Page:On the Stratification of Language - Muller - 1868.djvu/8

3 mysteries of human speech as much as by the mysteries of human thought; and what we call grammar and the laws of language, nay, all the technical terms which are still current in our schools, such as noun and verb, case and number, infinitive and participle, all this was first discovered and named by the philosophers and grammarians of Greece, to whom, in spite of all our new discoveries, I believe we are still beholden, whether consciously or unconsciously, for more than half of our intellectual life. But the interest which those ancient Greek philosophers took in language was purely philosophical. It was the form, far more than the matter of speech which seemed to them a subject worthy of philosophical speculation. The idea that there was, even in their days, an immense mass of accumulated speech to be sifted, to be analysed, and to be accounted for somehow, before any theories on the nature of language could be safely started, hardly ever entered their minds, or, when it did, as we see here and there in Plato's Kratylos, it soon vanished, without leaving any permanent impression. Every people and every generation have their own problems to solve. The problem that occupied Plato in his Kratylos was, if I understand him rightly, the possibility of a perfect language, a correct, true, or ideal language, a language founded on his own philosophy, his own system of types or ideas. He was too wise a man to attempt, like Bishop Wilkins, the actual construction of a philosophical language. But, like Leibniz, he just lets us see that a perfect language is conceivable, and that the chief reason of the imperfections of real language must be found in the fact that its original framers were ignorant of the true nature of things, ignorant of dialectic philosophy, and therefore incapable of naming