July 19, 1889.] 



SCIENCE. 



39 



a "knife" ijiaistoa) has been found by Prince L.-L. Bonaparte in 

 a single obscure village ; elsewhere it has been replaced by terms 

 borrowed from French or Spanish : yet we cannot suppose that the 

 Basques were unacquainted with instruments for cutting until they 

 had been furnished with them by their French and Spanish neigh- 

 bors. Greek and Latin have different words for " fire : " we cannot 

 argue from this that the knowledge of fire was ever lost among any 

 of the speakers of the Indo-European tongues. In short, we can- 

 not infer from the absence of a word in any particular language 

 ■that the word never existed in it : on the contrary, when a language 

 is known to us only in its literary form, it is safe to say that it 

 must have employed many words besides those contained in its 

 dictionary. 



A good illustration of the impossibility of arriving at any certain 

 results as long as we confine our attention to words which appear 

 in one but not in another of two cognate languages, is afforded by 

 the Indo-European words which denote a sheet of water. There 

 is no word of which it can be positively said that it is found alike 

 in the Asiatic and the European branches of the family. Lake, 

 ocean, even river and stream, go by different names. A doubt 

 hangs over the word for " sea : " it is possible, but only possible, 

 that the 'S>xa^cx\\. pathas is the same word as the Greek -n-diTos-, the 

 etymology of which is not yet settled. Nevertheless, we know that 

 tha speakers of the parent- language must have been acquainted, if 

 not with the sea, at all events with large rivers. Nans (" a ship ") 

 is the common heritage of Sanscrit and Greek, and must thus go 

 back to the days when the speakers of the dialects which after- 

 wards developed into Sanscrit and Greek still lived side by side. 

 It survives, like a fossil in the rocks, to assure us that they were a 

 water-faring people, and that the want of a common Indo-Euro- 

 pean word for " lake " or " river " is no proof that such a word may 

 not have once existed. 



The example I have just given illustrates the second way in 

 which the attempt has been made to solve the riddle of the Indo- 

 European birthplace. It is the only way in which the attempt can 

 succeed. Where precisely the same word, with the same meaning, 

 exists in both the Asiatic and the European members of the Indo- 

 European family, — always supposing, of course, that it has not 

 been borrowed by either of them, — we may conclude that it also 

 existed in the parent-speech. When we find the Sanscrit as'ivas 

 and the Latin eqims, the exact phonetic equivalents of one another, 

 both alike signifying " horse," we are Justified in believing that the 

 horse was known in the country from which both languages de- 

 rived their ancestry. Though the argument from a negative 

 proves little or nothing, the argument from agreement proves a 

 great deal. 



The comparative philologist has by means of it succeeded in 

 sketching in outline the state of culture possessed by the speakers 

 of the parent-language, and the objects which were known to 

 them. They inhabited a cold country. Their seasons were three 

 in number, perhaps four, and not two, as would have been the case 

 had they lived south of the temperate zone. They were nomad 

 herdsmen, dwelling in hovels, similar, it may be, to the low, round huts 

 of sticks and straw built by the Kabyles on the mountain-slopes of 

 Algeria. Such hovels could be erected in a few hours, and left 

 again as the cattle moved into higher ground with the approach of 

 spring, or descended into the valleys when the winter advanced. 

 The art of grinding corn seems to have been unknown, and crushed 

 spelt was eaten instead of bread. A rude sort of agriculture was, 

 however, already practised ; and the skins worn by the community, 

 with which to protect themselves against the rigors of the climate, 

 were sewn together by means of needles of bone. It is even possi- 

 ble that the art of spinning had already been invented, though the 

 art of weaving does not appear to have advanced beyond that of 

 plaiting reeds and withies. The community still lived in the stone 

 age. Their tools and weapons were made of stone or bone ; and, 

 if they made use of gold or meteoric iron, it was of the unwrought 

 pieces picked up from the ground, and employed as ornaments. 

 Of the v/orking of metals, they were entirely ignorant. As among 

 savage tribes generally, the various degrees of relationship were 

 minutely distinguished and named, even the wife of a husband's 

 brother receiving a special title ; but they could count at least as 

 far as a hundred. They believed in a multitude of ghosts and 



goblins, making offerings to the dead, and seeing in the bright sky 

 a potent deity. The birch, the pine, and the withy were known to 

 them ; so also were the bear and wolf, the hare, the mouse, and 

 the snake, as well as the goose and raven, the quail and the owl. 

 Cattle, sheep, goats, and swine were all kept. The dog had been 

 domesticated, and in all probability also the horse. Last, but not 

 least, boats were navigated by means of oars, the boats themselves 

 being possibly the hollowed trunks of trees. 



This account of the primitive community is necessarily imper- 

 fect. There must have been many words, like that for " river," 

 which were once possessed by the parent-speech, but afterwards 

 lost in either the eastern or western branches of the family. Such 

 words the comparative philologist has now no means of discover- 

 ing : he must accordingly pass them over along with the objects or 

 ideas which they represent. The picture he can give us of the 

 speakers of the primeval Indo-European language can only be ap- 

 proximately complete. Moreover, it is always open to correction. 

 Some of the words we now believe to have been part of the origi- 

 nal stock carried away by the derived dialects of Asia and Europe 

 may hereafter turn out to have been borrowed by one of these dia- 

 lects from another, and not to have been a heritage common to 

 both. It is often very difficult to decide whether we are dealing 

 with borrowed words or not. If a word has been borrowed by a 

 language before the phonetic changes had set in which have given 

 the language its peculiar complexion, or while they were in the 

 course of progress, it will undergo the same alteration as native 

 words containing the same sounds. The phonetic changes which 

 have marked off the High German dialects from their sister- 

 tongues do not seem to go back beyond the fall of the Roman 

 Empire, and words borrowed from Latin before that date will ac- 

 cordingly have submitted to the same phonetic changes as words 

 of native origin. Indeed, when once a word is borrowed by one 

 language from another, and has passed into common use, it soon 

 becomes naturalized, and is assimilated in form and pronunciation 

 to the words among which it has come to dwell. A curious exam- 

 ple of this is to be found in certain Latin words which made their 

 way into the Gaelic dialects in the fourth or fifth century. We 

 often find a Gaelic c corresponding to a Welsh /, both being de- 

 rived from a labialized guttural or qu, and the habit was accord- 

 ingly formed of regarding a <: as the natural and necessary repre- 

 sentative of a foreign /. When, therefore, words like the Latin 

 pascha axiA purpuraviere introduced by Christianity into the Gaelic 

 branch of the Celtic family, they assumed the form of caz'sg and 

 corcur. 



It is clear that such borrowings can only take place where the 

 speakers of two different languages have been brought into con- 

 tact with one another. Before the age of commercial intercourse 

 between Europe and India we cannot suppose that European words 

 could have been borrowed by Sanscrit or Persian, or Sanscrit and 

 Persian words by the European languages. But the case is quite 

 otherwise, if, instead of comparing together the vocabularies of the 

 eastern and western members of the Indo-European stock, we 

 wish to compare only western with western, or eastern with east- 

 ern. There our difficulties begin, and we must look to history, or 

 botany, or zoology for aid. From a purely philological point of 

 view, the English //67«/, the Old High German hanf, the Old Norse 

 hanpr, and the Latin cannabis, might all be derived from a com- 

 mon source, and point to the fact that hemp was known to the first 

 speakers of the Indo-European languages in north-western Europe. 

 But the botanists tell us that this could not have been the case. 

 Hemp is a product of the East, which did not originally grow in 

 Germany, and consequently both the plant itself and the name by 

 which it was called must have come from abroad. So, again, the 

 lion bears a similar name in Greek and Latin, in German, in Sla- 

 vonic, and in Celtic. But the only part of Europe in which the 

 lion existed at a time when the speakers of an Indo-European lan- 

 guage could have become acquainted with it were the mountains 

 of Thrace, and it must accordingly have been from Greek that its 

 name spread to the other cognate languages of the West. 



It has been needful to enter into these details before we can ap- 

 proach the question, " What was the original home of the parent 

 Indo-European language ? " They have been too often ignored or 

 forgotten by those who have set themselves to answer the question. 



