Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 4: Essays Chiefly on the Science of LanguageMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 4: Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
The fact also, on which I then strongly insisted,
that the Uraon Koles, and Rajmahal Koles, might be Koles in blood, but
certainly not in language, their language being, like that of the Gonds,
Dravidian, is now no longer disputed. But beyond this, all is still as
hypothetical as it was twenty years ago, simply because we can get no
grammars of the Munda dialects. Why do not the German missionaries at
Ranchi, who have done such excellent work among the Koles, publish a
grammatical analysis of that interesting cluster of dialects? Only a
week ago, one of them, Mr. Jellinghaus, gave me a grammatical sketch of
the Mundári language, and even this, short as it is, was quite
sufficient to show that the supposed relationship between the Munda
dialects and the Khasia language, of which we have a grammar, is
untenable. The similarities pointed out by Mason between the Munda
dialects and the Talaing of Pegu, are certainly startling, but equally
startling are the divergences; and here again no real result will be
obtained without a comparison of the grammatical structure of the two
languages. The other classes of Indian languages, the Taic, the
Gangetic, subdivided into Trans-Himalayan and Sub-Himalayan, the
Lohitic, and Tamulic, are still retained, though some of their names
have been changed. Without wishing to defend the names which I had
chosen for these classes, I must say that I look upon the constant
introduction of new technical terms as an unmixed evil. Every
classificatory term is imperfect. Aryan, Semitic, Hamitic, Turanian, all
are imperfect, but, if they are but rightly defined, they can do no
harm, whereas a new term, however superior at first sight, always makes
confusion worse confounded. The chemists do not hesitate to call sugar
an acid rather than part with an old established term; why should not we
in the science of language follow their good example?
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