13 h 56 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the words you speak carry a family history you have never thought to trace?
In Lectures on the Science of Language, F. Max Müller asks readers to study speech as closely as rocks or plants. He traces relationships among the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Rome and northern Europe. Similar words are only a start: the real question is what evidence proves that languages share a common source.
Müller breaks words down to their roots, follows patterns of sound change and challenges popular accounts of how speech begins. He also argues that thought and language cannot be pulled apart, and uses old words to explain myth. Some claims no longer hold, but the lectures open a vivid window onto the Victorian debate over language and human nature.
What you’ll discover
- The family history of words Follow Müller as he looks beyond resemblance to evidence of shared linguistic ancestry.
- Roots beneath familiar speech See how stripping away endings and suffixes brings Müller to the building blocks of words.
- The puzzle of beginnings Meet the theories of language origins that Müller examines with wit and sharp questions.
- Where thought meets speech Consider his striking argument that reasoning depends on words, or signs that work like them.
- Old words behind myths Explore his theory that divine names begin as words for dawn, sky, sun and storm.
Who will love it
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.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Language can be studied as a science
- Related languages share one common ancestor
- Languages grow by natural change, not design
- Three families and three stages of speech
- Words are built from a small set of roots
- Popular theories of language origin fall short
- Thought and speech cannot be pulled apart
- Myths grow from the shadows of old words
- What has lasted and what has fallen away
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Lezioni sulla scienza del linguaggio
by F. Max Müller · 1861
Müller traces words through language families to explore how speech begins, shapes thought and gives rise to myth.
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In short
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.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
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.
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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.
The author
F. Max Müller
1823–1900 · German-born British philologist
Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was a German-born philologist who lived and worked in Oxford, England. He studied Sanskrit and comparative religion. He published Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861 and 1864, and India: What Can It Teach Us? in 1883. He edited the Sacred Books of the East series.
More by F. Max Müller
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