482 THE PRIMITIVE HOME OF THE ARYANS. 



was held to be the most primitive of the Indo-European languages, to 

 reflect most clearly the features of the parent speech, the conclusion was 

 drawn that that parent speech had been spoken at no great distance 

 from the country in which the hymns of the Rig- Veda were first com- 

 posed. The conclusion was supported by the second argument drawn 

 from the sacred books of Parsaism In the Vendidad the migrations of 

 the Iranians were traced back through the successive creations of 

 Ormazd to Airyanem Vaejo, " the Aryan Power," which Lassen local- 

 ized near the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes. But Br«''al and De 

 Harlez have shown that the legends of the Vendidad, in their ])resent 

 form, are late and untrustworthy — later, in fact, than the Christian era ;* 

 and even if we could attach any historical value to them, they would 

 tell us only from whence the Iranians believed their own ancestors to 

 have come, and would throw no light on the cradle of the Indo-Euro- 

 pean languages as a whole. The first argument is one which I think 

 no student of language would any longer employ. As Professor Max 

 JNIiiller has said, it would suffice to prove that the Scandinavians emi- 

 grated from Iceland. But to those who would still urge it, I must re- 

 peat what I have said elsewhere. Although in many respects Sanskrit 

 has preserved more faithfully than the European languages the forms 

 of primitive Indo-European grammar, in many other respects the con- 

 verse is the case. In the latest researches into tiie history of Indo- 

 European grammar, Greek holds the place once occupied by Sanskrit. 

 The belief that Sanskrit was the elder sister of the family led to the 

 assumption that the three short vowels a, e, and o have all originated 

 from an earlier a. I was, I believe, the first to i)rotest against this 

 assumption in 1874, and to give reasons for thinking that the single 

 monotonous 3. of Sanskrit resulted from the coalescence of three dis- 

 tinct vowels. The analogy of other languages goes to show that the 

 tendency of time is to reduce the number of vocalic sounds possessed 

 by a language, not the contrary. In place of the numerous vowels 

 possessed by ancient Greek, modern Greek can now show only live, and 

 cultivated English is rapidly merging its vowel sounds into the so- 

 called " neutral " o. Since my protest the matter has been worked out 

 by Italian, German, and French scholars, and we now kiu)w that it is 

 the vocalic system of the European languages rather than of Sanskrit 

 which most faithfully represents the oldest form of Indo-European 

 speech. The result of the discovery, for discovery it must be called, 

 has been a complete revolution in the study of Indo European etymol- 

 ogy, and still more of Indo-European grammar, and whereas ten years 

 ago it was Sanskrit which was invoked to explain Greek, it is to Greek 

 that the " new school " now turns to explain Sanskrit. The comparative 

 philologist necessarily cannot do without the help of both; the greater 



• Brdal, "M^langc8deMythoIogieet de Linguistique" (1878), pp. 187-215. De Harlez, 

 ''Introduction a V fitndc de VAresta'^ pp. cxcii, sqq. Compare Danuesteter's Introduc- 

 tion to the Zvnd-Jventa, pt. 1, iu "The Sacied Booka of the East." 



