Friedrich Max Müller opens by arguing that the science of language belongs among the physical sciences, operating through natural laws rather than human design or historical convention. Language does not admit of arbitrary alteration by individuals; emperors cannot change grammatical gender, nor can purists permanently arrest linguistic drift. Instead, the surface of speech is constantly shaped by two opposing forces: phonetic decay, which wears down the body of words until radicals become grammatical inflections, and dialectical regeneration, which continually replenishes the literary language from the bottom up through the spoken idioms of families, clans, and regions.
The historical progression of every science naturally moves from the empirical collection of facts through systematic classification to theoretical inquiry. Just as geometry and botany began from practical human necessities before rising to abstract laws, the empirical study of language began with the rudimentary parsing of grammar by Greek and Indian philosophers. This empirical stage culminated in the traditional Greek and Latin grammar of antiquity, which provided a practical framework for teaching languages without uncovering their internal mechanisms.
The true breakthrough in the classification of languages came with the discovery of Sanskrit and the birth of comparative grammar. By examining the structural similarities and phonetic correspondences among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavonic tongues, scholars proved that these idioms are not independent inventions, but co-ordinate members of a single Aryan family. Their relationship is genealogical, pointing backward to an ancestral community of speakers who lived together in the remote past.
Grammatical terminations, long viewed as mysterious or conventional markers, are actually fossilized words that have lost their independent meaning through centuries of wear and tear. Case endings, personal pronouns in verbal conjugations, and derivative suffixes can be historically reconstructed and traced back to concrete roots. Through this rigorous comparative method, comparative philology reveals that language is an unbroken, living witness to the history of the human mind.
