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- THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
Lingala (Zaire, Congo), Kongo (Zaire, Congo, Angola), Bemba (Zaire, Zambia),
Nyanja (Malawi, Zambia), Shona (Zimbabwe), Ndebele (the Matebele in Zimbabwe and South Africa), Tswana (Botswana) and its close relative Sotho (South Africa, Lesotho), Swazi (Swaziland, South Africa), Xhosa (South Africa) and its close relative Zulu (South Africa). The southern languages have tones which are used partially for meaning but mostly for grammar. Banda (Congo) has three tones. Its speakers use three-tone drums to send formulaic messages. Efik has four tones and uses m and n as vowels. Most of the Niger-Congo languages have prefixes and suffixes to qualify nouns and verbs as well as words that agree with them. Nouns and verbs never exist on their own. Fulani has 18 suffixed noun qualifiers. THE COMPARATIVE METHOD As we have seen, the human mind has been speculating for hundreds of years on the origin and relationship of languages. But the solution to all these problems was far from being correct because no linguistic material was available. It was not until the Renaissance that material was gathered for later investigators to work on, and 49 they could not help being struck by the amazing similarity between some languages. Even in the sixteenth century, an Italian missionary called Filippo Sassetti had noted the similarity between the Italian numerals from six to nine - sei, sette, otto, nove, and their Sanskrit counterparts - sas, saptd, astau, nova.. An attempt to classify known languages according to the resemblance between them was made by the thinker Scaliger in 1599, when he grouped the chief languages after their wont for God, calling them respectively the deus-theos (i.e. Latin Greek), goit (Germanic), and bog (Slavonic) languages. This classification, however intelligent, might have continued blindly along these lines for ages, were it not for the discovery of Sanskrit. In the history of language, the discovery of Sanskrit is often compared to the discovery of America in the history of Mankind. It altered at a single stroke the whole field of linguistic research. William Jones, an English lawyer in India, wrote in 1786: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more acquisitively refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly be produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit." In these_often quoted lines, Jones announced clearly and unequivocally the relationship between three of the great languages of antiquity-Sanskrit, Greek and Latin-and at the same time anticipated the reconstruction of that common source which, it seems, no longer exists-the parent Indo-European language itself. This climax of language research in the 18th century heralded the full blossoming of philology in the 19th century. We have good grounds for saying that linguistics as a science was created in the 19th century, especially comparative linguistics. The first of the great pioneers in comparative linguistics of the last century in Western Europe was the Danish Rasmus Rask (1787-1832). His major work Download 5.01 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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