This site has, until now, carried nine features on the history of comparative linguistics — William Jones, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Max Müller, August Schleicher, Karl Brugmann, Otto Jespersen, and David W. Anthony. Each was read on its own, closely following its primary source.
But lay all nine side by side, and one question, changing shape each time, turns out to have stayed alive the whole way through. Is language change something that happens the way an oak tree grows — following a law of nature? Or is it a human historical practice, built up from the choices of individual speakers? This feature crosses all nine, retracing the history of that one question across six chapters. The close reading of each individual figure is left to their own feature; here the focus falls on what happens between one piece of work and the next — what was inherited, and what was reversed.
One question, running through 221 years
Laid out on a timeline, the sheer length of the period involved is the first thing that stands out. Jones’s address, pointing out a resemblance “which could not possibly have been produced by accident,” dates to 1786; Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language to 2007 — 221 years apart.
Across those 221 years, the tools of linguistics, and the very kinds of evidence available, changed beyond recognition. And yet the shape of the question running through all nine is remarkably stable. The resemblance Jones intuited as “no accident” became, in Rask’s and Grimm’s hands, a “regular correspondence”; in Bopp’s hands, the metaphor of an “organism”; in Schleicher’s hands, “a natural object that lives but has no history”; in Brugmann’s hands, “a law admitting no exception”; in Jespersen’s hands, “efficiency, driven by humans”; and in Anthony’s hands, “the history of nameless people who rode horses and pulled wagons.” The name changes, but the root question stays the same.
Another axis — language as “natural object,” language as “human practice”
Lining up the dates alone doesn’t show why thinking moved the way it did. Draw one more axis, cutting across time — language change seen as a law of nature, cut off from humans, versus language change seen as a historical practice, built from the accumulated choices of speakers.
On the left are the views that treat language change as mechanical, independent of humans. Rask and Grimm showed that sound correspondences are regular and predictable, turning language comparison into a rigorous procedure. Bopp uses the metaphor “language is an organism” to explain how endings wear down like fossils. Müller declares outright that “linguistics is a natural science,” and Schleicher takes that metaphor literally, asserting that “language lives, but because it doesn’t act like a human, it has no history.” Brugmann arrives at the strongest claim on this side: “sound laws operate without exception.”
On the right are the views that treat language change as the accumulated choices of speakers. Jespersen reframes what Schleicher called “decay” as “progress through efficiency,” treating children’s speech errors and pidgin languages as evidence of human adaptability. Anthony redraws the spread of language itself as the real migration and institutions (patron-client relationships, guest-host customs) of nameless people riding in wagons.
And one figure moved across this very axis. Brugmann himself. While holding up “sound laws operate without exception” — the strongest words on the natural-law side — he simultaneously recognized “analogy,” a thoroughly human force by which a speaker applies an existing pattern to a different word, as a second engine standing alongside sound law. Inside one scholar, the whole pendulum this feature set describes appears in miniature.
Six chapters
From here, read chronologically across six chapters. Each stands on its own, but read together, they show how one question, changing shape, was passed down.
- The Discovery of Correspondence — Jones and Rask
- Law and Organism — Grimm and Bopp
- Language as a Natural Object — Müller and Schleicher
- An Exceptionless Law, and One Step Toward the Human — Brugmann
- Simplification as Progress — Jespersen’s Reversal
- What Actually Happened — Anthony and an Answer, 221 Years On
Summary
| Figure (work, year) | What is language change | Natural law or human practice |
|---|---|---|
| Jones (1786) | A resemblance that couldn’t be an accident — suggests a common ancestor | (The question is born) |
| Rask (1818) | Regular grammatical correspondence is the surest clue | Leans natural law |
| Grimm (1822) | A table of consonant correspondences — later called a “law” | Leans natural law |
| Bopp (1833) | Endings are fossilized pronouns — language is an organism (metaphor) | Leans natural law |
| Müller (1861) | Linguistics is a natural science | Natural law |
| Schleicher (1861) | Language lives, but has no history like a human | Natural law |
| Brugmann (1886) | Sound laws operate without exception — but analogy is a human force too | Natural law → human |
| Jespersen (1922) | Simplification isn’t decay — it’s progress through efficiency | Human practice |
| Anthony (2007) | The spread of language is itself a human history of migration and institutions | Human practice |
In a nutshell — the question of why language changes has no final answer yet. But across 221 years, thought hasn’t moved at random either. The pull to fix language change as a “natural law” and the pull to reclaim it as a “human practice” keep appearing, again and again, like a swinging pendulum.