Panini.

3. Account for the ancient approaches to the issue of origin and interpret never ceasing attempts to find out which language was the first on our planet.

III. Key words

Endowment, sacred, name, another being, accurate pronunciation, Vedic Sanslerit, sutras, origin.

IV. In the beginning

Linguistics is the name given to the discipline which studies human language. One of the major questions that comes immediately to mind is that is human language. No wonder it was of special interest in the ancient times too, even at the huge period when there was no linguistics as a discipline in its own right. But language has always been so closely tied in with such fields as philosophy, logic, rhetoric and religion that it is rare to find a great number of any period, most ancient too, who does not comment on the role of language in human life or at least on the role of language in relation to his ideas. Early ideas about language are also to be found in a much broader context than that which normally associated with the development of human thought. There has always been a considerable body of tradition and myth in many cultures concerning the nature and origins of language. It is important for the linguist to be at least aware of this in formulating his own approach, even though he may find little here of direct relevance to his practical problems. Research in cultural anthropology has shown quite clearly that most primitive cultures (and, indeed, some of the not so primitive) were sure that a divinity had been involved with language from the very start. It is God who gives Adam the power of naming, as described in the Book of Genesis (‘And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name’); and similar stories are not hard to find in other cultures. The god Thoth was the originator of speech and writing to the Egyptians. The Babylonians attributed it to their god, Nabû. A heaven-sent water-turtle with marks on its back brought writing to the Chinese, it is said. According to Icelandic saga, Odin was the inventor of runic script. And Brahma is reputed to have given the knowledge of writing to the Hindu race. It should not be surprising to see such a widespread and deep-rooted connection between divinity and language. We can see this if we look at the superstitious and mystical ideas about the nature of language which affect many primitive societies, or – at another level – children. To take the latter case first, the apparently miraculous power of language is early appreciated by children: a cry produces comfort, makes food materialize, in a sense ‘controls’ objects. Children look at language with respect: strict adherence is expected for any language rules used in a game; there is a clear awareness of word taboos; name-calling is a standard and highly effective insult. For the primitive also, it is not difficult to see why language should seem to control objects. Writing, for instance, would be regarded as omniscient: it could tell a man things though many miles away from the writer; it could even provide information about the message-carrier himself. There are regular tales in the anthropological literature of natives stealing an object in a parcel, but delivering the message which accompanied it, only to be found out! They felt the writing had a voice, a life of its own – or may be that a god lived in the letters. From such ideas, that messages ‘spoke’, came many beliefs and theories. In some cultures, alphabets began to be interpreted mystically, as a proof of the existence of God, or as a way of predicting the future. Names were seen as embodying the power of their owners. According to Scripture, one way the true God was to be distinguished from idols was through his voice: he would answer when they called upon; they could not.

It was only a short step from the belief that words were somehow connected with things to the notion that words were things, and had a separate existence in reality. The concept of word-souls is found in places as far apart as Ancient Egypt, modern Greenland, and the pages of Plato. Words were held to embody the nature of things – a belief still fairly common, even in parts of the ‘civilized’ word. But a more important step was to see words as all-powerful, and then to use them deliberately to control or influence events. Runes were originally charms, and the power of a charm or an amulet depended largely on the writing upon it – the more spiritual the subject-matter, the better the charm. We find this kind of belief in Jewish phylacteries, and in the occasional Christian custom, such as that of fanning a sick person with pages of the Bible, or making him eat paper with a prayer on it. Again, if words control things, then their power could be intensified by saying them over: as the anthropologist Malinowski put it, ‘the repetitive statement of certain words is believed to produce the reality stated’. Magic formulae, incantations, rhythmical listing of proper names, and many other rites exemplify the intensifying power of words – and even, at times, word hysteria. Devils, or people, can be controlled by language in these traditions too – it is not simply a question of physical objects. There are many examples in folklore of forbidden names which, when discovered, break the evil spell of their owners – tom-tit-tot, Vargaluska, Rumpelstilzkin. Many primitive peoples do not do not like to hear their name used, for a personal name is a supreme, unique attribute, wherein resides the whole of one’s being. A characteristic situation would be for a tribal chief to take a new name, let us say the name ‘life’ – then a new word would not be used in inauspicious circumstances. Nor is it usual for the names of the dead to be uttered: while a name endures, a dead person does also, and those who utter the name bring the evil of death upon themselves. If the name involved was one’s ‘secret’ or ‘special’ name, then, of course, concern was doubled. Many Australian and New Zealand tribes have this belief; and every ancient Egyptian had two names – one for the world, and one for God, which was never divulged. To know a person ’secret’ name was really to have power over him. Only a god could acceptably know people and use their names so freely. In some cultures, if a child died, the next by the same mother would be called by some evil name, to show the death spirit that the child was not worth bothering about. In Roman levies, too, the authorities took good care to enroll first men with auspicious names – Victor, Felix, and the like. From another point of view, once the billion names of God have been intoned (goes the legend) the word will end, because its raison d’être will have ceased to exist. (Recently, someone has wanted to test this, using a prayer-wheel attached to an electronic speech synthesizer!)

Examples of this kind abound in the history of cultures. But primitive logophobia and logophilia (one might call it) have little specific importance for understanding the history of language can study. They simply indicate how deeply ideas about language can come to be ingrained within the individual or group psyche, and testify to the existence of a language awareness which exercised considerable influence in the development of particular issues later.

Great thinkers of the past were also preoccupied with the issue of language. Reflection on what language is gave rise to many theories. One of the most remarkable though very rarely interpreted is the theory expounded in the writings of Thatian, one of the great ancient Greek philosophers is who lived in the period of late antiquity.

The philosopher shares the common view for his time that language is an endowment (gift). His own contribution is in the elaboration of the consequences of the language being an endowment to human race. According to him human being only begins with language. He actually views language as another being, a distinctively human phenomenon. Thanks to language people are able to conceive of the word around them and their own distinctively human existence.

One of the most ancient linguistic traditions originated in India more than 2500 years ago. It came into existence due to many factors, one of the most important being the need to retain important being the need to retain accurate pronunciation of sacred texts.

In ancient India, the Hindu priests had begun to realize (around the fifth century B.C.) that the language of their oldest hymns, Vedic Sanskrit, was no longer the same, either in pronunciation or grammar, as the contemporary language. Now this is a common enough linguistic fact, that languages are continually though gradually changing, but it had particular point for the priests and scholars of the time; for an important part of their belief was that certain religious ceremonies, to be successful, needed to reproduce accurately the original pronunciation and text of the hymns used. The solution adopted in order to preserve the early states of the language from the effects of time was to determine exactly what the salient features of Vedic Sanskrit were, and to write them down as a set of rule as – in other words, describe the grammar and pronunciation of the old language. In this way, there would be an authoritative text, one not bound down by the vagaries of individual oral radiation. The earliest evidence we have of this feat is the work carried out by Panini in the fourth century B.C., in the form of a set of around 4.000 aphoristic statements about the language’s structure, known as sutras. This was, in fact, a grammar of Sanskrit, and its effect went far beyond the original intentions of the authors. For in producing this work, a great number of phonetic and grammatical minutiae were presented, and methodological and theoretical principles and ideas developed, some of which are still used in modern linguistics. A similar, though less influential development took place later (around the seventh century A.D.), in connection with the Koran and Arabic studies. The fact that the Koran was not to be translated, and was to receive a very literal interpretation, promoted considerable study of Arabic, both as a native and as a foreign language, and there were developments in lexicography (dictionary-making), the study of pronunciation, and language-history in subsequent centuries which stemmed directly from this essentially religious stimulus.

But there were other stirrings as well. Pure interest into the nature of the nature of language and how it came into being made the issue of its origin very attractive to many generations of scholars. Especially exciting was the question about the first language. This question was to the fore in early Greek speculations and it was raised in various forms by other civilizations too, such as the Indian, Arabic, and Egyptian. One indication of this, which all histories of linguistics like to quote, is recorded in the writing of Herodotus, the Greek historian. In his second book he tells of what may well have been the first psycholinguistic experiment. Apparently Psammetichus, an Egyptian king of about the seventh century B.C., wanted to find out which of all the peoples of the world was the most ancient. His way of determining this was to discover the oldest language, which, he thought, would be sure evidence of the oldest race. To do this, he placed two newly-born children of poor parentage in solitary confinement, but for the care of a shepherd, with strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence. He assumed that, when the time came for them to speak, having received no external stimulation from contemporary language, they would revert naturally to the world’s first. After two years, the children began to repeat constantly an utterance (recorded as ‘bekos’) in the presence of the shepherd, who immediately reported this to the Pharaoh. Psammetichus, upon making inquiries, discovered that this was the word for ‘bread’ in Phrygian, a neighboring language. The unavoidable conclusion for him, therefore, was that this language must have been the world’s original tongue, and that the Phrygian race was more primeval than his own.

This ‘experiment’ makes a fine story, and it is easy to be contemptuous of the Pharaoh’s naїvety. His experiment has, no validity; and the importance of imitation for the development of spoken language is by no means disproved, particularly if we consider the close similarity of the sounds of ‘bekos’ to the only sounds the children would be have consistently heard – the sheep! But it would be wrong to ridicule, for Psammetichus’ curiosity on this issue is by no means an isolated case; in a way he illustrates a question which has since developed an almost archetypal significance.

The modern linguistic view, on the whole, is that of the early linguist, Whitney, who condemned most of what had been said in connection with this topic as being ‘mere wordy talk’. At the turn of this century, the Linguistic Society of Paris made a standing order barring papers on the origin of language from its meetings. This was partly a reaction to the previous century of vague theorizing on the subject, but it was also an expression of an awareness that the question of the world’s oldest language, and the more general question of the origins of language, were not questions of a scientific nature. There was no evidence, no experimental test, which could be brought to bear on the matter. Rhetoric aside, there was no way of evaluating contradictory speculations. What evidence there was about language-history militated against acceptance of even the most basic assumptions used in the arguments about primevalness. The studies of comparative philology in the nineteenth century had shown no signs of a primitiveness that could be taken as a hallmark of an early or original tongue, though this had been frequently taken for granted in debate (’the first language must have been a simple one’). Indeed, the opposite was the case: the further back one traced a language in time, the more complex it seemed to become; and the earliest extant remains of language were clearly many thousands of years later than the time when language may well have developed in man. Scholars like Edward Sapir constantly emphasized the view that to call languages primitive was in any case a misunderstanding. ‘We know of no people that is not possessed of a fully developed language’, he said in his book Language.