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Germany was full of thought, and her universities swarmed with philosophers and grand thinkers in every department of knowledge. Humboldt was the friend and companion of the greatest poets, historians, philologists, artists, statesmen, critics and logicians of his time.
The men of my family that is, my uncle John, my father, and my eldest brother were all philologists, and extremely fond of the study of language. Grammar was favorite light reading, and the philosophy which lies at the root of human speech a frequent subject of discussion and research with them; but they none of them spoke foreign languages with ease or fluency.
The chief fault is that since 1870 the philologists have sat in the high schools as beati possidentes and laid chief stress upon the knowledge to be acquired and not on the formation of character and the demands of the present time.
There is one thing that naturalists could certainly learn from philologists, viz., to define their termini technici, and not to believe that wonders can be performed with words, if only they are spoken loud enough. The following letter comes from a naturalist, but is written in a sincere and courteous tone, and deserves to be made public.
We could hardly find a better analogy when we are dealing with some of the difficult and obscure features of the evolution of species. In both cases we find the action of the same natural laws. All philologists of any competence in their science now agree that all human languages have been gradually evolved from very rudimentary beginnings.
The number of these written characters is variously estimated by European philologists at from 25,000 to 50,000, although it is believed that one may become a fair reader of Chinese literature, by acquiring a knowledge of say 10,000 of the pictorial symbols, with their allowable variations of form in use.
You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists, Claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons you can get the life-histories of all of them but one.
He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice. Philologists have said that there are but two or three languages, properly speaking, among all the numerous tribes which formerly occupied the country that now composes the United States.
But, reverting to pronunciation, tare-ier would, of course, more correctly reverberate the sound of the French original than either of the other usages, while it would possess the advantage of conveying a suggestion of that proclivity for tearing, so characteristic of the animal designated by the term. On this important question the learned philologists wrangle.
It is strange to see philologists slowly reconstructing, here and there, fragments of the Aryan, 'And speak in a tongue which man speaks no more. Among the many excellent elementary and introductory works on philology which have appeared of late years, this of Müller's is on several accounts the best.
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