THE PKIMITIVE ROME OF THE ARYANS. 481 



It bais been needful to enter into these details before we can approach 

 the question, What w.is the original home of the parent Indo-Euro- 

 pean language 1 They have been too otten ignored or forgotten by 

 those who have set themselves to answer the question, and to this cause 

 must be ascribed the larger part of the misunderstandings and false 

 conclusions to which the incpiiry lias given birth. 



Until a few years ago, I shared the old belief that the parent speech 

 had its home in Asia, probably on the slopes of the Hindu Kush. The 

 fact that the languages of Europe and Asia alike possessed the same 

 words for " winter" and " ice" and " snow," and that the only two trees 

 Mhose names were preserved by both — the "birch" and the "]nne" — 

 were inhabitants of a cold region, proved tliat this home did not lie in 

 the troi)ics. But the uplands of the Hindu Kush, or the barren steppes 

 in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea, or even the valleys of Siberia, 

 would answer to the requirements ])resented by such words. Taken by 

 themselves they were fully compatible with the view that the first 

 speakers of the Indo-European tongues were an Asiatic people. 



But when I came to ask myself what were the grounds for holding 

 this view, I could find none that seemed to me satisfactory. There is 

 much Justice in Dr. Latham's remark that it is unreasonable to derive 

 the majority of the Indo-European languages from a continent to which 

 only two members of the group are known to belong, unless there is 

 an imperative necessity for doing so. These languages have grown out 

 of dialects once existing Avithin the parent sprech itself; audit cer- 

 tainly appears more i)robable that two of such dialects or languages 

 should have made their way into a new world, across the bleak plains 

 of Tartary, than that seven or eight should have done so. The argu- 

 ment, it is true, is not a strong one, but it raises at the outset a pre- 

 sumption in favor of Europe. Before the dialects had developed into 

 languages their speakers could not have lived far apart; there is in 

 fact evidence of this in the case of Sanskrit and Persian ; and a more 

 widely spread primitive community is implied by the numerous lan- 

 guages of Europe than by the two languages of Asia. A widley spread 

 community however is less likely to wander far from its original seat 

 than a community of less extent, more especially when it is a commun- 

 ity of lierdsiiien and the tract to be traversed is long and barren. 



Apart from the general ])rejndice in favor of an Asiatic origin due to 

 old theological teaching and the effect of the discovei'y of Sanskrit, 1 

 can find only two arguments which have been sui)poscd to be of suffi- 

 cient weight to determine the choice of Asia rather than of Europe as 

 the cradle of Indo-Euioi)ean siiecch. The first ol' these arguments is 

 linguistic, the second is historical or rather quasi historical. On the 

 one hand it has been laid down by eminent philologists that the less one 

 of the derived languages has dell('(;ted from the ])arent si)eech, the more 

 likely it is to be geographically nearer to its earliest home. The faith- 

 fulness of the record is a test of geographical proximity. As Sanskrit 

 H. Mis. 129 31 



