480 THE PRIMITIVE HOME OF THE ARYANS. 



these dialects from auotlier, and not to liave been a heritage common to 

 both. It is often very difficult to decide whether we are dealin<:j with 

 borrowed words or not. If a word has been borrowed by a lanfjuage 

 before the phonetic changes liad set in which liavc given the language 

 its peculiar complexion, or while they were in the course of progress, it 

 will undergo the same alteration as native words containing the same 

 sounds. The phonetic changes which have marked off the High German 

 dialects from their sister tongues do not seem to go back beyond the 

 fall of the Roman Empire, and words borrowed from Latin before that 

 date will accordingly have submitted to the same phonetic changes as 

 words of native origin. Indeed, when once a word is borrowed by one 

 language from another and has i)assed iato common use it soou becomes 

 naturalized and is assimilated in form and pronunciation to the words 

 among which it has come to dwell. A curious example of this is to be 

 found in certain Latin words which made their way into the Gaelic 

 dialects in tlie fourth or fifth century. We often find a Gaelic c corre- 

 sponding to a Welsh p, both being derived from a labialized guttural 

 or qu, and the habit was accordingly formed of regarding a c as the 

 natural and necessary representative of a foreign^;. When therefore 

 words like the Latin pascha and purpura were introduced by Christianity 

 into the Gaelic branch of the Keltic family they assumed the form of 

 caisg and corcur. 



It is clear that such borrowings can only take place where the speakers 

 of two different languages have been brought into contact with one 

 another. Before the age of commercial intercourse between Europe and 

 India we can not suppose that Euroi)ean words could have been bor- 

 rowed by Sanskrit or Persian, or Sanskrit and Persian words by the 

 European languages. But the case is quite otherwise if instead of 

 comparing together the vocabularies of the Eastern and Western 

 members of the Indo-European stock we wish to compare only Western 

 with Western or Eastern with Eastern. There our difficulties begin, 

 and we must look to history, or botany, or zoology for aid. From a 

 purely philological point of view the English hetnp^the old high German 

 hanf, the old Norse hanpr, and the Latin cannabis might all be derived 

 from a common source, and point to the fact that hemp was known to 

 the first speakers of the Indo-European languages in northwestern 

 Europe. But the botanists tell us that this could not have been the 

 case. Hemp is a product of the Bast which did not originally grow in 

 Germany, and consequently both the plant itself and the name by which 

 it was called must have come from abroad. So again, the lion bears a 

 similar name in Greek and Latin, in German, in Slavonic, and in Keltic. 

 But the only part of Europe in which the lion existed at a time when the 

 speakers of an Indo-European language could have become acquainted 

 with it were the mountains of Thrace, and it must accordingly have 

 been from Greek that its name spread to the other cognate languages 

 of the W est. 



