Peter Giles

“ How far the suffixes which can be traced back to Indo-European times (i.e. to a time before the separation of the languages) had existence as separate entities it is impossible to say. From what we see of the later history of the languages it is much more probable that both forms and signification were very largely the result of analogy. For in the making of new words analogy plays a much larger part than any reference to general principles of formation or composition. New words are to a large extent, even in modern times, the invention of persons unskilled in the history of language. ”

“ But even when a word is found very widely diffused over the area of the Indo-European languages, it is not justifiable to conclude that therefore the word must have belonged to the original language. The dispersion of the Indo-European people over the areas they now inhabit, or inhabited in the earliest times known to history, must have been gradual, and commerce or communication between different branches must have always existed to some extent ”

“ The pluperfect, the past of the perfect, is a late development and can hardly be reckoned Indo-European. In Greek the forms clearly arise from adding aorist endings to a perfect stem. The forms of Latin are not yet completely explained—but it is certain that the specially Latin meaning expressing something that was past at a time already past (relative time) is a late growth. When Homeric Greek wishes to express this meaning it uses most frequently the aorist, but also the imperfect as well as the pluperfect, the notion of relative time being derived from the context. ”

“ Even at the present day domestication means different things in the case of different animals. A pig is not domesticated as a dog is; in areas like the Hebrides or western Ireland, where cattle and human beings share the two ends of the same building, domestication means something very different from the treatment of large herds on a farm extending to many hundreds of acres. In other respects the height of the civilization was vastly exaggerated. That the Indo-European people were agricultural as well as pastoral seems highly probable. ”

“ The speakers of modern English are even a more multifarious body. A possible name for the family, implying only the speaking of a language of the stock without any reference to racial or national characteristics, could be obtained from the name for man, so widely though perhaps not altogether universally diffused throughout the family—Sanskrit vīras, Lithuanian wyras, Lat. vir, Irish fer, Gothic waír, &c. If the speakers of these languages were called collectively Wiros, no confusion with ethnological theories need arise. ”

“ The Indo-European civilization in its beginnings apparently belongs to the chalcolithic period (sometimes described by the barbarous term of Italian origin eneolithic) when copper, if not bronze had come in, but the use of stone for many purposes had not yet gone out. While primitive Indo-European man apparently knew, as has been said, the horse, ox, sheep, goat, pig and dog, it is to be observed that in their wild state at least these animals do not all affect the same kind of area. The horse is an animal of the open plain ”

“ Different languages regard this last in different ways. Sometimes the state resulting from the action is so characteristic that the perfect is almost an independent verb. Thus in Greek κτάομαι is “I acquire,” but κέκτημαι (the perfect) is “I possess,” the result of the action of acquiring. On the other hand the perfect may mean that the action has come to an end. This is specially common in Latin, as in Cicero’s famous announcement of the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators,—Vixerunt (“They have lived” = “They are no more”) . But it is by no means confined to Latin. ”

“ When a human population once more occupied Northern Europe it is impossible to estimate in years.
The problem may be attacked from the opposite direction. How long would it have taken for the Indo-European stock to spread from its original home to its modern areas of occupation? Some recent writers say that it is unnecessary to carry the stock back farther than 2500 B.C.—a period when the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were already ancient. ”

“ Suffixes which have developed in individual languages or individual sections of this family of languages can often be traced, e.g. the often quoted -hood in English words like “manhood,” or the English -ly in “manly,” which has gradually extended till it is actually attached to its own parent like in “likely.” But all recent investigation goes to show that before the Indo-European languages separated they possessed words with all the characteristics which we recognize in substantives like the Latin dominus or verbs like the Greek δείκνυται. ”

“ The name for the beech extends through a considerable number of Indo-European languages, and it has generally been assumed that the beech must have been known from the first and therefore must have been a tree which flourished in the original home. Now the habitat of the beech is to the west of a line drawn from Königsberg to the Crimea. The argument assumes that its distribution was always the same. But nothing is more certain than that in different ages different trees succeed one another on the same soil. ”

“ Aryan (q.v.) is conveniently brief, but is wanted as the proper term for the most easterly branch of the family. What is wanted is a term which does not confuse ethnological and linguistic ideas. Not all speakers of any given language are necessarily of the same stock. In ancient Rome Latin must have been spoken by many slaves or sons of slaves who had no Latin blood in their bodies, though a slave if manumitted by his master might be the father or grandfather of a Roman citizen with full rights. ”

“ Thus in phrases like the Greek ἡ καλὴ κόρη or the Latin illa pulchra puella the feminine gender is expressed three times, with no advantage, so far as can be detected, over the modern English, that fair maid, where it is not obviously expressed at all. In this respect and also in the employment of the same case endings for the plural as well as the singular, in the plural after a syllable expressing plurality, the agglutinative languages have a distinct superiority over the Indo-European languages in their earliest forms. ”

“ As the allied sciences are not prepared with an answer, it is necessary to fall back upon the Indo-European languages themselves. The attempt has often been made to ascertain both the position of the original home and the stage of civilization which the original community had reached from a consideration of the vocabulary for plants and animals common to the various languages of the Indo-European family. ”

“ The cow, on the other hand, hides her calf in a brake when she goes to graze, and is more a woodland animal. The pig’s natural habitat is the forest where beech mast, acorns, or chestnuts are plentiful. The goat is a climber and affects the heights, while the sheep also prefers short grass to the richer pastures suited to kine. To collect and tame all those animals implies control of an extensive and varied area.
What of the trees known to primitive Indo-European man? ”

“ In the great plain which extends across Europe north of the Alps and Carpathians and across Asia north of the Hindu Kush there are few geographical obstacles to prevent the rapid spread of peoples from any part of its area to any other, and, as we have seen, the Celts and the Hungarians, &c., have, in the historical period, demonstrated the rapidity with which such migrations could be made. Such migration may possibly account for the appearance of a people using a centum language so far east as Turkestan. ”

“ The ox, the horse, the sheep, the goat and the pig were domesticated as well as the dog and the farmyard fowls, but it was in oxen that their chief wealth consisted. Hence a cow was offered to an honoured guest, cows were the object of armed raids upon their neighbours, and when a member of the family died, a cow was killed to accompany him in the next world. ”

“ These points are most easily illustrated from Greek, because Greek, better than the other languages, has kept the distinctive usages of both moods and tenses. The perfect as distinguished from the other forms expresses either repetition of the action, emphasis, or the state which results from the action expressed by the verb. ”

“ So far as yet ascertained, Tocharish seems to be a mongrel dialect produced by an intermixture of peoples speaking respectively an I.E. language and a language of an entirely different origin. The stems of the words are clearly in many cases I.E., but the terminations are no less clearly alien to this family of languages. It is remarkable that some of its words, like ku, “dog,” have a hard k, while the other languages of this stock in Asia, so far as at present known, belong to the satem-group, and have in such words replaced the k by a sibilant. ”

“ Agriculture begins on a very small scale with the dibbling by means of a pointed stick of a few seeds of some plant which the women recognize as useful either for food or medicine, and is possible only when the people have ceased to be absolutely nomad and have fixed settlements for continuous periods of some length. ”

“ It is true that to the mathematician 3/4 or 6/8 or 9/12 are of identical value, but, if it be also generally true that mental and physical energy are dependent on the size and weight of the brain, then the mere mathematical relation between length and breadth is of less importance than the size of the quantities. ”

“ Thus with Kretschmer we must distinguish between what is common Indo-European and what is original Indo-European in language. (3) A word may exist in several of the languages, and may have existed in them for a very long time, and yet not be Indo-European. Hehn (Das Salz, ed. 2, 1901) rejects salt as an Indo-European word because it is not found in the Aryan group, though in this case he is probably wrong, (a) because, as has been shown by Professor Johannes Schmidt, its irregular declension (sal-d, genitive sal-nes) possesses characteristics of the oldest Indo-European words ”

“ In the instrumental singular and plural it is noticeable that there are two suffixes—one, represented in Germanic and Balto-Slavonic only, beginning with the sound –m, the other, surviving in most of the other languages for the plural, going back to an Indo-European form beginning with –bh. Professor Hirt of Leipzig has argued (Idg. Forschungen, v. pp. 251 ff.) that –bh– originally belonged to the instrumental plural (cf. the Lat. filiabus, omnibus, &c.) ”

“ Investigation of other parts of Europe is less complete, and prehistoric conditions in Asia are at present very imperfectly known. In Western Europe two prehistoric races are known, the palaeolithic and the neolithic. ”

“ The western group includes Polish with minor dialects, Czech or Bohemian, also with minor languages in the group, and Sorb. In the satem division is also included (4) Albanian, which like Armenian is much mixed with foreign elements—Latin, Greek, Turkish and Slavonic. ”