Origin of Indo-European Languages

Abstract

Two of Prof. Jóhannesson's works—his "Grammatik der urnordischen Runeninschriften" and his "Islenzk tunga í fornöld"—are well-established handbooks for the Germanic philologist. But, in his recent article in NATURE¹ (and more fully in the Icelandic work to which he there refers), he has embarked for more unconventional regions. There is, in fact, no doubt that Prof. Jóhannesson has contravened that ancient and famous minute of the Société de Linguistique which prohibited discussion of the origin of language. There was—and always will be—a sound basis for that excellent minute, and for a simple reason. In all languages known to us—whether ancient (like Sumerian) or modern (like modern English)—we observe that, for the great majority of words, the connexion between sound and sense is random; thus there is no reason known to us why, in English, the word for "7" should begin with s and that for "10" with t rather than vice versa. We may suppose that, in the very distant epoch when language originated, either the sound-sense relation was random or it was not. But the linguistic changes which must have operated in the long period intervening would certainly have quickly reduced a nonrandom sound-sense relation to a random one, similar to that which we have in known languages.