1876.] 



E. B. Shaw— On tie Ghalchah Languages. 



147 



abler heads to determine ; but it seems probable that the separation of the 

 Dards from the G-halchahs took place at a time when there still existed a 

 spoken tongue neither distinctly Indian nor distinctly Persian but contain- 

 ing the germs of both. If the Dardu immigration from the north had 

 been a late one, (say at the time of the Yuechi or of the Musalman inva- 

 sions) at a time when the language spoken in the plains of Bactria had 

 become almost as strongly differentiated from that of India as at the 

 present day,— it is not easy to see how the speech of the Dards could 

 have taken its development on Indian lines, as it has done ; and vice versa. 

 The fact of the tongues under notice still retaining so much mutual 

 resemblance, together with a local connection, would imply that they were 

 descended directly from one and the same mother ; while the fact of their 

 belonging to the opposite families shows that we must not seek their 

 common parentage either in the Indian or in the Persian tongue, but in 

 an early Indo-Iranian mother dialect, which alone would be capable of 

 giving birth to two such children from the same womb. To put the 

 matter in other words, it would seem that the Ghalchah and Dard nations 

 must have lived each a life of its own, distinct from that of any other 

 branches of the Aryan race and changing less fast than they, ever since 

 they emerged from the oneness of the Indo-Iranian stem. They are true 

 sisters, and yet they belong to rival families. Hence they must be of that 

 generation in which the split occurred. In any lower generation they 

 would either not be sisters, or, if they were, they would belong to the same 

 branch of the family. No Spanish Bourbon has been brother to a French 

 Bourbon since the generation in which the distinction first arose. 



Again, if the Dards were admitted to have come down across the Hindu- 

 Kush in those early days, but the Kashmiri and outer Himalayan popula- 

 tions were supposed to be a reflex wave of migration sent up by the Indo- 

 Aryans after their arrival and settlement in India, what a gap we ought to 

 have between the dialects of the Dards and those of these later comers into 

 their neighbourhood, a gap representing the whole progress in language made 

 between the time when the Indo-Aryans were still a mere Central Asian tribe 

 with incipient peculiarities of speech, and that when, their great migration 

 accomplished, they were in possession of their Sanskrit form of language. 

 A gap certainly does appear to exist, but I am not able to judge whether 

 it is a sufficiently broad one, or whether later inquiries may not fill it up as 

 the gap between Kashmiri and Panjabi has been filled by Mr. Drew's re- 

 searches. 



Max Muller tells us : " Before the ancestors of the Indians and Per- 

 sians started for the South, and the leaders of the Greek, Boman, Celtic, Teu- 

 tonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there 

 was a small clan of Aryans settled probably on the highest elevation of 



