OLD ARYAN WORDS 



that therefore the people who spoke it lighted 

 and aired their houses only through the door- 

 way, it is not easy to decide. It is very unsafe 

 to rest a conclusion upon negative evidence. 

 The old Aryans certainly might have had a 

 name for window which among various tribes 

 came to be supplanted by various other expres- 

 sions. Accordingly we can only say that, while 

 we are perfectly sure that they had doors, it is 

 quite uncertain, so far as philology goes, whether 

 they had windows or not. And in general, 

 while the occurrence of the same indigenous name 

 for any object, throughout the different classes of 

 Indo-European speech, is sufficient proof that 

 the primitive Aryans knew and named the ob- 

 ject, on the other hand, the non-existence of 

 such a common name raises only a negative 

 presumption, which we have seldom any further 

 means for testing. 



The ancient Aryan gained a livelihood chiefly 

 from rearing cattle and tilling the ground. The 

 names of our principal domestic animals are 

 found in all parts of the Indo-European terri- 

 tory. The various Teutonic terms, cow, ku y 

 chuo y reappear with the proper change of guttural 

 in Lettish gows, Pers. g&w, Armen. gov, Zend 

 gao zndgava, Skr.gaus,gava, zndgu. A peculiar 

 twist, by which a labial was pronounced, instead 

 of an original guttural, may be observed quite 

 frequently in the Graeco-Roman and Keltic lan- 

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