TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 889 



same result, and indicating north-eastern Europe as the starting-point of the Indo- 

 European languages, while the evidences invoked in favour of their Asiatic origin 

 have one and all broken down. 



These evidences chiefly rested on the supposed superiority of Sanslnit over the 

 other Indo-Em-opean languages as a representative of the parent-speech from which 

 they were all descended. The grammar and phonology of Sanskrit were imagined 

 to be more archaic, more faithful to the primitive pattern than those of its sister- 

 tongues. It was argued that this imphed a less amount of migration and change 

 on the part of its speakers, a nearer residence, in fact, to the region where the 

 parent-speech had once been spoken. As a comparison of the words denoting 

 certain objects in the Indo-European languages showed that this region must have 

 had a cold climate, it was placed on the slopes of the Hindu-Kush or at the sources 

 of the Oxus and Jaxartes. 



But we now know that instead of being the most faithful representative of the 

 parent-speech, Sanskrit is in many respects far less so than are its sister-languages 

 of Europe. Its vocabulary, for instance, has been thrown into confusion by the 

 coalescence of the three primitive vowel sounds a, e, 6 into the single monotonous 

 u, a con-uptiou which is paralleled by the coalescence of so many vowels in modern 

 cultivated English in the so-called ' neutral ' e. Greek, or even the Lithuanian, 

 which may still be heard to-day from the lips of unlettered peasants, has preserved 

 more faithfully than the Sanskrit of India the features of the parent Aryan. If 

 the faithfulness of the record is any proof of the geographical proximity of one of 

 the Indo-European languages to their common mother, it is in the neighbourhood 

 of Lithuania, rather than in the neighbourhood of India, that we ought to look f jr 

 traces of the first home of the Aryan family. 



But the theory of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-European family has not only 

 been deprived of its main support by the dethronement of Sanskrit, and the transfer 

 of its primacy to the languages of Europe, what Professor Max Miiller has termed 

 •* linguistic palreontology ' has further assisted in overthrowing the crumbling edifice. 

 When we find words of similar phonetic form and similar meaning in both the 

 Asiatic and the European branches of the Aryan family — words, too, which it can 

 be shown have not been borrowed by one Indo-European language from another — 

 we are justified in concluding that the objects or phenomena denoted by them were 

 already known to the speakers of the parent language. When we find, for instance, 

 that the birch is known by the same name in both Sanskrit and Teutonic, we may 

 infer that it was a tree with which the speakers of the mother tongue of Sanskrit 

 and Teutonic were acquainted, and that consequently they must have lived in a cold 

 climate. 



Four years ago a valuable contribution to the linguistic palaeontology of the 

 Aryan languages was made by Professor Otto Schrader. For the first time the 

 question was approached from the present level of comparative philology, and all 

 words were excluded from comparison which did not satisfy the requirements of 

 phonetic law. The results were sadly disquieting to the believers in that idyllic 

 picture of primitive Aryan life to which we had so long been accustomed. Professor 

 Schrader proved that the speakers of the parent Aryan language must not only have 

 lived in a cold climate — a fact which was Iniown already — but that they must have 

 lived in the stone age, with the skins of wild beasts only to protect them from the 

 rigours of the winter, and nothing better than stone weapons with which to ward 

 oiFthe attacks of savage animals. Their general cidture was on a level with their 

 general surroundings. It was little better than that of the Fuegian before he came 

 into contact with European missionaries. The minuteness with which the varying 

 degrees of family relationship were named, instead of indicating an ad\-anced social 

 life, as was formerly imagined, really indicated the direct contrary. The primitive 

 Aryan was indeed acquainted with fire ; he could even sew his skins together by 

 means of needles of bone ; and possibly could spin a little with the help of rude 

 spindle-whorls ; but beyond this his knowledge of the arts does not seem to have 

 «xtended. If he made use of gold or meteoric iron, it was only of the uuwrought 

 pieces which he picked up from the ground and employed as ornaments ; of the 

 working of metals he was -entirely ignorant. But he already practised a kind of 



