E.— GEOGRAPHY 127 



millennia before this period, for instance all the Danubian peoples who 

 moved across Europe in the third millennium B.C., and many still earlier, 

 such as the Men of Ofnet. What did they speak ? Look further afield to 

 the other side of the Old World (Fig. 7). At this date (say the sixth to the 

 third millennia B.C.) it is generally believed that hordes of Amerinds were 

 pouring into North America from central and east Asia. As I showed 

 in 1919 they were of much the same race as the Alpines entering 

 Europe. I suggest that the Pre-Gaelic Alpine invaders of Europe were 

 members of the same linguistic zone and spoke Basque. Later, Europe 

 was invaded by the last-evolved group in the cradleland who spoke 

 Aryan. These ' Wiros ' transferred their languages to almost all the 

 other tribes in Europe excluding the Basques and Finns. In the rugged 

 valleys of the Caucasus, relics of Pre-Aryan language, such as Abkasian, 

 seem to have survived. In its syntax it resembles both Basque and many 

 Amerind tongues. 



Following the principle of ' doubt and deduce,' I venture to sow many 

 seeds of linguistic heresy which I hope will prove fertile in the minds of 

 some young researchers. Let us consider the typical marginal languages 

 of Europe, i.e. Gaelic and Welsh. It seems to be rather generally believed 

 that these have always been spoken by the dark highlanders and their 

 allies of Mediterranean race in Wales and Ireland. A great deal of natural 

 pride is based on this belief in this age-long association. But our ' Zones 

 and Strata ' theory suggests that these marginal peoples only recently 

 learnt these languages from entirely different races. The writer believes 

 that Hamitic speech (akin to the language of the Pharaohs) was spoken 

 in most parts of Britain while the Greeks were learning Homer. The 

 Berbers, Tuaregs and other still more marginal folk of North Africa are 

 of the same race and still preserve their old speech without change (Fig. 13). 

 It is to be hoped that Berber will not be made compulsory for the un- 

 fortunate youngsters in the Irish Free State as the result of this address ! 

 As regards France, we have very little knowledge of the languages spoken 

 as late as 200 B.C. which are called Gaulic. Study of the migrations of 

 the Kentum Aryans shows that the western tribes probably spoke some- 

 thing close to Gaelic — but intermediate between this speech and Latin. 

 The writer has never been satisfied with the general belief that French is 

 entirely a derivative of Latin. If the western K Gauls used the same 

 linguistic roots as did the Romans, why is not French largely based on 

 Gaulic roots, with the presumably characteristic suffixes, etc. ' worn oft ' 

 according to the usual development of a language .-' I may make my 

 point clearer by an exaggerated analogy. Supposing we knew nothing 

 of the English language before 1750, we should be far from correct if we 

 assumed (because English resembled German) that it was largely due 

 to the Hanoverian culture of that date. 



Few developments in world history are more remarkable than the spread 

 of the Romance languages which are of course largely based on Latin. 

 It is well to realise that Latin is one of the most marginal and, therefore, 

 one of the most primitive of Aryan tongues. Jespersen pointed this out 

 many decades ago — but there is such a halo around Latin that this has 

 not yet become generally known (Jespersen 1894). Many philologists 

 still maintain that the striking change from Latin to French and from 



