FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE.
We have now traced the different stages through which language may pass
in attaining to its most perfect form, the inflected stage. There were
the two stages in which what we may call the bones of the language were
formed, the acquisition of those words which, like _pen_, _ink_ and
_paper_, when standing alone bring a definite idea into the mind, and,
next, the acquisition of those other words which, like _to_, _for_,
_and_, produce no idea in the mind when taken alone. We saw that while
the first class of words _may_ have been acquired with any imaginable
rapidity, the second class could only have gradually come into use as
one by one they fell out of the rank of the ‘significant’ class.
Again, after this skeleton of language has been got together, there
were, we saw, three other stages which went to make up the grammar of a
language: the radical stage, in which all the words of the language can
be cut up into _roots_ which are generally monosyllables, each of which
has a meaning as a separate word; the agglutinative stage, when the
root, _i.e._ the part of the word which expresses the essential idea,
remains always distinct from any added portion; and, thirdly, the
inflected stage, when in many cases the root and the addition to the
root have become so interwoven as to be no longer distinguishable.
Of course, really to understand what these three conditions are like,
the reader would have to be acquainted with some language in each of the
three; but it is sufficient if we get clearly into our heads that there
are these stages of language-growth, and that, further, each one of all
the languages of the world may be said to be in one of the three. Our
opportunities of tracing the history of languages being so limited, we
have no recorded instance of a language passing out of one stage into
another; but when we examine into these states they so clearly wear the
appearance of _stages_ that there seems every reason to believe that a
monosyllabic language might in time develop into an agglutinative, and
again from that stage into an inflexional, language, _if nothing stopped
its growth_.
[Sidenote: Arrest in the growth of language.]
But what, we may ask, are the causes which put a stop to the free growth
and development of language? One of these causes is the invention of
writing. Language itself is of course spoken language, speech, and as
such is subject to no laws save those which belong to our organs of
speaking and hearing. No sooner is the word spoken than it is gone, and
lives only in the memory; and thus speech, though it may last for
centuries, dies, as it were, and comes to life again every hour. It is
with language as it is with those national songs and ballads which,
among nations that have no writing, take the place of books and
histories. The same poem or the same tale passes from mouth to mouth
almost unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet at no moment is it
visible and tangible, nor for the most part of the time audible even,
but for these centuries lives on in men’s memories only. So Homer’s
ballads must have passed for several hundred years from mouth to mouth;
and, stranger still, stories which were first told somewhere by the
banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes by distant ancestors of ours, are told
to this very day, little altered, by peasants in remote districts of
England and Scotland. But to return to language. It is very clear that
so long as language remains speech and speech only, it is subject to
just so many variations as, in the course of a generation or two, men
may have introduced into their habits of speaking. Why these variations
arise it is perhaps not quite easy to understand; but every one knows
that they do arise, that from age to age, from generation to generation,
not only are new words being continually introduced, and others which
once served well enough dropped out of use, but constant changes are
going on in the pronunciation of words. As we have already said, if left
to itself a language would not remain quite the same in two different
districts. We know, for instance, that the language of common people
does differ very much in different counties, so that what with varieties
of pronunciation, and what with the use of really peculiar words, the
inhabitants of one county are scarcely intelligible to the inhabitants
of another.
This constant change in language can be resolved, so to say, into two
forces--one of decay, the other of renewal. The change which each word
undergoes is of the nature of decay. It _loses_ something from its
original form. But then, out of this change, it passes into new forms;
and very often out of one word, by this mere process of change in sound,
two words spring. We have already seen instances of how this may come
about. The Anglo-Saxon _agân_ becomes in process of time _agone_, as we
have seen. That word again, by a further process of decay, changes into
_ago_. So far we have nothing but loss. But then the Old English _agân_
had only the same meaning as our past participle _gone_.[26] So now we
have two words really in the place of one, and where formerly men would
have said, ‘It is a long time _agone_,’ or ‘That man has lately
_agone_,’ we now can say, ‘It is a long time _ago_,’ ‘The man has lately
_gone_.’ And we may in any language watch this process of decay
(_phonetic decay_, as it is called) and regeneration (_dialectic
regeneration_, the philologists call it) ever going forward. We see, as
it were,--
‘The hungry ocean gain
Advantage o’er the kingdom of the shore;
And the firm soil win of the watery main
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.’
The influence which keeps a language together, and tends to make changes
such as these as few as possible, is that of writing. When once writing
has been invented it is clear that language no longer depends upon the
memory only, no longer has such a seemingly precarious tenure of life as
it had when it was no more than speech. The writing remains a strong
bulwark against the changes of time. Although our written words are but
the symbols of sound, they are symbols so clear that the recollection of
the sound springs up in our minds the moment the written word comes
before our eyes. So it is that there are hundreds of words in the
English language which we should many of us not use once in a lifetime,
which are yet perfectly familiar to us. All old-fashioned words which
belong to the _literary_ language, and are never used now in common
life, would have been forgotten long ago except for writing. The fact,
again, that those provincialisms which make the peasants of different
counties almost mutually unintelligible do not affect the intercourse of
educated people, is owing to the existence of a written language.
[Sidenote: Chinese.]
It was at one time thought by philologists that in Chinese we had a
genuine specimen of a language in the radical stage of formation. As
such it is cited, for instance, in Professor Max Müller’s _Lectures on
the Science of Language_. But the most trustworthy Chinese scholars are,
I believe, now of opinion that the earliest Chinese of which we can find
any trace had already passed through this stage and become an
agglutinative language, and that it has since decayed somewhat from that
condition to become once more almost a monosyllabic language.
However that may be, it is acknowledged that Chinese has never passed
beyond a very primitive condition, and that its having rested so long in
this state is due more than anything else to the early invention of
writing in that country. We know how strange has been the whole history
of civilization in China. How the Chinese, after they had made long ago
an advance far beyond all their contemporaries at that date of the
world’s history, seem to have suddenly stopped short there, and have
remained ever since a stunted incomplete race, devoid of greatness in
any form. Their character is reflected very accurately in their
language. While it was still in a very primitive condition writing was
introduced into the country, and from that time forward the tongue
remained almost unchanged. Other languages which are closely allied to
Chinese--Burmese, Siamese, and Thibetan--are so nearly monosyllabic that
they can scarcely be considered to have yet got fairly into the
agglutinative stage.
It is, then, writing which has preserved for us Chinese in the very
primitive condition in which we find it. For people in a lower order of
civilization there may be many other causes at work to prevent an
agglutinative language
[Sidenote: Turanian languages.]
becoming inflexional. It is not always easy to say what the hindering
causes have been in any individual case; but perhaps, if we look at the
difference between the last two classes of language, we can get some
idea of what they might be for the class of agglutinative languages as a
whole. An inflexional language has quite lost the memory of the real
meaning of its inflexions--or at least the real reason of them. We could
give no reason why we should not use _bought_ in the place of _buy_,
_art_ in the place of _am_, _whom_ in the place of _who_--no other
reason save that we have always been taught to use the words in the
position they take in our speech. But there was once a time when the
changes only existed in the form of _additions_ having a distinct
meaning. Even in agglutinative languages these additions have a distinct
meaning _as_ additions, or, in other words, if we were using an
agglutinative language we should be always able to distinguish the
addition from the root, and so should understand the precise effect of
the former in modifying the latter. To understand the use of words in an
agglutinative language, therefore, a great deal less of tradition and
memory would be required than are wanted to preserve an inflected
language. This really is the same as saying that for the inflected
language we must have a much more constant use; and this again implies a
greater intellectual life, a closer bond of union among the people who
speak it, than exists among those who speak agglutinative languages.
Or if we look at the change from another point of view, we can say that
the cause of the mixing up of the root, and its addition came at first
from a desire to _shorten_ the word and to save time--a desire which was
natural to people who spoke much and had much intercourse. We may then,
from these various considerations, conclude that the people who use the
agglutinative languages are people who have not what is called a close
and active national life. This is exactly what we find to be the case.
If a primitive language, such as the Chinese, belongs to a people who
have, as it were, developed too quickly, the agglutinative languages, as
a class, distinguish a vast section of the human race whose natural
condition is a very unformed one, who are for the most part nomadic
races without fixed homes, or laws, or states. They live a tribal
existence, each man having little intercourse save with those of his
immediate neighbourhood. They are unused to public assemblies. Such
assemblies take among early peoples almost the place of literature, in
obliging men to have a common language and a united national life. Being
without these controlling influences, it results that the different
dialects and tongues belonging to the agglutinative class are almost
endless. It is not our intention to weary the reader by even a bare list
of them. But we may glance at the chief heads into which these
multifarious languages may be grouped, and the geographical position of
those who speak them.
The agglutinative tongues include the speech of all those peoples of
Central Asia whom in common language we are wont to speak of as Tartars,
but whom it would be more correct to describe as belonging to the Turkic
or Mongol class, and of whom several different branches--the Huns, who
emigrated from the borders of China to Europe; the Mongols or Moghuls,
who conquered Persia and Hindustan; and lastly, the Osmanlîs, or
Ottomans, who invaded Europe and founded the Turkish Empire--are the
most famous, and most infamous, in history. Another large class of
agglutinative languages belongs to the natives of the vast region of
Siberia, from the Ural mountains to the far east. Another great class,
closely allied to these last, the Finnish tongues namely, once spread
across all the northern half of what is now European Russia, and across
North Scandinavia; but the people who spoke them have been gradually
driven to the extreme north by the Russians and Scandinavians. Lastly, a
third division is formed by those languages which belonged to the
original inhabitants of Hindustan before the greater part of the country
was occupied by the Hindus. These languages are spoken of as the
Dravidian class. The natural condition of these various nations or
peoples is, as we have said, a nomadic state, a state in which
agriculture is scarcely known, though individual nations out of them
have risen to considerable civilization. And as in very early times
ancestors of ours who belonged to a race speaking an inflexional
language bestowed upon some part of these nomadic people the appellation
_Tura_, which means ‘the swiftness of a horse,’ from their constantly
moving from place to place, the word Turanian has been applied to all
these various peoples, and the agglutinative languages are spoken of
generally as Turanian tongues.
[Sidenote: Aryan and Semitic languages.]
And now we come to the last--the most important body of languages--the
inflected; and we see that for it have been left all the more important
nations and languages of the world. Almost all the ‘historic’ people,
living or dead, almost all the more civilized among nations, come under
this our last division: the ancient Egyptians, Chaldæans, Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as the modern Hindus and the
native Persians, and almost all the inhabitants of Europe, with the
countless colonies which these last have spread over the surface of the
globe. The class of inflected languages is separated into two main
divisions or _families_, within each of which the languages are held by
a tie of relationship. Just as people are of the same family when they
recognize their descent from a common ancestor, so languages belong to
one family when they can show clear signs that they have grown out of
one parent tongue. We may be sure that we are all the children of the
first pair, and we may know in the same way that all languages must have
grown and changed out of the first speech. But the traces of parentage
and relationship are in both cases buried in oblivion; it is only when
we come much farther down in the history of the world that we can really
see the marks of distinct kinship in the tongues of nations separated by
thousands of miles, different in colour, in habits, in civilization, and
quite unconscious of any common fatherhood.
[Sidenote: Kinship in languages.]
Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected.
Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an
unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such
likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest
words of life--_kann_ and _can_, _soll_ and _shall_, _muss_ and _must_,
_ist_ and _is_, _gut_ and _good_, _hart_ and _hard_, _mann_ and _man_,
_für_ and _for_, together with an innumerable number of verbs,
adjectives, substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly
one from another--we may feel sure either that the English once spoke
German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German
have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken
by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land.
As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother
languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention
once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English
and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are
common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any
reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many
German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a
corresponding word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the
fact that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that
changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively unimportant provided
these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the
consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one
such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in
the other language.
For instance, we soon begin to notice that ‘T’ in German is often
represented by ‘D’ in English, as _tag_ becomes _day_; _tochter_,
_daughter_; _breit_, _broad_; _traum_, _dream_; _reiten_, _ride_; but
sometimes by ‘TH’ in English, as _vater_ becomes _father_; _mutter_,
_mother_. Again, ‘D’ in German is often equal to ‘TH’ in English, as
_dorf_, _thorpe_; _feder_, _feather_; _dreschen_, _thrash_ (_thresh_);
_drängen_, _throng_; _der_ (_die_), _the_; _das_, _that_. Now there is a
certain likeness common to these three sounds, ‘T,’ ‘D,’ and ‘TH,’ as
any one’s ear will tell him if he say _te_, _de_, _the_. As a matter of
fact they are all pronounced with the tongue pressed against the teeth,
only in rather different places; and in the case of the last sound,
_the_,[27] with a breath or aspirate sent between the teeth at the same
time. So we see that, these letters being really so much alike in sound,
there is nothing at all extraordinary in one sound becoming exchanged
for another in the two languages. We learn, therefore, to look beyond
the mere appearance of the word, to weigh, so to speak, the sounds
against each other, and to detect likenesses which might perhaps
otherwise have escaped us. For instance, if we see that CH in German is
often represented by GH in English--in such words as _tochter_,
_daughter_; _knecht_, _knight_; _möchte_, _might_; _lachen_,
_laugh_,--we have no difficulty in now seeing how exactly _durch_
corresponds to our _through_. For we have at the beginning the _d_ which
naturally corresponds to our _t_, the _r_ remains unchanged, and the
_ch_ naturally corresponds to our _gh_; only the vowel is different in
position, and that is of comparatively small account. Nevertheless at
first sight we should by no means have been inclined to allow the near
relationship of _durch_ and _through_. Thus our power of comparison
continually increases, albeit a knowledge of several languages is
necessary before we can establish satisfactory rules or proceed with at
all sure steps.
When we have acquired this knowledge there are few things more
interesting than noting the changes which words undergo in the different
tongues, and learning how to detect the same words under various
disguises. And when we have begun to do this, it is by comparing the
words of our own language with corresponding words in the allied tongues
German, Norse, or Dutch, whatever it may be, that we are most frequently
reminded of the meaning of words which have half grown out of use with
us. As, for instance, when the German _Leiche_ (corpse) reminds us of
the meaning of lich-gate (A.S. lica, a corpse) and Lichfield; or the
Norse _moos_, a marshy or heathy region, explains our _moss_-troopers. I
doubt if most people quite know what sea-mews are, still more if the
word mewstone (which, for example, is the name of a rock near Plymouth)
would at once call up the right idea into their mind. But the German
_Möwe_, sea-gull, makes it all plain. How curious is the relationship
between _earth_ and _hearth_, which is exactly reproduced in the German
_Erde_ and _Herde!_ or the obsolete use of the word _tide_ for ‘time’
(the original meaning of the tides--the ‘times,’) in the expression
‘Time and tide wait for no man’! But in the Norse we have the same
expression _Tid og Time_, which signifies exactly Macbeth’s ‘time and
the hour.’ And of course these words, our _tide_, Norse _Tid_, are the
correspondants of the German _zeit_. When once we have detected how
often the German _z_ corresponds to the English _t_--as in _Zahn_,
tooth; _Zehe_, toe; _Zählen_, to tell (_i.e._, to count); _Zinn_,
tin--we have no difficulty in seeing that our _town_ may correspond to
the German _Zaun_, a hedge: and we guess, what is in fact the case, that
the original meaning of town was only an enclosed or empaled place. The
relationship of our _fee_ to the German _Vieh_, cattle, and the proof
that the earliest money with us was cattle-money, would, at first sight,
be perhaps not so easily surmised by a mere comparison of German and
English words. These are only one or two of the ten thousand points of
interest which rise up before us almost immediately after we have, so to
say, stepped outside the walls of our own language into the domains of
its very nearest relations.
Nor is the interest of this kind of comparison less great very often in
the case of proper names. The smaller family--or, as we have used the
word family to express a large class of languages, let us say the branch
to which English and German belong--is called the Teutonic branch. To
that branch belonged nearly all those barbarian nations who, towards the
fall of the Roman empire, began the invasion of her territories, and
ended by carving out of them most of the various states and kingdoms of
modern Europe. The best test we have of the nationalities of these
peoples, the best proof that they were connected by language with each
other and with the modern Teutonic nations, is to be found in their
proper names. We have, for instance, among the Vandals such names as
Hilderic, Genseric, and the like; we compare them at once with Theodoric
and Alaric, which were names of famous Goths. Then as the Gothic
language has been preserved we recognize the termination _rîk_ or _rîks_
in Gothic, meaning a ‘king,’ and connected with the German _reich_, and
also with the Latin _rex_--Alaric becomes _al-rik_, ‘all-king,’
universal king. In Theodoric we recognize the Gothic _thiudarik_, ‘king
of the people.’ Again, this Gothic word _thiuda_ is really the same as
the German _deutsch_, or as ‘Dutch,’ and is the word of which ‘Teutonic’
is only a Latinized form. In the same way Hilda-rik in Gothic is ‘king
of battles;’ and having got this word from the Vandals we have not much
difficulty in recognizing Childeric, the usually written form of the
name of a Frankish king, as the same word. This change teaches us to
turn ‘CH’ of Frankish names in our history-books into ‘H,’ so that
instead of Chlovis (which should be Chlodoveus) we first get Hlovis,
which is only a softened form of Hlodovig, or Hludwig, the modern
Ludwig, our Louis. _Hlud_ is known to have meant ‘famous’[28] and _wig_
a ‘warrior,’ so that Ludwig means famous warrior. The same word ‘wig’
seems to appear in the word Merovingian, a Latinized form of
Meer-wig,[29] which would mean sea-warrior.
These instances show us the _kind_ of results we obtain by a comparison
of languages. In the case of these names, for instance, we have got
enough to show a very close relationship amongst the Vandals, the Goths,
and the Franks; and had we time many more instances might have been
chosen to support this conclusion. Here, of course, we have been
confining ourselves to one small _branch_ of a large family. The road,
the farther we go, is beset with greater difficulties and dangers of
mistake, and the student can do little unless he is guided by fixed
rules, which we should have to follow, supposing we were able to carry
on our inquiries into many and distant languages. We may, to some
extent, judge for ourselves what some of these guiding rules must be.
Those words which we have instanced as being common to English and
German, both we and the Germans have got by inheritance from an earlier
language. Yet there are in English hundreds of words which are not
acquired by inheritance from other languages, but merely by adoption;
hundreds of words have been taken directly from the Latin, or from the
Latin through the French, or from the Greek, and not derived from any
early language which was the parent of the Latin, Greek, and English.
How shall we distinguish between these classes of words? We answer, in
the first place, that the _simpler_ words are almost sure to be
inherited, because people, in however rude a state they were, could
never have done without words to express such everyday ideas as _to
have_, _to be_, _to laugh_, _to make_, _to kill_--_I_, _thou_, _to_,
_for_, _and_; whereas they might have done well enough without words
such as _government_, _literature_, _sensation_, _expression_, words
which express either things which were quite out of the way of these
primitive people, or commonish ideas in a somewhat grand and abstract
form.
One of our rules, therefore, must be to begin by choosing the commoner
class of words, or, generally speaking, those words which are pretty
sure never to have fallen out of use, and which therefore must have been
handed down from father to son.
There is another rule--that those languages must be classed together
which have like grammatical forms. This is the rule of especial
importance in distinguishing a complete family of languages. For when
once a language has got into the inflected stage, though it may
hereafter lose or greatly modify nearly all its inflexions, it never
either sinks back into the agglutinative stage, or adopts the
grammatical forms of another language which is also in the inflected
condition.
These are the general rules, therefore, upon which we go. We look first
for the grammatical forms and then for the simple roots, and according
to the resemblance or want of resemblance between them we decide whether
two tongues have any relationship, and whether that relationship is near
or distant.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Semitic races.]
Now it has in this way been found out that all inflected languages
belong to one of two families, called the Semitic and the Aryan. Let us
begin with the Semitic. This word, which is only a Latinized way of
saying Shemite, is given to the nations who are supposed to be descended
from Shem, the second son of Noah. The nations who have spoken languages
belonging to this Semitic family have been those who appear so much in
Old Testament history, and who played a mighty part in the world while
our own ancestors were still wandering tribes, and at an age when
darkness still obscured the doings of the Greeks and Romans. Foremost
among all in point of age and fame stand the Egyptians, who are believed
to have migrated in far pre-historic ages to the land in which they rose
to fame. They found there a people of a lower, a negro or half-negro
race, and mingled with them, so that their language ceased to be a pure
Semitic tongue. In its foundation, however, it was Semitic. The earliest
of the recorded kings of Egypt, Menes, is believed to date back as far
as 5000 B.C. Next in antiquity come the Chaldæans, who have left behind
them great monuments in the ancient cities Erech and Ur, and their
successors the Assyrians and Babylonians. Abraham, himself, we know, was
a Chaldæan, and from him descended the Hebrew nation, who were destined
to shed the highest honour on the Semitic race. Yet, so great may be the
degeneration of some races and the rise of others, so great may be the
divisions which thus spring up between peoples who were once akin, it is
also true that all those peoples whom the Children of Israel were
specially commanded to fight against and even to exterminate--the
Canaanites, the Moabites, and the Edomites--were likewise of Semitic
family. The Phœnicians are another race from the same stock who have
made their mark in the world. We know how, coming first from the coasts
of Tyre and Sidon, they led the way in the art of navigation, sent
colonies to various parts of the world, and foremost among these founded
Carthage, the rival and almost the destroyer of Rome. Our list of
celebrated Semitic races must close with the Arabs, the founders of
Mohammedanism, the conquerors at whose name all Europe used to tremble,
whose kingdoms once extended in an unbroken line from Spain to the banks
of the Indus.
[Sidenote: The Aryan races.]
Such a list gives no mean place to the Semitic family of nations; but
those of the Aryan stock are perhaps even more conspicuous. This family
(which is sometimes called Japhetic, or descendants of Japhet) includes
the Hindus and Persians among Asiatic nations, and almost all the
peoples of Europe. It may seem strange that we English should be related
not only to the Germans and Dutch and Scandinavians, but to the
Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, French, Spanish, Italians, Romans, and
Greeks as well; stranger still that we can claim kinship with such
distant peoples as the Armenians, Persians, and Hindus. Yet such is the
case, and the way in which all these different nations once formed a
single people, speaking one language, and their subsequent dispersion
over the different parts of the world in which we now find them, affords
one of the most interesting inquiries within the range of pre-historic
study. What seems actually to have been the case is this: In distant
ages, somewhere about the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the north of
that mountainous range called the Hindoo-Koosh, dwelt the ancestors of
all the nations we have enumerated, forming at this time a single and
united people, simple and primitive in their way of life, but yet having
enough of a common national life to preserve a common language. They
called themselves Aryas or Aryans, a word which, in its very earliest
sense, seems to have meant those who move upwards, or straight; and
hence, probably, came to stand for the noble race as compared with other
races on whom, of course, they would look down.[30]
How long these Aryans had lived united in this their early home it is,
of course, impossible to say; but as the tribes and families increased
in numbers, a separation would naturally take place. Large associations
of clans would move into more distant districts, the connection between
the various bodies which made up the nation would be less close, their
dialects would begin to vary, and thus the seeds of new nations and
languages would be sown. The beginning of such a separation was a
distinction which arose between a part of the Aryan nation, who stayed
at the foot of the Hindoo-Koosh Mountains, and in all the fertile
valleys which lie there, and another part which advanced farther into
the plain. This latter received the name _Yavanas_, which seems to have
meant the protectors, and was probably given to them because they stood
as a sort of foreguard between the Aryans, who still dwelt under the
shadow of the mountains, and the foreign nations of the plains. And now,
their area being enlarged, they began to separate more and more from one
another; while at the same time, as their numbers increased, the space
wherein they dwelt became too small for them who had, out of one, formed
many different peoples. Then began a series of _migrations_, in which
the collection of tribes who spoke one language and formed one people
started off to seek their fortune in new lands, and thus for ever broke
off association with their kindred and their old Aryan home. One by one
the different nations among the Yavanas (the protectors) were infected
with this new spirit of adventure, and though they took different
routes, they all travelled westward, and arrived in Europe at last.[31]
A not improbable cause has been suggested of these migrations. It is
known that, in spite of the immense volume of water which the Volga is
daily pouring into it, the Caspian Sea is gradually drying up, and it
has been conjectured as highly probable that hundreds of years ago the
Caspian was not only joined to the Sea of Aral, but extended over a
large district which is now sandy desert. The slow shrinking in its bed
of this sea would, by decreasing the rainfall, turn what was once a
fertile country into a desert; and if we suppose this result taking
place while the Aryan nations were gradually increasing in numbers, the
effect would be to drive them, in despair of finding subsistence in the
ever-narrowing fertile tract between the desert and the mountains, to
seek for new homes elsewhere. This, at any rate, is what they did. First
among them, in all probability, started the Kelts or Celts, who,
travelling perhaps to the south of the Caspian and the north of the
Black Sea, found their way to Europe, and spread far on to the extreme
west. At one time it is most likely that the greater part of Europe was
inhabited by Kelts, who partly exterminated and partly mingled with the
stone-age men whom they found there. As far as we know of their actual
extension in historic times we find this Keltic family living in the
north of Italy, in Switzerland, over all the continent of Europe west of
the Rhine, and in the British Isles; for the Gauls, who then inhabited
the northern part of continental Europe west of the Rhine, the ancient
Britons, and probably the Iberians, the ancient inhabitants of Spain,
belonged to this family.[32] The Highland Scotch, who belong to the old
blood, call themselves Gaels, and their language Gaelic, which is
moreover so like the language of the old Irish (who called themselves by
practically the same name--Gaedhill) that a Highlander could make
himself understood in Ireland; perhaps he might do so in Wales, where
the inhabitants are likewise Kelts. These words Gael and Gaedhill are of
the same origin and meaning as Gaul. In the early days of the Roman
republic the Gauls, as we know, inhabited all the north of Italy, and
used often to make successful incursions down to the very centre of the
peninsula. Beyond the Alps they extended as far as into Belgium, which
formed part of ancient Gaul. So much for the Kelts.
Another great family which left the Aryan home was that from which
descended the Greeks and Romans.[33] The primitive ancestors of these
two people have been called the Pelasgians (Pelasgi), the name which the
Greeks gave to their own ancestors who lived in the days before the name
Hellenes was used for the Greek nationality. There is evidence of a
certain early civilization, which is believed to have been that of these
primitive Pelasgi, in the centre of Asia Minor. And it seems probable
that the line of migration of this nationality passed to the south of
the Caspian Sea, then through Asia Minor, and finally, not all at once,
but in successive streams, some across the Hellespont or Dardanelles to
the north of Italy and the north of Greece, and some to the coast of
Asia Minor, and across by the islands of the Ægean to the mainland of
Greece. At every point upon the route there were left behind
remains--offshoots, as it were, or cuttings from the great Pelasgic
stem,--a primitive half-Greek stock in the centre of Asia Minor, a
barbarous half-Greek stock in Thrace and Macedon; while all along the
coasts of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands, and in the southern parts of
European Greece (more especially those which looked eastward) there
arose a much more cultivated race. For in these regions the Greeks came
in contact with the Phœnicians, and gathered much from the
civilizations of Egypt and Assyria. If there were remains of a primitive
Italian race in the north of Italy these were (in subsequent, but still
pre-historic years) blotted out by the spread of the Gauls beyond the
Alps.
How little did these rival nationalities, the Greeks and Romans, deem
that their ancestors had once formed a single people! All such
recollections had been lost to the Greeks and Romans, who, when we find
them in historic times, had invented quite different stories to account
for their origin.
Next we come to two other great families of nations who seem to have
taken the same route at first, and perhaps began their travels together
as the Greeks and Romans did. These are the Teutons and the Slavs. They
seem to have travelled by the north of the Caspian and Black Sea,
extending over all the south of Russia, and down to the borders of
Greece; then gradually to have pushed on to Europe, ousting the Kelts
from the eastern portion, until we find them in the historical period
threatening the borders of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube.
Probably the Teutons pushed on most to the west, and left the Slavs
behind.
The Teutonic family of nations first comes before us vaguely in the
history of the invasion of Gaul and Italy by the Cimbri and the
Teutones, which, as we know, was checked by Marius in the years 102 and
101 B.C. It is probable that both Cimbri and Teutones were of German
origin, though some have connected the name _Cimbri_ with _Cymri_, the
native name of the Welsh (whence _Cumberland_, etc.). This attack by the
Cimbri and Teutones was only an isolated attempt on behalf of the
Teutons. The great invasion of the Roman empire by them did not begin
till five centuries later, in 395 A.D. Of the nations who from this time
forward were engaged in the dismemberment of the empire, and in laying
the foundations of mediæval history, almost all seem to have been of
Teutonic origin. The chief among these nationalities were the
Goths--divided into two great nationalities, the Visi-Goths (West
Goths), and the Ostro-Goths (East Goths), who successively conquered
Italy, and founded kingdoms in Italy, South Aquitaine, and Spain. Then
there were the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Alani and the Suevi, who
invaded Gaul at the beginning of the fifth century, and passed on, some
of them, to found kingdoms in Spain and Africa. There were the Lombards
who succeeded the Ostro-Goths as conquerors of Italy; the Franks who
subdued the Burgundians and the Visi-Goths; the Bavarians who settled in
the Roman provinces of Vindelicia and Noricum, the English (Saxons,
Angles, and Jutes) who settled in the Roman province of Britain. All
these nations carved for themselves new states out of the fragments of
the Roman empire, and these states have for the most part remained
unchanged till our day. And of all those other German states, many of
which were acquired by driving back the Slavs (_e.g._ modern Saxony,
Prussia), we need not speak here. For we have already said what are the
modern nations which compose the Teutonic, or be it, for the words are
the same, the Deutsch, or Dutch family. They are the Scandinavians--that
is to say, the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the
English, the Dutch and Flemings (most of the old Keltic inhabitants of
Belgium were subsequently driven out by Teutonic invaders), and the
Germans.
Lastly, we come to the Slavonians (Slavs), about whom and the
Panslavonic movement which is to weld all the Slavonic peoples into one
great nationality we have heard so much in recent years. The word Slav
comes from _slowan_, which in old Slavonian meant to ‘speak,’ and was
given by the Slavonians to themselves as the people who alone, in their
view, spoke intelligibly. Just so the Greek word βάρβαροι
(_barbaroi_), from which we get our word barbarians, arose, in obedience
to a like prejudice, only from the imitation of people babbling or
making unintelligible sounds--‘bar-bar-bar.’ But among the Germans who
conquered and enslaved the people, Slav became synonymous with the Latin
_servus_, and from them it passed on to express the idea of
slave--_esclave_, _schiavo_, etc. The Slavonic people once extended much
farther to the west in Northern Europe than they do at present--as far,
for instance, as the Elbe in Northern Germany. We begin to hear of them
in history about the age of Charlemagne--a little, that is, before the
end of the eighth century, A.D. The _Obotriti_ and the _Wiltzi_ are the
names of two Slavonic nations on the Baltic, of whom we hear much about
this time. But they can no longer be identified as the ancestors of any
existing race. In the reign of Charlemagne’s grandson, called Lewis the
German, we hear much of other Slavonic peoples whose names have more
meaning for us--the Sorabians, the Czechs (_i.e._ Bohemians), the Mähren
or Moravians, and the Carinthians, who, if they have as separate peoples
ceased to exist, have left behind them their names in the lands they
inhabited.
The same has been the case with other Slavonic peoples who appear later
in history--the Pomeranians and the Prussians (earlier Borussians) and
the Silesians. The people who now bear these names and inhabit these
countries are by origin almost exclusively Teutonic; but the names
themselves and the earlier inhabitants were not Teutons, but Slavs.
The existing Slavonic nationalities are the Russians, Lithuanians
(incorporated in Russia), the Poles, the Czechs or Bohemians, the
Bulgarians, Servians, Montenegrins, etc.,--most, in fact, of the nations
of the Southern Danube.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Pre-historic research through language.]
This is the classification of nationalities by their language. No
classification is perfect; and we know, as an historical fact, that many
nations have abandoned their original tongue, and adopted that of some
other people--their conquerors probably,--as the Gauls and Goths (or
Iberians) of France and Spain have adopted the Latin of the Romans, as
the Highland Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh and Cornishmen have adopted
English.
But a classification by language is far more satisfactory than any other
sort of classification of nations. For when we think of nations we do
not think first of all of their _physique_. The most important thing to
know about them is not their hair was dark or red, their eyes brown or
blue. What we care most to learn are their national character, their
thoughts, their beliefs, their forms of social life. And for the days
when we have no national literature, no history, to guide us, almost the
only means of gaining reliable information upon these points is by a
study of the language of the people in question. Language holds within
it far better than do _tumuli_ or weapons, or articles of pottery or
woven-stuffs or ornaments, the records of long-past times, records of
material civilization and mental culture likewise. It holds these
records, as a chemist would say, in solution in it; not visible perhaps
to the mere passer-by; but if we know how to precipitate the solution it
is wonderful what results we obtain.
No sooner has he finished his classification of languages than a mine of
almost exhaustless wealth then opens before the philologist--a mine,
too, which has at present been only broached. He soon learns the laws
governing the changes of sound from one tongue into another. We have
noted experimentally some of these laws in the more simple relationships
of language, as between English and German, where ‘tag’ becomes ‘day,’
‘dorf’ ‘thorpe,’ and the like; and all relationships of language are
answerable to similar rules. There are laws for the change of sound from
Sanskrit into the primitive forms of Greek, Latin, German, English,
etc., just as there are laws of change between the first two or the last
two.[34] So we soon learn to recognize a word in one language which
reappears in altered guise in another. And it may be well imagined how
valuable such knowledge can be made. If we find a word common say to
Greek and Latin, signifying some simple object, a weapon, a tool, an
animal, a house, it is not over-likely that it will have changed from
the time when it was first employed: the words of this kind which are
now in use have, we know, little tendency to change. So that the time
when this word was first used is in all probability the time when the
_thing_ was first known to primitive man; and if the word is common to
the whole Aryan family, or if it is peculiar to a portion only, then it
is argued that the thing was known or unknown before the separation of
the Aryan folk. I do not, of course, say that rule is never at fault,
only that this is a better criterion than any other sort of research
would afford us, and that by this method of word-comparison we get no
bad picture of the world of our earliest Aryan ancestors.
It might well have happened that when the migrations began our ancestors
were still like the stone-age men of the shell-mounds, still in the
hunter condition; that they knew nothing of domesticated animals, or of
pastures and husbandmen: or it might be, again, that they had left the
pastoral state long behind, and that all their ideas associated
themselves with agriculture, with the division of the land, and with the
recurring seasons for planting. The evidence of language, dealt with
after the fashion we have described, points to the belief that the
ancient Aryans had only made some beginnings of agriculture, as a
supplement to their natural means of livelihood, their flocks and herds:
for among the words common to the whole Aryan race there are very few
connected with farming, whereas their vocabulary is redolent of the
herd, the cattle-fold, the herdsman, the milking-time. Even the word
daughter, which corresponds to the Greek _thugatêr_ and the Sanskrit
_duhitar_, means in the last language ‘the milker,’ and that seems to
throw back the practice of milking to a vastly remote antiquity.[35]
On the other hand, the various Indo-European branches have different
names for the plough, one name for the German races, another for the
Græco-Italic, and for the Sanskrit. And though _aratrum_ has a clear
connection with a Sanskrit root _ar_, it is not absolutely certain that
it ever had in this language the sense of ploughing, and not merely of
wounding, which is a still more primitive meaning of the same root,
whence came the expression for ploughing as of wounding the earth.
Or say we wish to form some notion of the social life of the Aryans. Had
they extended ideas of tribal government? Had they kings, or were they
held together only by the units of family life? Our answer would come
from an examination of their common word for ‘king.’ If they have no
common word, then we may guess that the title and office of kingship
arose among the separate Aryan people and received a name from each. Or
is it that their common word for king had first some simpler
signification, ‘father,’ perhaps, showing that among the Aryan folk the
social bond was still confined within the real or imaginary boundary of
the family? In fact we do find a common word for king in several of the
Aryan languages which has no subsidiary meaning less than that of
_directing_, or keeping straight. This is the Latin _rex_, the Gothic
_rîks_, Sanskrit _rîg_, etc., and its earliest ascertainable meaning was
‘the director.’ The Aryans then, even in those days, acknowledged as
supreme[36] some director chosen (probably) from out of the tribe, a
chief to lead their common warlike or migratory expeditions.
These are but illustrations of the method upon which are founded all
conclusions touching these our ancestors, and the manner of our
knowledge concerning them; far better obtained than merely by gazing
upon the instruments which have fallen from their hands, or the
monuments they might have raised to commemorate the dead. The
difference, in truth, between relics such as these which lie enclosed in
language, and the weapons and tombs of the Stone Ages, is exactly the
difference between Shakespeare’s statue in Westminster Abbey or his bust
at Stratford, and that ‘livelong monument’ whereof Milton spoke. By
perfecting beyond the power of any other race the wonderfully complex
faculty of speech the Aryans secured that their memory should be handed
on the more certainly, and with far greater completeness, than by
records left palpable to men’s eyes and hands. Many of their secret
thoughts might be unlocked by the same key. Already the same means are
being used to give us glimpses of their religious ideas. For the _names_
of the common Aryan gods can be arrived at by just the same comparative
method: it may well happen that a name which is only a proper name in
one language, can in another be traced to a root which unravels its
original meaning. It was so, we saw, with the word _daughter_. Here the
Sanskrit root seems to unravel the hidden--the lost, and so
hidden--meaning in the Greek or English words. So with a god, the
meaning of a name, concealed from the sight of those who used it in
prayer or praise, becomes revealed to _us_ by the divining rod of the
science of language.
And it is true, nevertheless, that the mine of wealth thus opened has as
yet been but cursorily explored.[37] There are far more and greater fish
in this sea than ever came out of it. Some day, perhaps, a strictly
scientific method may be found for classifying and tracing the changes
which words undergo. Sometimes a word is found greatly modified;
sometimes it survives almost intact between the different tongues. Is
there any reason for this? At present we cannot say.
The question might be answered by means of an elaborate classification
under the head of the alterations which words have undergone,[38] and
such a comparative vocabulary would lead to the solution of infinite
questions concerning the growth of nations. We should be able to look
almost into the minds of people long ago, better than we can examine the
minds of contemporary races in a lower mental condition, and see what
ideas took a strong hold upon them, what things they treated as
realities, what metaphorically, and how large for them was the empire of
imagination.
Next there is the boundless field of proper names, both those of persons
and geographical names. These last in every country bear a certain
witness to the races who have passed through that country, and
show--roughly at least--the order of their appearance there. The older
geographical names will be those of natural features, rivers, mountains,
lakes, which have been never absent from the scene; the newer names will
be those bestowed upon the works of man. In our own country this is the
case. The names of our rivers (Thames, Ouse, Severn, Wye) are nearly all
Keltic, _i.e._ British; those of our towns are Teutonic, Saxon or Norse.
Some few Roman names linger on, as in the name and termination
‘Chester;’ but this, as meaning a place of strength, shows us clearly
the reason of its survival. Every European country has changed hands, as
ours has done; nay, every country in the world.[39] So here again we
have promise of plenty of work for the philologist in compiling a
‘Glossary of Proper Names’ with etymologies.
Lastly, let it not be forgotten that a great part of all that has been
done for the Aryan can be done likewise for the Semitic languages--a
field as yet little turned by the plough; and the reader will confess
the debt the world is likely some day to owe to Comparative Philology.