3 Review(s)

In this book the author tries to tell us that if every word can be analysed and traced back to its roots, it will tell us its own story. It is well known that in dealing with the earliest phrases, whether in language, or religion, or mythology, our evidence is often imperfect. New facts must modify old theories, Max Müller urges. In the Semitic language, he says, we are never satisfied till we have traced the roots and even though the radical meanings assigned to some words are very startling, the general principle that words have a radical predicative meaning is never doubted in Hebrew or Arabic. Every language, he concludes, if properly studied will reveal to us the mind of the artist who framed it and will teach us the same lesson, the lesson on which the whole Science of Thought is based, that there is no language without reason as there is no reason without?language.