Resumen
Resumen de Conferencias sobre la ciencia del lenguaje
Para quién es
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.
De qué trata este libro
In the spring of 1861 a German scholar stood before a London audience and made a bold claim. Language, he said, can be studied like rocks or plants, and the study deserves a place among the sciences. The scholar was Friedrich Max Müller, who had settled in Oxford and made his name by editing the oldest Hindu hymns, the Rig Veda. His lectures were given at the Royal Institution, a second series followed a couple of years later, and together they became one of the most widely read books on language in the English-speaking world.
Müller wrote for educated people who were not specialists. He wanted them to see what a few decades of work in Germany had shown. The languages of India, Persia, Greece, Rome and northern Europe are relatives, descended from a common source. Words can be traced back through time like family lines. Sounds change by rule, not by chance. And the old question of where speech came from can be asked in a sensible way, with evidence in hand.
You will hear how Müller sorted the languages of the world, how he broke words into their smallest parts, and why he mocked the popular theories of how speech began. You will also hear how he tied language to thought, and how he used it to explain myth. Some of his claims have not lasted, and we will say which. First, the discovery that made all of this possible.
En este resumen
- 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
Idea clave 1 de 9
Language can be studied as a science
Müller opens by asking why a subject so close to us has been so little understood. Everyone speaks, yet few people ask what speech is made of or how it changes. He argues that the answer lies in a recent discovery. Scholars had at last found a method to compare languages and to test their kinship.
The story begins with Sanskrit, the ancient sacred language of India. European scholars met it late, in the eighteenth century, through the work of men in British India. Sir William Jones, a judge in Calcutta, said in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were so alike in their roots and grammar that they must have sprung from a common source. Müller treats this as the spark that lit the new field.
After Jones came the German scholars who turned a bold guess into a method. Franz Bopp compared the verb endings of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and other tongues in detail. Jacob Grimm, better known for his fairy tales, traced how the sounds of the Germanic languages had shifted from those of their cousins. Müller presents these men as the founders of a discipline, and he wants his audience to feel the excitement of that moment.
Why does Müller call it a science and not just a hobby? He says a science needs classification, general laws and a clear subject. Language offers all three. It is a natural thing that grows by its own rules, and those rules can be found by patient comparison of facts.
For the reader today, the point is a change of attitude. Instead of treating odd spellings and strange words as mistakes or accidents, Müller asks us to treat them as evidence. Each word carries a history. His first lesson is to look at speech as something that has a past, and to ask how it got here.
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 Conferencias sobre la ciencia del lenguaje
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 first series was given in London in 1861 and the second in 1863. 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.