Part 13

The language of Ulfilas, the Gothic, belongs, through its phonetic structure, to the Low-German class, but in its grammar it is, _with few exceptions_, far more primitive than the Anglo-Saxon of the Beowulf, or the Old High-German of Charlemagne. These few exceptions, however, are very important, for they show that it would be grammatically, and therefore historically, impossible to derive either Anglo-Saxon or High-German, or both,(174) from Gothic. It would be impossible, for instance, to treat the first person plural of the indicative present, the Old High-German _nerjamês_, as a corruption of the Gothic _nasjam_; for we know, from the Sanskrit _masi_, the Greek _mes_, the Latin _mus_, that this was the original termination of the first person plural.

Gothic is but one of the numerous dialects of the German race; some of which became the feeders of the literary languages of the British Isles, of Holland, Friesia, and of Low and High Germany, while others became extinct, and others rolled on from century to century unheeded, and without ever producing any literature at all. It is because Gothic is the only one of these parallel dialects that can be traced back to the fourth century, whereas the others disappear from our sight in the seventh, that it has been mistaken by some for the original source of all Teutonic speech. The same arguments, however, which we used against Raynouard, to show that Provençal could not be considered as the parent of the Six Romance dialects, would tell with equal force against the pretensions of Gothic to be considered as more than the eldest sister of the Teutonic branch of speech.

There is, in fact, a third stream of Teutonic speech, which asserts its independence as much as High-German and Low-German, and which it would be impossible to place in any but a co-ordinate position with regard to Gothic, Low and High German. This is the _Scandinavian_ branch. It consists at present of three literary dialects, those of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, and of various local dialects, particularly in secluded valleys and fiords of Norway,(175) where, however, the literary language is Danish.

It is commonly supposed(176) that, as late as the eleventh century, identically the same language was spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and that this language was preserved almost intact in Iceland, while in Sweden and Denmark it grew into two new national dialects. Nor is there any doubt that the Icelandic skald recited his poems in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, nay, even among his countrymen in England and Gardariki, without fear of not being understood, till, as it is said, William introduced Welsh, _i.e._ French, into England, and Slavonic tongues grew up in the east.(177) But though one and the same language (then called Danish or Norrænish) was understood, I doubt whether one and the same language was spoken by all Northmen, and whether the first germs of Swedish and Danish did not exist long before the eleventh century, in the dialects of the numerous clans and tribes of the Scandinavian race. That race is clearly divided into two branches, called by Swedish scholars the East and West Scandinavian. The former would be represented by the old language of Norway and Iceland, the latter by Swedish and Danish. This division of the Scandinavian race had taken place before the Northmen settled in Sweden and Norway. The western division migrated westward from Russia, and crossed over from the continent to the Aland Islands, and from thence to the southern coast of the peninsula. The eastern division travelled along the Bothnian Gulf, passing the country occupied by the Finns and Lapps, and settled in the northern highlands, spreading toward the south and west.

The earliest fragments of Scandinavian speech are preserved in the two _Eddas_, the elder or poetical Edda, containing old mythic poems, the younger or Snorri’s Edda giving an account of the ancient mythology in prose. Both Eddas were composed, not in Norway, but in Iceland, an island about as large as Ireland, and which became first known through some Irish monks who settled there in the eighth century.(178) In the ninth century voyages of discovery were made to Iceland by Naddodd, Gardar, and Flokki, 860-870, and soon after the distant island, distant about 750 English miles from Norway, became a kind of America to the Puritans and Republicans of the Scandinavian peninsula. Harald Haarfagr (850-933) had conquered most of the Norwegian kings, and his despotic sway tended to reduce the northern freemen to a state of vassalage. Those who could not resist, and could not bring themselves to yield to the sceptre of Harald, left their country and migrated to France, to England, and to Iceland (874). They were mostly nobles and freemen, and they soon established in Iceland an aristocratic republic, such as they had had in Norway before the days of Harald. This northern republic flourished; it adopted Christianity in the year 1000. Schools were founded, two bishoprics were established, and classical literature was studied with the same zeal with which their own national poems and laws had been collected and interpreted by native scholars and historians. The Icelanders were famous travellers, and the names of Icelandic students are found not only in the chief cities of Europe, but in the holy places of the East. At the beginning of the twelfth century Iceland counted 50,000 inhabitants. Their intellectual and literary activity lasted to the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the island was conquered by Hakon VI., king of Norway. In 1380, Norway, together with Iceland, was united with Denmark; and when, in 1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden, Iceland remained, as it is still, under Danish sway.

The old poetry which flourished in Norway in the eighth century, and which was cultivated by the skalds in the ninth, would have been lost in Norway itself had it not been for the jealous care with which it was preserved by the emigrants of Iceland. The most important branch of their traditional poetry were short songs (hliod or Quida), relating the deeds of their gods and heroes. It is impossible to determine their age, but they existed at least previous to the migration of the Northmen to Iceland, and probably as early as the seventh century, the same century which yields the oldest remnants of Anglo-Saxon, Low-German, and High-German. They were collected in the middle of the twelfth century by _Saemund Sigfusson_ (died 1133). In 1643 a similar collection was discovered in MSS. of the thirteenth century, and published under the title of _Edda_, or Great-Grandmother. This collection is called the old or poetic Edda, in order to distinguish it from a later work ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (died 1241). This, the younger or prose Edda, consists of three parts: the mocking of Gylfi, the speeches of Bragi, and the Skalda, or _Ars poetica_. Snorri Sturluson has been called the Herodotus of Iceland; and his chief work is the “Heimskringla,” the world-ring, which contains the northern history from the mythic times to the time of King Magnus Erlingsson (died 1177). It was probably in preparing his history that, like Cassiodorus, Saxo Grammaticus, Paulus Diaconus, and other historians of the same class, Snorri collected the old songs of the people; for his “Edda,” and

## particularly his “Skalda,” are full of ancient poetic fragments.

The “Skalda,” and the rules which it contains, represent the state of poetry in the thirteenth century; and nothing can be more artificial, nothing more different from the genuine poetry of the old “Edda” than this _Ars poetica_ of Snorri Sturluson. One of the chief features of this artificial or skaldic poetry was this, that nothing should be called by its proper name. A ship was not to be called a ship, but the beast of the sea; blood, not blood, but the dew of pain, or the water of the sword. A warrior was not spoken of as a warrior, but as an armed tree, the tree of battle. A sword was the flame of wounds. In this poetical language, which every skald was bound to speak, there were no less than 115 names for Odin; an island could be called by 120 synonymous titles. The specimens of ancient poetry which Snorri quotes are taken from the skalds, whose names are well known in history, and who lived from the tenth to the thirteenth century. But he never quotes from any song contained in the old “Edda,”(179) whether it be that those songs were considered by himself as belonging to a different and much more ancient period of literature, or that they could not be used in illustration of the scholastic rules of skaldic poets, these very rules being put to shame by the simple style of the national poetry, which expressed what it had to express without effort and circumlocution.

We have thus traced the modern Teutonic dialects back to four principal channels,—the _High-German_, _Low-German_, _Gothic_, and _Scandinavian_; and we have seen that these four, together with several minor dialects, must be placed in a co-ordinate position from the beginning, as so many varieties of Teutonic speech. This Teutonic speech may, for convenience’ sake, be spoken of as one,—as one branch of that great family of language to which, as we shall see, it belongs; but it should always be borne in mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several distinct national deposits.

We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld’s Great Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic, form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.

And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian,—the languages of Portugal, of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,(180) and of the Grisons of Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.(181) The Provençal, which, in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere _patois_. The earliest Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d’Oil, or the ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen of the Langue d’Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan languages than a careful perusal of the “Comparative Grammar of the Six Romance Languages” by Professor Diez.

Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north, and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen, had produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are still called _vulgar_ or _popular_.(182) A great deal, no doubt, of the corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a smaller extent, the same _barbarizing_ has affected all other Roman dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local, provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by the Teutonic conquerors.

The next branch of the Indo-European family of speech is the _Hellenic_. Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious refutation.

The fourth branch of our family is the _Celtic_. The Celts seem to have been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and Gadhelic. The _Kymric_ comprises the _Welsh_; the _Cornish_, lately extinct; and the _Armorican_, of Brittany. The _Gadhelic_ comprises the _Irish_; the _Galic_ of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the _Isle of Man_. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated inroads into the regions of civilization, familiarizing Latin and Greek writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh _brennin_. A Brennus conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls. Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed. A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin might, in their turn, be derived.

The fifth branch, which is commonly called _Slavonic_, I prefer to designate by the name of _Windic_, _Winidae_ being one of the most ancient and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions, the _Lettic_ and the _Slavonic_, and we shall have to subdivide the Slavonic again into a _South-East Slavonic_ and a _West Slavonic_ branch.

The _Lettic_ division consists of languages hardly known to the student of literature, but of great importance to the student of language. _Lettish_ is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. _Lithuanian_ is the name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism of 1547.(183) In this, and even in the language as now spoken by the Lithuanian peasant, there are some grammatical forms more primitive, and more like Sanskrit, than the corresponding forms in Greek and Latin.

The _Old Prussian_, which is nearly related to Lithuanian, became extinct in the seventeenth century, and the entire literature which it has left behind consists in an old catechism.

_Lettish_ is the language of Kurland and Livonia, more modern in its grammar than Lithuanian, yet not immediately derived from it.

We now come to the _Slavonic_ languages, properly so called. The eastern branch comprehends the _Russian_ with various local dialects; the _Bulgarian_, and the _Illyrian_. The most ancient document of this eastern branch is the so-called Ecclesiastical Slavonic, _i.e._ the ancient Bulgarian, into which Cyrillus and Methodius translated the Bible, in the middle of the ninth century. This is still the authorized version(184) of the Bible for the whole Slavonic race; and to the student of the Slavonic languages, it is what Gothic is to the student of German. The modern Bulgarian, on the contrary, as far as grammatical forms are concerned, is the most reduced among the Slavonic dialects.

_Illyrian_ is a convenient or inconvenient name to comprehend the _Servian_, _Croatian_, and _Slovinian_ dialects. Literary fragments of _Slovinian_ go back as far as the tenth century.(185)

The western branch comprehends the language of _Poland_, _Bohemia_, and _Lusatia_. The oldest specimen of Polish belongs to the fourteenth century: the Psalter of Margarite. The Bohemian language was, till lately, traced back to the ninth century. But most of these old Bohemian poems are now considered spurious; and it is doubtful, even, whether an ancient interlinear translation of the Gospel of St. John can be ascribed to the tenth century.(186)

The language of Lusatia is spoken, probably, by no more than 150,000 people, known in Germany by the name of _Wends_.

We have examined all the languages of our first or Aryan family, which are spoken in Europe, with one exception, the _Albanian_. This language is clearly a member of the same family; and as it is sufficiently distinct from Greek or any other recognized language, it has been traced back to one of the neighboring races of the Greeks, the Illyrians, and is supposed to be the only surviving representative of the various so-called barbarous tongues which surrounded and interpenetrated the dialects of Greece.

We now pass on from Europe to Asia; and here we begin at once, on the extreme south, with the languages of India. As I sketched the history of Sanskrit in one of my former Lectures, it must suffice, at present, to mark the different periods of that language, beginning, about 1500 B. C., with the dialect of the Vedas, which is followed by the modern Sanskrit; the popular dialects of the third century B. C.; the Prakrit dialects of the plays; and the spoken dialects, such as Hindí, Hindústání, Mahrattí, Bengalí. There are many points of great interest to the student of language, in the long history of the speech of India; and it has been truly said that Sanskrit is to the science of language what mathematics are to astronomy. In an introductory course of lectures, however, like the present, it would be out of place to enter on a minute analysis of the grammatical organism of this language of languages.

There is one point only on which I may be allowed to say a few words. I have frequently been asked, “But how can you prove that Sanskrit literature is so old as it is supposed to be? How can you fix any Indian dates before the time of Alexander’s conquest? What dependence can be placed on Sanskrit manuscripts which may have been forged or interpolated?” It is easier to ask such questions than to answer them, at least to answer them briefly and intelligibly. But, perhaps, the following argument will serve as a partial answer, and show that Sanskrit was the spoken language of India at least some centuries before the time of Solomon. In the hymns of the Veda, which are the oldest literary compositions in Sanskrit, the geographical horizon of the poets is, for the greater part, limited to the north-west of India. There are very few passages in which any allusions to the sea or the sea-coast occur, whereas the snowy mountains, and the rivers of the Penjáb, and the scenery of the Upper Ganges valley are familiar objects to the ancient bards. There is no doubt, in fact, that the people who spoke Sanskrit came into India from the north, and gradually extended their sway to the south and east. Now, at the time of Solomon, it can be proved that Sanskrit was spoken at least as far south as the mouth of the Indus.

You remember the fleet of Tharshish(187) which Solomon had at sea, together with the navy of Hiram, and which came once in three years, bringing _gold_ and _silver_, _ivory_, _apes_, and _peacocks_. The same navy, which was stationed on the shore of the Red Sea, is said to have fetched gold from _Ophir_,(188) and to have brought, likewise, great plenty of _algum_(189) trees and precious stones from Ophir.

Well, a great deal has been written to find out where this Ophir was; but there can be no doubt that it was in India. The names for _apes_, _peacocks_, _ivory_ and _algum_-trees are foreign words in Hebrew, as much as _gutta-percha_ or _tobacco_ are in English. Now, if we wished to know from what part of the world _gutta-percha_ was first imported into England, we might safely conclude that it came from that country where the name, _gutta-percha_, formed part of the spoken language.(190) If, therefore, we can find a language in which the names for peacock, apes, ivory, and algum-tree, which are foreign in Hebrew, are indigenous, we may be certain that the country in which that language was spoken must have been the Ophir of the Bible. That language is no other but Sanskrit.

_Apes_ are called, in Hebrew, _koph_, a word without an etymology in the Semitic languages, but nearly identical in sound with the Sanskrit name of ape, _kapi_.

_Ivory_ is called either _karnoth-shen_, horns of tooth; or _shen habbim_. This _habbim_ is again without a derivation in Hebrew, but it is most likely a corruption of the Sanskrit name for elephant, _ibha_, preceded by the Semitic article.(191)

_Peacocks_ are called in Hebrew _tukhi-im_, and this finds its explanation in the name still used for peacock on the coast of Malabar, _togëi_, which in turn has been derived from the Sanskrit _śikhin_, meaning furnished with a crest.

All these articles, ivory, gold, apes, peacocks, are indigenous in India, though of course they might have been found in other countries likewise. Not so the _algum-tree_, at least if interpreters are right in taking _algum_ or _almug_ for sandalwood. Sandalwood is found indigenous on the coast of Malabar only; and one of its numerous names there, and in Sanskrit, is _valguka_. This _valgu_(_ka_) is clearly the name which Jewish and Phœnician merchants corrupted into _algum_, and which in Hebrew was still further changed into _almug_.