The Order of Words in the Ancient Languages Compared With That of the Modern Languages (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Order of Words in the Ancient Languages Compared With That of the Modern LanguagesThe English-speaking student who enters upon the study of an ancient language is soon led to ask, "Why is the order of words to which I am accustomed so different from this? and why does an ancient writer put his thoughts together in a way that seems so unnatural?" When he comes to the German he finds its arrangement a little less unusual; while if he undertakes the French he soon discovers far more points of agreement than dissimilarity between the new language and his own. There may be nothing surprising to him in the fact that hardly am two languages designate the same object with precisely the same term; but why should the component parts of a complex thought be arranged so differently with respect to one another? We read what Greek and Roman and Hebrew and German thinkers have said upon all questions of general human interest and see nothing foreign in their ideas. There is no ancient history, or philosophy, that is materially unlike in its principles what is called modern history, or modern philosophy. When we have extracted the ideas from the unfamiliar words and their strange arrangement, we find nothing about them which, generally speaking, impresses us as strange. We must conclude, then, that the human mind is the same in all ages, where the civilization is virtually on the same level. In poetic composition it is easy to see why words cannot be arranged in the same order when a thought in different languages is expressed in words of different lengths and differently accented. In prose, the reason of the divergence is much more difficult to discover.Perhaps no one would maintain that any amount of research will ever make it possible to account for the minor divergences of speech.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.