CHAPTER IV.

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.