Phonetic Bickerings

The evidence turns on theories of phonetic laws as they worked in pre-Homeric Greece.  But these laws, as they apply to common ordinary words, need not, we are told, be applied so strictly to proper names, as of gods and heroes.  These are a kind of comets, and their changes cannot be calculated like the changes of vulgar words, which answer to stars (i. 298).  Mr. Max Muller ’formerly agreed with Curtius that phonetic rules should be used against proper names with the same severity as against ordinary nouns and verbs.’  Benfey and Welcker protested, so does Professor Victor Henry.  ’It is not fair to demand from mythography the rigorous observation of phonetics’ (i. 387).  ’This may be called backsliding,’ our author confesses, and it does seem rather a ’go-as-you-please’ kind of method.

Phonetic Rules

Mr. Max Muller argues at length (and, to my ignorance, persuasively) in favour of a genial laxity in the application of phonetic rules to old proper names.  Do they apply to these as strictly as to ordinary words?  ’This is a question that has often been asked . . . but it has never been boldly answered’ (i. 297).  Mr. Max Muller cannot have forgotten that Curtius answered boldly—­in the negative.  ’Without such rigour all attempts at etymology are impossible.  For this very reason ethnologists and mythologists should make themselves acquainted with the simple principles of comparative philology.’ {109}

But it is not for us to settle such disputes of scholars.  Meanwhile their evidence is derived from their private interpretations of old proper names, and they differ among themselves as to whether, in such interpretations, they should or should not be governed strictly by phonetic laws.  Then what Mr. Max Muller calls ‘the usual bickerings’ begin among scholars (i. 416).  And Mr. Max Muller connects Ouranos with Vedic Varuna, while Wackernagel prefers to derive it from [Greek], urine, and this from [Greek]=Sk.  Varshayami, to rain (ii. 416, 417), and so it goes on for years with a glorious uncertainty.  If Mr. Max Muller’s equations are scientifically correct, the scholars who accept them not must all be unscientific.  Or else, this is not science at all.

Basis of a Science

A science in its early stages, while the validity of its working laws in application to essential cases is still undetermined, must, of course, expect ‘bickerings.’  But philological mythologists are actually trying to base one science, Mythology, on the still shifting and sandy foundations of another science, Phonetics.  The philologists are quarrelling about their ‘equations,’ and about the application of their phonetic laws to mythical proper names.  On the basis of this shaking soil, they propose to build another science, Mythology!  Then, pleased with the scientific exactitude of their evidence, they object to the laxity of ours.