Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/268

246 immense progress which the study of language has made during the past few years, the world is still full of hasty generalizers, who would rather skim wide and difficult conclusions off the surface of half-examined facts than wait to gather them as the fruits of slow and laborious research. The greater part of the rubbish which is even now heaping up in the path of our science, encumbering its progress, comes from the neglect of these simple principles: that no man is qualified to compare fruitfully two languages or groups who is not deeply grounded in the knowledge of both, and that no language can be fruitfully compared with others which stand, or are presumed to stand, in a more distant relationship with it, until it has been first compared with its own next of kin.

We see, it may be farther remarked, upon how narrow and imperfect a basis those comparative philologists build who are content with a facile setting side by side of words; whose materials are simple vocabularies, longer or shorter, of terms representing common ideas. There was a period in the history of linguistic science when this was the true method of investigation, and it still continues to be useful in certain departments of the field of research. It is the first experimental process; it determines the nearest and most obvious groupings, and prepares the way for more penetrating study. Travellers, explorers, in regions exhibiting great diversity of idiom and destitute of literary records—like our western wilds, or the vast plains of inner Africa—do essential service by gathering and supplying such material, anything better being rendered inaccessible by lack of leisure, opportunity, or practice. But it must be regarded as provisional and introductory, acceptable only because the best that is to be had. Genetic correspondences in limited lists of words, however skilfully selected, are apt to be conspicuous only when the tongues they represent are of near kindred; and even then they may be in no small measure obscured or counterbalanced by discordances, so that deeper and closer study is needed, in order to bring out satisfactorily to view the fact and degree of relationship. Penetration of the secrets of linguistic structure and growth,