OF LANGUAGES. 



31 



their terms expressing the relationship of father, mother, 

 son, daughter, brother and sister remained the same; that 

 is, the change occurring in their domestic arrangements 

 did not produce any corresponding change in their 

 language. 29 



Thus among the Aryan nations all these three varieties 

 of wedlock have had their turn, but the terms of kinship 

 follow throughout unaltered the same principle of formation. 

 The old Indian epic contains the story of Draupadi and her 

 five husbands, the famous Pandavas, and of Pandu, their 

 father, the husband of two wives. The same conservatism 

 in language can be witnessed elsewhere, among Semitic, and 

 many other races whose manners with respect to marriage 

 changed, but where also such change in life did not make 

 itself felt in speech. 



The truth is that the position of the individual remains 

 comparatively unaffected by alterations in the terms of 

 marriage. The relationship between mother and child is 

 natural, clear and immutable ; that between father and child 

 is settled according to the prevailing custom, not the less 

 is this the case among brothers and sisters. 



The first material change in a young household is the birth 

 of a child, and those who were previously living together as 

 man and wife become respectively father and mother. It 

 is the child which confers on its parents the dignity of 

 fatherhood and motherhood, and it appears therefore only 

 proper that the names it gives to its father and mother 

 should give rise to a set of words which afterwards denote 

 their respective duties. The words for father and mother 

 are thus, in the great majority of languages, identical with 



(29) We therefore cannot at all agree with Mr. Lewis H. Morgan when 

 he contends in his elaborate ' 1 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the 

 Human Family," that the terms of relationship are dependent on the form 

 of connubium in vogue among the various nations ; compare pages 467 and ff . 



