LANGUAGE. 



a guttural or a dental. The same word is written 

 by Protestant missionaries with k, by French with 

 /. It takes months of patient labour to teach a 

 Hawaian youth the difference between k and /, g 

 and d, I and r. . . . If colonies started to-morrow 

 from the Hawaian islands, the same which took 

 place thousands of years ago, when the Hindus, 

 the Greeks, and Romans left their common 

 home, would take place again. One colony 

 would elaborate the indistinct, half-guttural, half- 

 dental contact into a pure guttural ; another, into 

 a pure dental ; a third, into a labial.' Much 

 light is thrown on this question by those phonetic 

 peculiarities those deficiencies and predilections 

 of articulation which characterise whole tribes and 

 nations, as they often do individuals. They may 

 have originated, perhaps, in the idiosyncrasies of 

 individual ancestors (a lisping patriarch might 

 produce a tribe of lispers, without their inheriting 

 the physical defect which caused the lisp in him), 

 or in a common habit of the organs of speech 

 produced by external circumstances ; but once 

 established, they are very persistent and influen- 

 tial. The Mohawks, and several other American 

 tribes, have- no p, b, m,f,v, or TV, they never articu- 

 late with their lips. In Chinese, there is no d; r 

 is also wanting ; and as the habit of the language 

 requires a vowel after every consonant, the nearest 

 approach they can make to the sound of Christ 

 is Ki-li-se-tu. An analogous habit of articulation 

 transforms the English word gold in the mouth of 

 a Kafir into i-go-li-de.* 



By observing the laws which we have above 

 illustrated as regulating the interchange of sounds 

 among the Indo-European languages, we can 

 often identify words where there is little or 

 no internal resemblance. Take Eng. feather. 

 If there is a corresponding word in Greek or 

 Latin, the root-consonants must, by Grimm's law, 

 be/-/; which leads us to the root pet, signifying 



in both languages, to fly. From this the Greeks 

 formed pet-eron (contracted into pterori), a wing, 

 which there is no difficulty in admitting to be the 

 same word as feather. It is hard to believe the 

 same of the Lat. penna, until we learn that it once 

 had the forms pet-na and pes-na, penna being the 

 result of assimilation. Again, we undertake to 

 identify French larme with Eng. tear. No one 

 will dispute that larme is a corruption of Lat. lacri- 

 maj in fact, it can be followed through the succes- 

 sive stages of change. Now, we know that the 

 Romans had a peculiarity of letting d in some posi- 

 tions degenerate into /. Nor is this unaccount- 

 able, when we consider that the contact of organs 

 which produces d, differs from that which pro- 

 duces / chiefly in being more energetic ; a slovenly 

 d slides into /. Thus, the Greek name, Odysseus, 

 became, in the mouths of the Romans, Ulysses ; 

 they said odor (a smell), but oleo (I smell) ; and, 

 instead of impedimentum, dedicare, we sometimes 

 find impelimentum, delicare. These and other 

 instances would warrant us to conclude that lacri- 

 ma was a corruption of dacri-ma (corresponding 

 to Gr. dakru), even if we had not the express 

 statement of Festus that dacrima was the older 

 form. After this, there is no difficulty in recog- 

 nising dacri, or dakru, as identical with Gothic 

 tagr, Eng. tear. 



The words which are most palpably and un- 

 mistakably the same throughout the Indo- 

 European tongues are the numerals, the pro- 

 nouns, and those expressive of family relations. 

 The following table, taken from Professor 

 Whitney's excellent volume on Language and the 

 Study of Language, exhibits in a clear way some 

 of these correspondences. Under each word is 

 added its equivalent in two other languages, 

 Arabic and Turkish, which, though existing in 

 proximity to the Aryan languages, will be seen to 

 have no affinity with them or with one another. 



Such are a few specimens of the mass of evi- 

 dence which goes {o prove that the Indo-European 

 languages are only later dialectic varieties of a 

 single original tongue. No one of these languages 

 not even the Sanscrit, old as we know it to have 



* These predilections and idiosyncrasies of articulation are 

 strikingly exhibited in a New Zealand newspaper printed in 

 parallel columns of English and Maori. The Maori version ex- 

 hibits European proper names and words borrowed from English, 

 transliterated as the natives pronounce them. The Maoris seem 

 incapable of articulating d, b,f, v, I, or s, or of pronouncing any 

 consonant without a vowel after it ; so that in their mouths Donald 

 Fraser becomes Tonore Pereiha ; Stephen = Tepene ; Martha = 

 Maata; Locke Raka; Jerusalem = Hiruharama; October = 

 Oketopa ; September = Hepetema ; school = kura ; horses = 

 fcoiho ; bay = pei ; courts = coon. 



been can claim to be the parent of the others. 

 The relation among them is that of sisters, 

 daughters of one mother, which perished, as it 

 were, in giving them birth. If we ask where the 

 tribe or nation lived that spoke this parent tongue, 

 we get little beyond conjectures for answer. Most 

 of the speculations on this topic point to Central 

 Asia, somewhere east of the Caspian, and north 

 of the Hindu Kush. And, from the legendary tra- 

 ditions of the sacred books of the ancient Per- 

 sians, there seem good grounds for believing that 

 in that region the ancient Bactria the Indo- 

 Persian branch of the family once lived together ; 

 that they there quarrelled, owing to religious 



