Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love words, the history of ideas, or the Victorian debate over science and human nature. It also welcomes students of linguistics curious about where the field began.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Language, he said, can be studied like rocks or plants, and the study deserves a place among the sciences. He was Friedrich Max Müller, an Oxford scholar who had edited the Rig Veda, the oldest Hindu hymns. His lectures became one of the most widely read books on language in the English-speaking world. You will hear how he sorted the tongues of the world, why he mocked popular theories of how speech began, and which of his claims have not lasted.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1Language can be studied as a scienceFree
- 2Related languages share one common ancestor
- 3Languages grow by natural change, not design
- 4Three families and three stages of speech
- 5Words are built from a small set of roots
- 6Popular theories of language origin fall short
- 7Thought and speech cannot be pulled apart
- 8Myths grow from the shadows of old words
- 9What has lasted and what has fallen away
Punkt 1 von 9
Language can be studied as a science
Müller asks why a subject so close to us is so little understood. Everyone speaks, yet few ask what speech is made of. His answer is a recent discovery. Scholars had found a method to compare languages and test their kinship.
Sanskrit, the ancient sacred language of India, gives the study a decisive push. Sir William Jones argues that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are so alike in roots and grammar that they must share a common source. German scholars such as Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm then turned that guess into a method.
For Müller a science needs classification, general laws and a clear subject, and language offers all three. Even mistakes in language have causes we can trace. They are evidence, and each one carries a history.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache
What is Lectures on the Science of Language about?
It is a set of public lectures arguing that language can be studied as a science. Müller covers how languages are related, how words change, what roots are, how speech may have begun, and how language links to thought and myth.
What did Max Müller mean by the Aryan family of languages?
He used Aryan for the group now called Indo-European, which includes Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Slavic languages. He meant a shared language ancestry only and warned that it did not prove a shared race.
What are the bow-wow and pooh-pooh theories?
Müller gave these names to two theories of how speech began. Bow-wow says words copy natural sounds, and pooh-pooh says words grew from instinctive cries. He rejected both, since neither explains how words come to express general ideas.
When were the lectures given and are they still accurate?
The preface carries the date June 1861. The comparative method holds up, but his Turanian family, root theory, ding-dong idea and solar myth reading have been largely abandoned.
Is Lectures on the Science of Language hard to read?
It is fairly easy to follow, since the lectures were written for general audiences and use vivid examples. The main arguments are clear.