50 COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE 



of their wanderings as an undivided people, others indicative only of 

 the wanderings of certain groups. 



But something must be said of the relation of comparative gram- 

 mar to the study of prehistoric antiquities. For it is this phase of 

 the subject which is regarded with the greatest suspicion within the 

 ranks of comparative grammarians; and at the same time makes 

 the strongest appeal to popular interest. What Woman's Club has 

 not been privileged to listen to a paper upon "The Cradle of the 

 Aryans"? Linguistic Palaeontology, as it is often called, refers to 

 the study of the reconstructed vocabulary of a parent speech with 

 reference to the light it throws upon the civilization of the people 

 using this language. Investigation along this line was initiated 

 and has been most vigorously pursued within the Indo-European 

 field, but similar studies have been made for the Semitic and other 

 families of languages. The common possession, by the various 

 languages of a family, of a given word in the form appropriate to 

 the known phonetic characteristics of each is evidence of the existence 

 of such a word in the parent speech, and consequently of the object 

 designated by this word. Such a series as Sanskrit cva, Avestan spa 

 (cf. also o-TraKtt, quoted as Median by Herodotus), Armenian sun, 

 Greek KVWV, Latin cam's, Old Irish cu, Gothic hunds (certainly not to 

 be separated, though possibly contaminated with the root seen in 

 English hunt), Lithuanian szu, Old Prussian sunis (Russian sobaka 

 must have been borrowed from Iranian), leaves no room for doubt 

 that the primitive Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some 

 species of dog. Similar evidence is sufficient to show their acquaint- 

 ance with numerous other animals, with certain trees, with at least 

 one metal, with a kind of grain, with some means of conveyance 

 both by land and by water, with three seasons, including winter with 

 snow, with the art of sewing, plaiting, weaving, and making vessels 

 of earthenware, with a complete family organization, etc., etc. 



But the earlier essays at a comprehensive view of such conditions, 

 those idyllic pictures of primitive Indo-European life with the 

 milkmaid in the foreground, were marked by so little appreciation 

 of the limitations of linguistic evidence as to bring the whole subject 

 into a disrepute from which it has never fully recovered. Later 

 progress has consisted in a more precise valuation and a more critical 

 application of the evidence from language, and especially in con- 

 trolling and supplementing it by evidence from other sources, such 

 as prehistoric archaeology, historical accounts of early conditions 

 among the various Indo-European peoples, and general ethnology 

 as showing what conditions are likely to be found together. With 

 regard to linguistic evidence, we must recognize that absence of 

 agreement in the designation of an object is no proof that it was 



