Page:Sayce Intro Science of Language v1.djvu/17

will call Accadian, had ceased to be spoken before the seventeenth century b.c., but not before the civilization and culture it enshrined had been adopted by a new race, who had to study and learn the dead tongue in which they were preserved, as the scholars of the Middle Ages had to study and learn Latin. Hence came the need of dictionaries, grammars, and reading-books; and the clay tablets of Nineveh accordingly present us not only with interlinear and parallel Assyrian translations of Accadian texts, arranged upon the Hamiltonian method, but also with syllabaries and lexicons, with phrase-books and grammars of the two languages. It is the first attempt ever made to draw up a grammar, and the comparative form the attempt has assumed shows how impossible was even the suggestion of such a thing without the comparison of more than one form of speech. The vocabularies are compiled sometimes on a classificatory principle, sometimes on an alphabetic one, sometimes on the principle of grouping a number of derivations around their common root; and the latter principle enunciates at once the primary doctrine and object of comparative philology—the analysis of language into its simplest elements. With the discovery of roots we may date the possibility and the beginning of linguistic science.

Next in order of time to the grammarians of Babylonia and Assyria came the grammarians of India, whose labours again were called forth by the comparison of different forms of speech. The sacred language of the Veda had already become antiquated and obscure, while the rise and spread of Buddhism had raised more than