Chapter 47

[43].

Aryan Hypothesis and Controversy. The Races of Mankind change more slowly than their Languages. Theory of the gradual Origin of Languages. Difficulty of defining what is meant by a Language as distinct from a Dialect. Great Number of extinct and living Tongues. No European Language a Thousand Years old. Gaps between Languages, how caused. Imperfection of the Record. Changes always in Progress. Struggle for Existence between rival Terms and Dialects. Causes of Selection. Each Language formed slowly in a single Geographical Area. May die out gradually or suddenly. Once lost can never be revived. Mode of Origin of Languages and Species a Mystery. Speculations as to the Number of original Languages or Species unprofitable.

The supposed existence, at a remote and unknown period, of a language conventionally called the Aryan, has of late years been a favourite subject of speculation among German philologists, and Professor Max Muller has given us lately the most improved version of this theory, and has set forth the various facts and arguments by which it may be defended, with his usual perspicuity and eloquence. He observes that if we know nothing of the existence of Latin--if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost--if tradition even was silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Wallachian, and Rhaetian dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which these six modern dialects derive their origin in common. Without this supposition it would be impossible to account for their structure and composition, as, for example, for the forms of the auxiliary verb "to be," all evidently varieties of one common type, while it is equally clear that no one of the six affords the original form from which the others could have been borrowed. So also in none of the six languages do we find the elements of which these verbal and other forms could have been composed; they must have been handed down as relics from a former period, they must have existed in some antecedent language, which we know to have been the Latin.

But, in like manner, he goes on to show, that Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are also eight varieties of one common and more ancient type, and no one of them could have been the original from which the others were borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resemblance as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages. The people who spoke this unknown parent speech, of which so many other ancient tongues were off-shoots, must have migrated at a remote era to widely separated regions of the old world, such as Northern Asia, Europe, and India south of the Himalaya.*

(* Max Muller, "Comparative Mythology" Oxford Essays 1856.)

The soundness of some parts of this Aryan hypothesis has lately been called in question by Mr. Crawfurd, on the ground that the Hindoos, Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, and other people referred to as having derived not only words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source, belong each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is said, preserved their peculiar characters unaltered from the earliest dawn of history and tradition. If, therefore, no appreciable change has occurred in three or four thousand years, we should be obliged to assume a far more remote date for the first branching off of such races from a common stock than the supposed period of the Aryan migrations, and the dispersion of that language over many and distant countries.

But Mr. Crawfurd has, I think, himself helped us to remove this stumbling-block, by admitting that a nation speaking a language allied to the Sanscrit (the oldest of the eight tongues alluded to), once probably inhabited that region situated to the north-west of India, which within the period of authentic history has poured out its conquering hordes over a great extent of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. The same people, he says, may have acted the same part in the long, dark night which preceded the dawn of tradition.*

(* Crawfurd, "Transactions of the Ethnological Society"