Baur's Philological Introduction to Greek and Latin for Studenis

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WITH the publication of Jacob Grimm's “German Grammar” the comparative study of language entered upon a new period of existence. Bopp and the other great founders of Comparative Philology had been too busily engaged in laying the foundations of the science, in determining its main laws and principles, and in classifying whole groups or families of speech, to devote themselves to the minute and special investigation of single languages, and trace therein the application and action of the laws they had formulated. But a time came when the work of the pioneer was finished, and when it was necessary for special scholars to elaborate the details of the new science and to strengthen or modify its conclusions by a patient examination of individual dialects. The old-fashioned “philology” which had professed to analyse the forms of a language, as preserved in its literature, had proceeded upon a wrong method and had accordingly arrived at wrong results; its area of comparison was too narrow and limited, its procedure was capricious and at haphazard, and its doctrines were based rather upon individual taste than upon inductive reasoning. When it was discovered, however, that language is as much subject to the action of invariable laws as the bodily frame of man, that every sound in the words we utter is due to conditions which can be accurately gauged and determined, the “philology” of the last century underwent a complete change. It stands to the modern science of language in much the same relation as alchemy stands to chemistry. The general laws of language which had been obtained by a careful and far-reaching comparison of phenomena, were applied to explain and illuminate the facts presented by special languages, and these in their turn served to confirm or modify the generalisations already made. Baur's Philological Introduction to Greek and Latin for Studenis. Translated from the German by C. Kegan Paul and E. D. Stone. (London: King and Co., 1876.)