| OCR Text |
Show 70 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF INDIAN LANGUAGES. in many of the dissertations on Indian languages found in the literature of the subject. The assumed superiority of the Greek and Latin languages to the English and other modern civilized tongues, has in part been the cause of the many erroneous conceptions of the rank of Indian tongues. When the student discovers that many of the characteristics of the classic languages appear in the Indian which are to a greater or less extent lost in the modern civilized languages, he has at once assumed the superiority of the Indian tongue; and when he has further discovered that some of these characteristics are even more highly developed than in the classic ones he has been led to still further exalt them. This exaggeration has still another cause. The many curious linguistic devices by which great specification of expression is attained has led some scholars into undue admiration, as they have failed to appreciate the loss in the economy and power which these peculiar methods entail. It is proposed to set forth the rank of Indian languages by briefly comparing them with the English and incidentally with some other languages. In the comparison we have but fragmentary materials for use. Any extended discussion, therefore, would be out of place, but it is believed that a brief statement of the matter will result in clearing away the errors into which some persons have fallen. This leads us to speak of language as organized. By the grammatic processes mentioned in the last section, language is organized. Organization postulates the differentiation of organs and their combination into integers. The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence. For example, let us take the words, John, father, and love. John is the name of an individual; love is the name of a mental action, and father the name of a person. We put them together, John loves father, and they express a thought; John becomes a noun, and is the subject of the sentence; love becomes a verb, and is the predicant; father a noun, and is the object; and we now have an organized sentence. A sentence requires |
