40 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 337 



and to this cause must be ascribed the larger part of the misunder- 

 standings and false conclusions to which the inquiry has given 

 birth. 



Until a few years ago I shared the old belief that the parent- 

 speech had its home in Asia, probably on the slopes of the Hindu 

 Kush. The fact that the languages of Europe and Asia alike pos- 

 sessed the same words for "winter " and "ice" and " snow," and 

 that the only two trees whose names were preserved by both — 

 the " birch " and the " pine " — were inhabitants of a cold region, 

 proved that this home did not lie in the tropics. But the uplands 

 of the Hindu Kush, or the barren steppes in the neighborhood of 

 the Caspian Sea, or even the valleys of Siberia, would answer to 

 the requirements presented by such words. Taken by themselves, 

 they were fully compatible with the view that the first speakers of 

 the Indo-European tongues were an Asiatic people. 



But when I came to ask myself what were the grounds for hold- 

 ing this view, I could find none that seemed to me satisfactory. 

 There is much justice in Dr. Latham's remark that it is unreasona- 

 ble to derive the majority of the Indo-European languages from a 

 continent to which only two members of the group are known to 

 belong, unless there is an imperative necessity for doing so. These 

 languages have grown out of dialects once existing within the 

 parent-speech itself,, and it certainly appears more probable that 

 two of such dialects or languages should have made their way 

 into a new world, across the bleak plains of Tartary, than that 

 seven or eight should have done so. The argument, it is true, is 

 not a strong one, but it raises at the outset a presumption in favor 

 of Europe. Before the dialects had developed into languages, their 

 speakers could not have lived far apart. There is, in fact, evidence 

 of this in the case of Sanscrit and Persian ; and a more widely 

 spread primitive community is implied by the numerous languages 

 of Europe than by the two languages of Asia. A widely spread 

 community, however, is less likely to wander far from its original 

 seat than a community of less extent, more especially when it is a 

 community of herdsmen, and the tract to be traversed is long and 

 barren. 



Apart from the general prejudice in favor of an Asiatic origin, 

 due to old theological teaching and the effect of the discovery of 

 Sanscrit, I can find only two arguments which have been supposed 

 to be of sufficient weight to determine the choice of Asia rather 

 than of Europe as the cradle of Indo-European speech. The first 

 of these arguments is linguistic ; the second is historical, or rather 

 quasi-historical. On the one hand, it has been laid down by emi- 

 nent philologists that the less one of the derived languages has 

 deflected from the parent-speech, the more hkely it is to be geo- 

 graphically nearer to its earliest home. The faithfulness of the 

 record is a test of geographical proximity. As Sanscrit was held 

 to be the most primitive of the Indo-European languages, to reflect 

 most clearly the features of the parent-speech, the conclusion 

 was drawn that that parent-speech had been spoken at no great 

 distance from the country in which the hymns of the Rig- Veda 

 were first composed. The conclusion was supported by the second 

 argument drawn from the sacred books of Parsaism. In the Ven- 

 didad the migrations of the Iranians were traced back through the 

 successive creations of Ormazd to Airyanem Vaej&, " the Aryan 

 Power," which Lassen localized near the sources of the Oxus and 

 Jaxartes. But Breal and De Harlez have shown that the legends 

 of the Vendidad, in their present form, are late and untrustworthy, 

 — later, in fact, than the Christian era ; ^ and, even if we could 

 attach any historical value to them, they would tell us only from 

 whence the Iranians believed their own ancestors to have come, 

 and would throw no light on the cradle of the Indo-European lan- 

 guages as a whole. The first argument is one which I think no 

 student of language would any longer employ. As Professor Max 

 Miiller has said, it would suffice to prove that the Scandinavians 

 emigrated from Iceland. But to those who would still urge it, I 

 must repeat what I have said elsewhere. Although in many re- 

 spects Sanscrit has preserved more faithfully than the European 

 languages the forms of primitive Indo-European grammar, in many 

 other respects the converse is the case. In the latest researches 



^ Breal. MtSlanges de Mythologie et de Linguistique (1878), pp. 187-215 j De 

 Harlez, Introduction a I'Etude de I'Avesta, pp. cxcii., sgq. Compare Darmesteter's 

 Introduction to the Zend-Avesta, part i, in The Sacred Books of the East, 



into the history of Indo-European grammar, Greek holds the place 

 once occupied by Sanscrit. The belief that Sanscrit was the. 

 elder sister of the family led to the assumption that the three short 

 vowels a, e, and o have all originated from an earlier a. I was, I 

 believe, the first to protest against this assumption in 1874, and to- 

 give reasons for thinking that the single monotonous a of Sanscrit 

 resulted from the coalescence of three distinct vowels. The anal- 

 ogy of other languages goes to show that the tendency of time is 

 to reduce the number of vocalic sounds possessed by a language, 

 not the contrary. In place of the numerous vowels possessed by 

 ancient Greek, modern Greek can now show only five, and culti- 

 vated English is rapidly merging its vowel sounds into the so-called 

 " neutral " 9. Since my protest the matter has been worked out by 

 Italian, German, and French scholars ; and we now know that it is 

 the vocalic system of the European languages rather than of Sanscrit 

 which most faithfully represents the oldest form of Indo-European 

 speech. The result of the discovery, for discovery it must be 

 called, has been a complete revolution in the study of Indo-Euro- 

 pean etymology, and still more of Indo-European grammar; and 

 whereas ten years ago it was Sanscrit which was invoked to ex- 

 plain Greek, it is to Greek that the " new school " now turns to 

 explain Sanscrit. The comparative philologist necessarily cannot 

 do without the help of both. The greater the number of lan- 

 guages he has to compare, the sounder will be his inductions ; but 

 the primacy which was once supposed to reside in Asia has been 

 taken from her. It is Greek, and not Sanscrit, which has taught us 

 what was the primitive vowel of the reduplicated syllable of the 

 perfect and the augment of the aorist, and has thus narrowed the 

 discussion into the origin of both. 



Until quite recently, however, the advocates of the Asiatic home 

 of the Indo-European languages found a support in the position of 

 the Armenian language. Armenian stands midway, as it were, 

 between Persia and Europe, and it was imagined to have very close 

 relations with the old language of Persia. But we now know that 

 its Persian affinities are illusory, and that it must really be grouped 

 with the languages of Europe. What is more, the decipherment 

 of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van has cast a strong light on the 

 date of its introduction into Armenia. These inscriptions are the 

 records of kings whose capital was at Van, and who marched their 

 armies in all directions during the ninth, eighth, and seventh cen- 

 turies before our era. The latest date that can as yet be assigned 

 to any of them is B.C. 64.0. At this time there were still no 

 speakers of an Indo-European language in Armenia. The lan- 

 guage of the inscriptions has no connection with those of the Indo- 

 European family, and the personal and local names occurring in the 

 countries immediately surrounding the dominions of the Vannie 

 kings, and so abundantly mentioned in their texts, are of the same 

 linguistic character as the Vannie names themselves. 



The evidence of classical writers fully bears out the conclusions 

 to be derived from the decipherment of the Vannie inscriptions. 

 Herodotos (vii. 73) tells us that the Armenians were colonists from 

 Phrygia, the Phrygians themselves having been a Thracian tribe 

 which had migrated into Asia. The same testimony was borne by 

 Eudoxos,' who further averred that the Armenian and Phrygian 

 languages resembled one another. The tradition must have been 

 recent in the time of Herodotos, and we shall probably not go far 

 wrong if we assign the occupation of Armenia by the Phrygian 

 tribes to the age of upheaval in western Asia which was ushered 

 in by the fall of the Assyrian Empire. Professor Pick has shown 

 that the scanty fragments of the Phrygian language that have sur- 

 vived to us belong to the European branch of the Indo-European 

 family, and thus find their place by the side of Armenian. 



Instead, therefore, of forming a bridge between Orient and Occi- 

 dent, Armenian represents the furthermost flow of Indo-European 

 speech from West to East. And this flow belongs to a relatively 

 late period. Apart from Armenian, we can discover no traces of 

 Indo-European occupation between Media and the Halys until the 

 days when Iranian Ossetes settled in the Caucasus, and the moun- 

 taineers of Kurdistan adopted Iranian dialects. I must reiterate 

 here what I have said many years ago : if there is one fact which 

 the Assyrian monuments make clear and indubitable, it is that up 

 to the closing days of the Assyrian monarchy no Indo-European 



^ According to Eustathios {in Dion, v. G94). 



