As the previous chapter showed, in 1861 Müller and Schleicher swung the pendulum furthest toward “natural law.” Karl Brugmann, read in this chapter, looks at first like the figure who pushed that swing even further. But his own body of work already contains the seed of the next reversal.
An exceptionless law — the strongest words on the natural-law side
In 1886, in the preface to his Grundriss, Brugmann set down his generation’s attitude in a footnote:
Unser Aller Streben geht heute dahin, den Ausnahmen und Unregelmässigkeiten gegenüber nicht nur gelegentlich, sondern jedesmal und systematisch nach dem die Ausnahmestellung bedingenden Grunde zu suchen, und wir halten die Aufgabe der Wissenschaft so lange für unerledigt, bis die Antwort auf das Warum gefunden ist.
(What all of us strive for today is not merely, on occasion, but every single time and systematically, to seek out the reason underlying an exception or irregularity — and we hold the task of scholarship to be unfinished until the answer to the question “why” has been found. Article 127)
This goes further even than Schleicher, from the previous chapter. Schleicher flatly declared language a “natural object that lives but has no history.” Brugmann’s generation — the Neogrammarians — pushed further still, claiming that sound change follows a mechanical law, without exception. Verner’s discovery that “even an exception has a reason,” seen in Chapter 2, is elevated here into the central principle of comparative linguistics.
But he also acknowledged another force — analogy
And yet this same scholar, in this same book, candidly admits that some phenomena can’t be explained by sound law alone. That force is “analogy” — the process by which a speaker applies an existing word-form pattern to a different word, a thoroughly human force, akin to a child saying “goed” by analogy with the regular past tense (Article 126).
Sound law is a phenomenon in which the sound itself changes, mechanically and unconsciously. Analogy is a phenomenon in which a speaker, even without realizing it, “borrows” an existing pattern for a different word. The former extends the idea of treating language as a natural object; the latter recognizes the human act of the speaker as an agent of change. By treating these two as a paired set, Brugmann was, for the first time, able to give a systematic account of a great many “exceptions.”
His own positioning, and a contemporary rebuttal
Brugmann himself placed his own method as “roughly a middle course” between Bopp and Schleicher, from the previous chapters (Article 128) — treating his predecessors as an inheritance to synthesize, not obstacles to overcome. And just a year before this book was published, in 1885, the Austrian linguist Hugo Schuchardt had already openly challenged the very principle that “sound laws operate without exception” (Article 129). Brugmann’s conviction was never universally shared, even in his own time.
Summary
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Sound law (natural-law side) | Sound change follows a mechanical law without exception — the strongest natural-law claim in this genealogy |
| Analogy (human-practice side) | A human force by which a speaker applies an existing pattern to a different word |
| One man’s pendulum | The same scholar acknowledged both forces, in the same book |
In a nutshell — Brugmann raised the strongest words on the natural-law side, while, with his own hand, opening a door toward the human side. The next chapter looks at how thought steps decisively through that door.