514 Evolution and Language 



some authorities, to be written in excellent Hebrew. The study 

 of them has been the fascination and the despair of many a philo- 

 logist. Thanks to the devoted labours of numerous scholars, mainly 

 in the last sixty years, the general drift of these inscriptions 

 is now known. They are the only important records of the ancient 

 Umbrian language, which was related closely to that of the Samnites 

 and, though not so closely, to that of the Romans on the other side 

 of the Apennines. Yet less than twenty years ago a book was 

 published in Germany, which boasts itself the home of Comparative 

 Philology, wherein the German origin of the Umbrian language was 

 no less solemnly demonstrated than had been its Celtic origin by 

 Sir William Betham in 1842. 



It is good that the study of language should be historical, but the 

 first requisite is that the history should be sound. How little had 

 been learnt of the true history of language a century ago may be seen 

 from a little book by Stephen Weston first published in 1802 and 

 several times reprinted, where accidental assonance is considered 

 sufficient to establish connection. Is there not a word had in English 

 and a word had in Persian which mean the same thing? Clearly 

 therefore Persian and English must be connected. The conclusion is 

 true, but it is drawn from erroneous premises. As stated, this identity 

 has no more value than the similar assonance between the English 

 cover and the Hebrew h&phar, where the history of cover as coming 

 through French from a Latin co-operire was even in 1802 well-known 

 to many. To this day, in spite of recent elaborate attempts^ to 

 establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic 

 families of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such re- 

 lation between these families. This is not to deny the possibility of 

 such a connection at a very early period; it is merely to say that 

 tlu'ough the lapse of long ages all trustworthy record of such relation- 

 ship, if it ever existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, 

 obliterated. 



But while Stephen Weston was publishing, with much public 

 approval, his collection of amusing similarities between languages — 

 similarities which proved nothing — the key to the historical study 

 of at least one family of languages had already been found by a 

 learned Englishman in a distant land. In 1783 Sir William Jones 

 had been sent out as a judge in the supreme court of judicature 

 in Bengal. While still a young man at Oxford he was noted as a 

 linguist; his reputation as a Persian scholar had preceded him to 

 the East. In the intervals of his professional duties he made a 

 careful study of the language wJiich was held sacred by the natives 



1 Most recently in H. MoUer's Semitisch und Indogermanisch, Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 

 1907. 



