THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. Ill 



cult of acquisition. The Aryan conquerors would naturally not 

 attempt, like the Teutonic conquerors of southern Europe or the 

 Nox'man conquerors of England, to acquire the speech of their sub- 

 jects. Like the Roman conquerors of Gaul, they would retain their 

 own language, but in such a simplified form as would adapt it for 

 communication with the conquered people. The mingled race would 

 speak an idiom which would be in the main Aryan, but would have 

 lost many vocal elements and many grammatical inflections. The 

 new language would be to the primitive Aryan what the English is 

 to the German, or what the French is to the Latin. It would be a 

 less complex speech, and more easy of pronunciation ; and while the 

 mass of its vocables would be of Aryan origin, but much corrupted 

 and abbreviated, there would be in it a considei'able number of words 

 derived from a difterent source. This description applies to all the 

 European languages of Aryan stock, from the Greek to the Celtic ; 

 but the change and corruption are greater, as might be expected, the 

 further west we advance. 



Thus the application of the elementary principles of comparative 

 philology disjioses of the hypothesis of the European origin of the 

 Aryan race, which some eminent scholars have lately maintained on 

 various and often contradictory grounds. The notion that the Aryan 

 .speech could have originated among the comparatively simple and 

 formless idioms of western Europe, and, advancing eastward, could 

 have yielded such highly complex languages as the Zend and the San- 

 scrit, is one which finds no countenance in the laws of linguistic 

 science, or in any known example of a like evolution. Nor should it 

 be objected that the ancient Aryan tongues of Europe, as they ai-e 

 known to us, ave of later date than the ancient Aryan tongues of 

 Asia, and may therefore have suffered more disintegration and loss 

 by the mere lapse of time. The facts do not sustain this objection. 

 We know the condition of the Greek and the Latin in the fourth 

 century before Christ, when the Sanscrit and the Zend were flourish- 

 ing tongues ; and we know the character of the Maiso-Gothic lan- 

 guage at a date not very much later. Greek, Latin and Mjeso- 

 Gothic alike show evidences of the loss and distortion caused by the 

 violent impact of other tongues. Conquest and migration — the 

 migration of the Aryan hordes into Europe, gradually overpowering 

 and absorbing the earlier populations — will alone account for the 



