Page:Sayce Intro Science of Language v1.djvu/18

one popular dialect to the rank of a literary language, and obliged the educated Hindu not only to study his own speech in its earlier and later forms, but to compare it with other more or less related idioms as well. Since Indian philology, however, is intimately connected with the history of the modern science of Language, it will be more convenient to consider it further on.

The problems of language were naturally among the first to present themselves to the activity of the Greek mind. Already the instinct of their wonderful speech, itself the fitting creation and reflex of the national character, had found in the word λόγος; an expression of the close relationship that exists between reasoned thought and the words in which it clothes itself; and the question which Greek philosophy sought to answer was the nature of this relationship, and of the language wherein it is embodied. Do words exist, it was asked, by nature (φύσει) or by convention (ϑέσει); do the sounds which we utter exactly and necessarily represent things as they are in themselves, or are they merely the arbitrary marks and symbols conventionally assigned to the objects we observe and the conceptions we form? This was the question that the greatest of the Greek thinkers attempted to solve; and the controversy it called forth divided Greek philosophy into two camps, and lies at the bottom of all its contributions to linguistic science. It is true that the question was really a philosophic one, and that the advocates of free-will on the one side, and of necessity on the other, naturally saw in speech either the creation and plaything of the human will, or else a power over which man has as little control as over the forces of nature. Important as were the results