Page:Sayce Intro Science of Language v1.djvu/14
CHAPTER I.
theories of languages.
“If we preserve in our histories of the world the names of those who are said to have discovered the physical elements—the names of Thales, and Anaximenes, and Empedocles—we ought not to forget the names of the discoverers of the elements of language—the founders of one of the most useful and most successful branches of philosophy—the first grammarians.”—Max Müller.
“Speech is silvern, silence is golden,” is the well-known saying of a modern prophet, wearied with the idle utterances of a transition age, and forgetful that the prophet, or προφητής, is himself but the “spokesman” of another, and that the era which changed the Hebrew seer into the Nabi, or “proclaimer,” brought with it also the beginning of culture and civilization, and the consciousness of a high religious destiny. Far truer was the instinct of the old poet of the Rig-Veda, the most ancient monument of our Aryan literature, written, it may be, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ, when he calls “the Word” one of the highest goddesses “which rushes onward like the wind, which bursts through heaven and earth, and, awe-inspiring to each one that it loves, makes him a Brahman, a poet, and a sage.” The haphazard etymology which saw in the μέροπες ἄνθρωποι of Homer “articulate-speaking