Lectures on The Science of Language 28

Lectures on The Science of Language 28

Some of the evidence here collected in tracing the ancient name of the

Aryan family, may seem doubtful, and I have pointed out myself some links

of the chain uniting the earliest name of India with the modern name of

Ireland, as weaker than the rest. But the principal links are safe. Names

of countries, peoples, rivers, and mountains, have an extraordinary

vitality, and they will remain while cities, kingdoms, and nations pass

away. _Rome_ has the same name to-day, and will probably have it forever,

which was given to it by the earliest Latin and Sabine settlers, and

wherever we find the name of Rome, whether in Wallachia, which by the

inhabitants is called Rumania, or in the dialects of the Grisons, the

Romansch, or in the title of the Romance languages, we know that some

threads would lead us back to the Rome of Romulus and Remus, the

stronghold of the earliest warriors of Latium. The ruined city near the

mouth of the Upper Zab, now usually known by the name of Nimrud, is called

_Athur_ by the Arabic geographers, and in Athur we recognize the old name

of Assyria, which Dio Cassius writes Atyria, remarking that the barbarians

changed the Sigma into Tau. Assyria is called Athurâ, in the inscriptions

of Darius.(249) We hear of battles fought on the _Sutledge_, and we hardly

think that the battle field of the Sikhs was nearly the same where

Alexander fought the kings of the Penjáb. But the name of the _Sutledge_

is the name of the same river as the _Hesudrus_ of Alexander, the

_Śatadru_ of the Indians, and among the oldest hymns of the Veda, about

1500 B. C., we find a war-song referring to a battle fought on the two

banks of the same river.

 

No doubt there is danger in trusting to mere similarity of names. Grimm

may be right that the Arii of Tacitus were originally Harii, and that

their name is not connected with Ârya. But the evidence on either side

being merely conjectural, this must remain an open question. In most

cases, however, a strict observation of the phonetic laws peculiar to each

language will remove all uncertainty. Grimm, in his “History of the German

Language” (p. 228), imagined that _Hariva_, the name of _Herat_ in the

cuneiform inscriptions, is connected with Arii, the name which, as we saw,

Herodotus gives to the Medes. This cannot be, for the initial aspiration

in _Hariva_ points to a word which in Sanskrit begins with _s_, and not

with a vowel, like _ârya_. The following remarks will make this clearer.

 

Herat is called _Herat_ and _Heri_,(250) and the river on which it stands

is called _Heri-rud_. This river _Heri_ is called by Ptolemy Ἀρείας,(251)

by other writers _Arius_; and _Aria_ is the name given to the country

between Parthia (Parthuwa) in the west, Margiana (Marghush) in the north,

Bactria (Bakhtrish) and Arachosia (Harauwatish) in the east, and Drangiana

(Zaraka) in the south. This, however, though without the initial _h_, is

not Ariana, as described by Strabo, but an independent country, forming

part of it. It is supposed to be the same as the _Haraiva_ (Hariva) of the

cuneiform inscriptions, though this is doubtful. But it is mentioned in

the Zend-avesta, under the name of _Harôyu_,(252) as the sixth country

created by Ormuzd. We can trace this name with the initial _h_ even beyond

the time of Zoroaster. The Zoroastrians were a colony from northern India.

They had been together for a time with the people whose sacred songs have

been preserved to us in the Veda. A schism took place, and the

Zoroastrians migrated westward to Arachosia and Persia. In their

migrations they did what the Greeks did when they founded new colonies,

what the Americans did in founding new cities. They gave to the new cities

and to the rivers along which they settled, the names of cities and rivers

familiar to them, and reminding them of the localities which they had

left. Now, as a Persian _h_ points to a Sanskrit _s_, _Harôyu_ would be in

Sanskrit _Saroyu_. One of the sacred rivers of India, a river mentioned in

the Veda, and famous in the epic poems as the river of Ayodhyâ, one of the

earliest capitals of India, the modern Oude, has the name of _Sarayu_, the

modern _Sardju_.(253)

 

As Comparative Philology has thus traced the ancient name of Ârya from

India to Europe, as the original title assumed by the Aryans before they

left their common home, it is but natural that it should have been chosen

as the technical term for the family of languages which was formerly

designated as Indo-Germanic, Indo-European, Caucasian, or Japhetic.

 

 

 

 

 

LECTURE VII. THE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE.

 

 

Our analysis of some of the nominal and verbal formations in the Aryan or

Indo-European family of speech has taught us that, however mysterious and

complicated these grammatical forms appear at first sight, they are in

reality the result of a very simple process. It seems at first almost

hopeless to ask such questions as why the addition of a mere _d_ should

change love present into love past, or why the termination _ai_ in French,

if added to _aimer_, should convey the idea of love to come. But, once

placed under the microscope of comparative grammar, these and all other

grammatical forms assume a very different and much more intelligible

aspect. We saw how what we now call terminations were originally

independent words. After coalescing with the words which they were

intended to modify, they were gradually reduced to mere syllables and

letters, unmeaning in themselves, yet manifesting their former power and

independence by the modification which they continue to produce in the

meaning of the words to which they are appended. The true nature of

grammatical terminations was first pointed out by a philosopher, who,

however wild some of his speculations may be, had certainly caught many a

glimpse of the real life and growth of language, I mean _Horne Tooke_.

This is what he writes of terminations:(254)—

 

“For though I think I have good reasons to believe that all terminations

may likewise be traced to their respective origin; and that, however

artificial they may now appear to us, they were not originally the effect

of premeditated and deliberate _art_, but separate words by length of time

corrupted and coalescing with the words of which they are now considered

as the terminations. Yet this was less likely to be suspected by others.

And if it had been suspected, they would have had much further to travel

to their journey’s end, and through a road much more embarrassed; as the

corruption in those languages is of much longer standing than in ours, and

more complex.”

 

Horne Tooke, however, though he saw rightly what road should be followed

to track the origin of grammatical terminations, was himself without the

means to reach his journey’s end. Most of his explanations are quite

untenable, and it is curious to observe in reading his book, the

Diversions of Purley, how a man of a clear, sharp, and powerful mind, and

reasoning according to sound and correct principles, may yet, owing to his

defective knowledge of facts, arrive at conclusions directly opposed to

truth.

 

When we have once seen how grammatical terminations are to be traced back

in the beginning to independent words, we have learnt at the same time

that the component elements of language, which remain in our crucible at

the end of a complete grammatical analysis, are of two kinds, namely,

_Roots predicative_ and _Roots demonstrative_.

 

We call _root_ or _radical_, whatever, in the words of any language or

family of languages, cannot be reduced to a simpler or more original form.

It may be well to illustrate this by a few examples. But, instead of

taking a number of words in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and tracing them

back to their common centre, it will be more instructive if we begin with

a root which has been discovered, and follow it through its wanderings

from language to language. I take the root AR, to which I alluded in our

last Lecture as the source of the word _Arya_, and we shall thus, while

examining its ramification, learn at the same time why that name was

chosen by the agricultural nomads, the ancestors of the Aryan race.

 

This root AR(255) means _to plough_, to open the soil. From it we have the

Latin _ar-are_, the Greek _ar-oun_, the Irish _ar_, the Lithuanian

_ar-ti_, the Russian _ora-ti_, the Gothic _ar-jan_, the Anglo-Saxon

_er-jan_, the modern English _to ear_. Shakespeare says (Richard II. III.

2), “to ear the land that has some hope to grow.”

 

From this we have the name of the plough, or the instrument of earing: in

Latin, _ara-trum_; in Greek, _aro-tron_; in Bohemian, _oradto_; in

Lithuanian, _arklas_; in Cornish, _aradar_; in Welsh, _arad_;(256) in Old

Norse, _ardhr_. In Old Norse, however, _ardhr_, meaning originally the

plough, came to mean earnings or wealth; the plough being, in early times,

the most essential possession of the peasant. In the same manner the Latin

name for money, _pecunia_, was derived from _pecus_, cattle; the word

_fee_, which is now restricted to the payment made to a doctor or lawyer,

was in Old English _feh_, and in Anglo-Saxon _feoh_, meaning cattle and

wealth; for _feoh_, and Gothic _faihu_, are really the same word as the

Latin _pecus_, the modern German _vieh_.

 

The act of ploughing is called _aratio_ in Latin; _arosis_ in Greek: and I

believe that _arôma_, in the sense of perfume, had the same origin; for

what is sweeter or more aromatic than the smell of a ploughed field? In

Genesis, xxviii. 27, Jacob says “the smell of my son is as the smell of a

field which the Lord has blessed.”

 

A more primitive formation of the root _ar_ seems to be the Greek _era_,

earth, the Sanskrit _irâ_, the Old High-German _ëro_, the Gaelic _ire_,

_irionn_. It meant originally the ploughed land, afterwards earth in

general. Even the word _earth_, the Gothic _airtha_,(257) the Anglo-Saxon

_eorthe_, must have been taken originally in the sense of ploughed or

cultivated land. The derivative _ar-mentum_, formed like _ju-mentum_,

would naturally have been applied to any animal fit for ploughing and

other labor in the field, whether ox or horse.

 

As agriculture was the principal labor in that early state of society when

we must suppose most of our Aryan words to have been formed and applied to

their definite meanings, we may well understand how a word which

originally meant this special kind of labor, was afterwards used to

signify labor in general. The general tendency in the growth of words and

their meanings is from the special to the more general: thus _gubernare_,

which originally meant to steer a ship, took the general sense of

governing. _To equip_, which originally was to furnish a ship (French

_équiper_ and _esquif_, from _schifo_, ship), came to mean furnishing in

general. Now in modern German, _arbeit_ means simply _labor_; _arbeitsam_

means industrious. In Gothic, too, _arbaiþs_ is only used to express labor

and trouble in general. But in Old Norse, _erfidhi_ means chiefly

_ploughing_, and afterwards labor in general; and the same word in

Anglo-Saxon, _earfodh_ or _earfedhe_, is labor. Of course we might equally

suppose that, as laborer, from meaning one who labors in general, came to

take the special sense of an agricultural laborer, so _arbeit_, from

meaning work in general, came to be applied, in Old Norse, to the work of

ploughing. But as the root of _erfidhi_ seems to be _ar_, our first

explanat