The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science / William Dwight Whitney -- NY: D. Appleton and Co., 1896

In 1786, Sir William Jones published The Sanskrit Language in which he remarked on similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek and suggested that all three developed from a common extinct language now called "Proto-Indo-European." Jones's observations were an important landmark in the study of language. One century later, the field of philology was in its golden age. William Dwight Whitney was among the leading philologist of the era. He was professor of Sanskrit and editor of The Century Dictionary, an English language dictionary surpassed only by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Whitney published a general treatment of language and the principles of comparative philology in 1875 entitled The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, which covered much of the same ground that appeared in his 1867 work, Language and the Study of Language. Life and the Growth of Language is an excellent exposition of the state of the art in philology during its heyday. It combines a clear explanation of basic linguistic concepts with hypotheses about how languages change over time. This is illustrated with analyses of specific word forms as they are transformed by the tendencies among speakers that alter language.

The great bulk of his book examines various Indo-European languages which he claims belong to the most well-developed language family. His examples show the genetic links between modern languages by examining three basic linguistic forms: inflective, agglutinative, and word order languages. All languages make use of each of these forms, though normally one is dominant. In Latin which is mainly inflective, case endings express the role that the word plays in the sentence; suffixes tell us, for example, whether the noun is the subject of the sentence or the object. In English, this information normally is revealed by the order of the words in the sentence. Agglutinative languages employ specific words to express cases and link them together in complex, compound words. Whitney's prime examples of agglutinative languages are Scythian and Chinese, in which words tend to be single syllables. These syllables are brought together to express numerous semantic relations, e.g., cases common in English, as well as passive, reflexive, causative, negative, and impossible action.

These linguistic properties are explained in the course of showing how language changes, sometimes to the extent of altering the dominant structure the language. For example, Modern English, a word order language, developed out of Old English, a inflected language; however, contrary to this trend, some Modern English inflections were formed from older agglutinative or word order features. Whitney's example of this is the past tense suffix "-ed." According to Whitney, it is the worn away expression of "did." "Did" is still used to indicate the past tense as in expressions like "he did love." The origin of the -ed ending came from a slightly different word order, "he love did." The existence of both "he did love" and "he loved" in Modern English indicates that early English was probably agglutinative where "did" served to indicate the past tense.

The Life and Growth of Language drives home the plasticity of language. Suffixes and prefixes are formed out of words worn away by lazy speakers. Conversely, word orders are standardize or specific words are employed to express what was expressed previously by now neglected inflections. Whitney describes other changes to the language related to the invention of new words and word borrowings. Both often take place as a result of significant cultural changes due to new technologies or modes of life or due to exposure to foreign cultures through trade, migration, or conquest. According to Whitney, many words originated in onomatopoeias.

In the later chapters, Whitney describes features of other language families, highlighting the amazing diversity of linguistic forms. For example, outside Indo-European languages, the distinction between verb and other parts of speech is not so stark. Single words are made to do the work of numerous parts of speech and are distinguished only by their inflections. Whitney observes that intonation is critical to distinguishing Chinese words, Native American languages make an important distinction between animate and inanimate objects rather like some languages distinguish genders, and Scythian employs fifteen to twenty separated cases.

Philologists of Whitney's time believed that the relationship between languages could be recognized by the similarity between certain core words, e.g., mother, father, brother, and others that were not likely to be replaced by new or borrowed words. Famously, Jones recognized the similarity of the Latin and Greek "pater" and "mater" and the Sanskrit "piter" and "matar," along with other similar words. Similarities between the grammatical structure of two languages provided an even stronger argument for their common ancestry. Such arguments, however, are not always convincing since accidental commonalities clearly appear between languages.

The difficulty of establishing strong connections between languages raises an important question about the "science" of philology. Whitney examines this in his last chapter. His sensitivity to the difficulties of drawing sound conclusions is, however, limited by the progress of the philosophy of science of the 19th century. While not yet widely and clearly articulated, verificationism and induction was the state of the art in the philosophy of science in Whitney's day. Falsificationism and the hypothetico-deductive method was still 50 to 75 years away from its seminal articulation in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Since philology was concerned chiefly with reconstructing dead language that had no written record, there was little to no possibility of testing an hypothesis. All that could be done was to formulate elegant, but untestable theories that linked existing languages. This short-coming may well have been the main reason that philology did not last far into the 20th century as a science. However, with recent advances in archaeology and genetics, a larger body of evidence has become available to support philological claims. Furthermore, more recent philosophers of science and epistemologists, e.g., W.V.O. Quine and Nelson Goodman have enhanced the significance of theory construction in the progress of science, potentially establishing greater respect for future philological activity.

Whitney's work is surprisingly advanced when compared to 20th century linguistics. It is evidence that the advances in 20th century linguistics were not radical departures from the ideas of the 19th century, but merely clearer expressions of nascent older ideas. Similarly, Whitney views Indo-European languages as somehow more developed than those of other families. This reflects his time, but he also exhibits a budding awareness that all human languages are essentially equally sophisticated and are a product of a common natural human capacity. There are many passages that make Whitney sound like a typical 19th century ethnocentric imperialist and other that seem to recognize that non-Indo-European languages, even "primitive" languages, are no less sophisticated than Indo-European languages. In these passages, the difference for Whitney is mostly in the size of the languages' vocabularies, and he recognizes that this is merely a reflection of a more complex industrial society.

All in all, Whitney's The Life and Growth of Language is a fascinating romp through Indo-European philology. Happily, it requires no special knowledge to enjoy the excursion.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the OED / Simon Winchester -- NY: Harper Collins, 1998

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the truly monumental literary achievements of all time. Not only did it purport to define every English word (past and present), but it provided quotes from a wide variety of sources, exemplifying the meanings of those words and tracing the changes in their meanings over time. Furthermore, we are given the etymology of each word. The final publication of the first edition was completed forty-nine years after its primary editor, James Murray, took responsibility for the effort, but those years were preceded by approximately two decades that saw preliminary work on the dictionary by others.

The first edition was completed in ten volumes in 1928, but reprinted in twelve volumes plus a supplementary volume in 1933. In the 1970s and 1980s, four more supplements were added to the work until in 1989, the second edition was published in twenty volumes. The work was the unique product of a rather post-modern project. The first editors put out a call to the English-reading public, asking for volunteers to send in quotations that included any word that was interesting or used in an unusual way. From these contributions, sub-editors would compile promising quotations for the editors to chose from to compile the final entries. The work was, in essence, a Victorian wiki, finally composed of 414,825 words and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations.

Among the most important volunteers was William Minor, an American doctor living in England. Along with Murray, Minor is the subject of Simon Winchester's book, The Professor and the Madman. Minor, the madman, was incarcerated for a murder he committed in a delusional fit. His detention began in 1872 when he was 37 years old and continued until months before the end of his life in 1920. During this time, Minor indexed the words of a huge number of books, particularly eighteenth century books, and sent quotation to Murray and his team as they compiled the dictionary. Although he did not submit the most quotations for consideration by editors, Minor's quotations were especially well chosen and timely in the publication process. As particular words were being prepared for inclusion, Murray would contact Minor for his assistance and Minor would respond by examining his index and sending off the necessary quotations. Consequently, his efforts were perhaps the most important of any single volunteer.

Winchester's account of Minor's life and contribution to the dictionary is sympathetic and touching without excusing Minor's murder. Along with an informative account of the composition of the dictionary, Winchester vividly describes Minor's mental illness. As such, The Professor and the Madman is as much a case study of paranoid schizophrenia as it is an account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The descriptions of Minor's delusions stand in fascinating contrast to the systematic work of the dictionary's editors and Minor's own meticulous research.

If there is a weakness to Winchester's account, it is that it focuses too narrowly on its two protagonists and gives short shrift to the wider community of philologists, lexicographers, and volunteer readers. Granted, Winchester clearly set out to present the extraordinary story of William Minor, with James Murray in a supporting role, but Minor's contribution to the dictionary cannot be fairly assessed or even understood without placing it in its proper context.

The Lost Road and Other Writings / J.R.R. Tolkien -- New York: Ballantine Books, 1996

Following J.R.R. Tolkien's death, his son Christopher Tolkien began combing through Tolkien's papers to provide the world with posthumous works much in demand. Among the material the Christopher published is the twelve-volume series The History of Middle-earth. Volume Five The Lost Road and Other Writings is among the most important of the series. In it, we find versions of the stories that serve as the backdrop for The Hobbit and especially The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, the versions in Volume Five were written just before the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Consequently, they give us the clearest picture of Tolkien's legendarium as it bears on understanding The Lord of the Rings.

The first part of the work details the history of Numenor and its fall. Numenor was an island created for the race of men who fought with their half-kin the elves in the epic battle against Morgoth. Ultimately, the Numenoreans were seduced by Saron into waging war against the Valar, the gods who inhabited the forbidden Western land of Valinor. Upon the defeat of the Numenoreans, the island of Numenor was submerged into the ocean, with only a remnant of the race (loyal to the gods) escaping to Middle-earth. With the destruction of Numenor, the Valar reshaped the planet -- Arda -- such that it was now impossible for mortals to travel "the road" to the forbidden shores of Valinor, forever separating the men Middle-earth from alinor; hence, the story of "the lost road."

The Lost Road itself was an attempt by Tolkien to write a time travel story in which the travelers found their way back to Numenor through the vehicle of dreaming. The Lost Road was never completed, though Tolkien again attempted the story in a later work known as The Notion Club Papers. The Notion Club Papers can be found in Volume Nine of The History of Middle-earth -- Sauron Defeated.

Time travel as conceived in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers bears an interesting relationship to the work that Tolkien was engaged in as a philologist. Reconstructing dead, prehistoric languages from the remnants of descendant historical languages and thereby recreating the prehistoric culture is at least as much an art as a science. It inevitably involves creativity and imagination which are most at liberty in our dreams. How much Tolkien saw his work as a philologist as traveling through time is an open question, but The Lost Road is strong evidence that this is how he conceived of it.

Part two of Volume Five reaches even further back in the history of Arda, providing a description of its creation, annals of the world before the fall of Morgoth, and a version of the Quenta Silmarillion which tells the history of elves from their origins to the fall of their arch enemy, Morgoth. It also includes a version of The Llammas, a treatise on the history of the languages of the people of Arda.

Much of the material in Volume Five appears in earlier published work by Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion. After each section by Tolkien, Christorpher makes an heroic effort to describe how the present version differs from other versions, but the level of detail is too great for the casual reader to appreciate the distinctions. Setting the texts side by side and using Christopher's notes as a guide might yield valuable insight into the transformation of Tolkien's creation, but in the end, it would probably only be of interest to the most dedicated Tolkien scholar. Nonetheless, Tolkien's narative, given to us in The Lost Road and Other Writings will reward anyone who appreciates Tolkien's work.

History in English Words / Owen Barfield -- Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 1967

A lot of people are very fond of tracing the origins of words, such that a dictionary that does not provide etymological information can be a real disappointment. Our fascination for etymology, however, usually stops short of a passion for philology, i.e., understanding the relationship between words and culture and the principles that lie behind the changes in words and their meanings. The 19th century saw the heyday of philology, though a good deal of philological work was done in the early part of the 20th century; but by that time, there was a struggle in academic English departments between professors of literature and professors of language. With the rise of linguistics departments, the professors of language tended to lose ground in English departments, bringing on the decline of philology.

Owen Barfield's History in English Words is a late reminder of how fascinating philology can be. Barfield strategically selects words that have entered the English language to provide a brisk history of the English speaking people. As the conditions of life and our perspectives on the world changed, our language changed to express these new conditions and perspectives. Our history is revealed in our language.

Barfield's first chapter, "Philology and the Aryans," reaches back to the millennia prior to the advent of English. This is perhaps the most speculative, but also most interesting, facets of philology -- the attempt to identify common roots in recorded languages, to reconstruct prehistoric languages and thereby shed light on prehistoric culture. By the second chapter, "The Settlement of Europe," Barfield's subject becomes historical and he begins employing his primary method of study -- selecting newly introduced words to illustrate the changing currents of culture. In the early Middle Ages, words such as altar, candle, clerk, creed, deacon, hymn, martyr, mass, nun, priest, shrine, and temple entered the English language. This was, of course, a reflection of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, the absence of such institutions among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, and the centrality of religion to the lives of the post-conversion English speakers.

Later, in Modern England, the language was supplemented by a huge infusion of French and Latin words, but also words from other European languages, reflecting the integration of Europe and international commerce. Indeed, the Age of Discovery brought words to English from all over the world; however, the simple borrowing of words from other languages to enrich English does not adequately illustrate Barfield's study. The real work is done in subsequent chapters in which Barfield identifies important currents in the zietgeist of the English speaking people, for example, the rise of experimental science, the discovery of individuality, personality, and reason, and the hegemony of a mechanistic world view. Barfield illustrates each of these new currents of thinking with the new words that entered the English langauge that were needed to express the new ideas.

Much of this is not surprising, but some is quite startling and revealing. Barfield observes that after the Reformation a host of new words entered the language that began with the prefix "self-," e.g., self-conceit, self-liking, self-love, self-confidence, self-command, self-contempt, self-esteem, and self-pity, among others. Today we use most of these words without thinking, but their sudden, simultaneous appearance in our language is evidence of an important change in how people thought of themselves. The explosion of the "self-" prefix seems to reveal something much more subtle and deeper in the cultural changes of the time, whereas the appearance of new scientific terms to describe new instruments and processes is relatively unremarkable.

History in English Words is alternately unenlightening and exquisitely surprising, since much of the changes to our language are ones that we would easily understand and predict, given our general understanding of history, but others reveal a largely imperceptible plasticity of culture not marked by what is obvious to any historian.

The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology / Tom Shippey -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003.

Much has been written about the roots of the mythology created by Tolkien in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Some of it is insightful -- some of it is superficial. Tom Shippey's work The Road to Middle-Earth lies on the far end of the insightful side of the spectrum. Shippey, was briefly a personal acquaintance of Tolkien. He is a medieval scholar in his own right, having held the Chair of English Language and Medieval Literature at Leeds University (formerly held by Tolkien himself) and the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at St. Louis University in Missouri. His Road to Middle-Earth was first published in 1982, with a second edition in 1992, and a revised and expanded edition in 2003. The subsequent editions are informed by Tolkien's posthumous publications, particularly, the twelve volume set The History of Middle-Earth.

The most important theme in Shippey's work is how philology informed Tolkien's work. Clearly, Tolkien gave enormous attention to the words he chose in all he wrote. His work was deeply informed by his understanding of Old English, Old Norse, and other Northern European medieval languages. Shippey traces a huge number of connections between these languages and Tolkien's writing, and he provides valuable explanations of the significance of specific word choices and invented names to Tolkien's themes and ideas. Shippey's expert analysis reveals layer upon layer of meaning.

Shippey locates Tolkien's legendarium within the myths and legends of Northern Europe in the same way that a philologist might postulate unrecorded words in long dead languages. For example, based on specific observable rules for word relations between languages, the words for dwarves -- "dweorh" (Old English), "dvergr" (Old Norse), and "twerg" (High German) -- allow philologists to postulate "*dvairgs" in Gothic. They may do this despite the absence of any record of the word for dwarves in Gothic. In writing these inferred words, philologists normally precede them with an asterisk, e.g., *dvairgs, to distinguish it from a recorded word.

According to Shippey, philologist, including Tolkien, came to accept this methodology, and to infer -- not just words -- but the realities to which they were attached. He writes, "The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call '*-' or 'asterisk-reality', that which no longer existed but could with 100 percent certainty be inferred." Furthermore, this methodology encouraged philologists to blur the distinction between historical discovery and creative construction.

Shippey indicates that Tolkien was particular prone to this. Applied to literature, Tolkien called this technique "Sub-Creation." The resulting story lies somewhere between historical reality and mere fiction. Sub-Creation has a depth of meaning and authenticity that reaches beyond the creative product of a single author relying on his or her individual imagination. Shippey's account does much to explain the sense that many Tolkien fans have that Middle-Earth exists on the same plane as the Garden of Eden, Gilgamesh's Cedars of Lebanon, and Asgard of the Aesir. It also explains what Tolkien meant when he wrote that he wanted to create a mythology for England. Middle-Earth is essentially the *Mythology of England.

Despite the strength of Shippey's analysis, one is sometimes left with the feeling that Shippey imputes more than was intended by Tolkien. As a medieval scholar well-equipped with the tools of philology, it would be easy for Shippey to interpret accidental elements in Tolkien's work as part of Tolkien's conscious Sub-Creation; however, even if this is true, it only indicates the extent to which Tolkien was living and breathing the combined mythologies that form the building blocks of Middle-Earth.

The Road to Middle-Earth is loaded with many more insights than I have described here. It is a tour de force of Tolkien scholarship and deserves to be read by every Tolkien fan.