The Future Of Philology [pp. 698-714]

THE FUTURE OF PHILOLOGY.
ART. VIII.-THE FUTURE OF PHILOLOGY.
By Professor F. A. MARCH, LL.D., Lafyt)ette College, President of the Amierican
Philological Asseciation.
The last year has been one of wide activity in original work
upon language, though it has produced no book which is yet
seen to mark a new era.
Perhaps no facts have occurred more significant than these
three:-Pott's great lexicon of Roots has been completed; an
English Dialect society has been formed under the direction of
Mr. Skeat and the inspiration of Mr. Ellis; and a grammar has
been published of the speech of the primitive population of
Babylonia, which is claimed to be a representative of the parent
speech of the so-called Turanian or Scythian family of languages,
and to be likely to play the same part in reducing those languages to order which the Sanskrit has done in the Indo-European family.
These three facts may be taken as representative of a great
change that is taking place in the current of linguistic activity,
The study of the ancient literary monuments of the Indo-European speeches has heretofore been the great work of coluparative philology; but it is now giving place to the study of living
dialects on the one hand, and of the relics of the ancestors of
barbaric tribes on the other. The more sober western leaders
of the new generation are trying to ground the laws of language
in physiological necessities and the facts of living dialects; the
more adventurous, who seek to solve the wider problems of philology and turn to the east for light, are leaving the familiar
fields of the Indo-Europeans and looking to strange and puzzling
speeches to find new worlds to conquer.
It will suggest the extent of the study of dialects to mention
a few of the essays of the year. The English Dialect society
is vigorously at work collecting all the living varieties of English speech and asking our aid. With it should be put A. J.
Ellis' work on The English Dialects in Great Britain and America, forming part of his great work on Early English Pronunciation; J. A. HI. Murray's Dialect of the Southern Counties of
Scotland, C. C. Robinson on The Yorkshire Dialects, Prince
Louis Lucien Bonaparte on The English Dialects, and Sweet on
Danish Pronunciation in the Philological Society's Transactions; John Winkler's General Netherland and Frisian Dialecticon, a thiou,':U s oli d Du'ch pages oit Athe continental Low Ger
|Oct.
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