Aryan languages

“ We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to imagine these dialects flowing like streams from the centre of Asia to the South, the West, and the North. I must confess that Professor Benfey’s protest against this theory seems to me very opportune, and his arguments in favor of a more northern, if not European, origin of the whole Aryan family of speech, deserve, at all events, far more attention than they have hitherto received. ”

“ Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth to inhabit?
When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time: when the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more with them—for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy Taylor ”

“ And again, there is an accepted connection in myth and language between all Aryan languages and Sanskrit. According to Sir George Dasent, "The whole human race has sprung from one stock planted in the East, which has stretched its boughs and branches laden with the fruit of language and bright with the bloom of song and story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth." ”

“ The central principle upon which philologists have worked is this, that if a word occurs to-day in a fair sprinkling of the Aryan languages, then that word existed in the Aryan parent-language, and therefore the thing of which it is the label existed in some form or other in the primitive Aryan civilization. Conversely, if an object or an idea is found to have a different name in most of the Aryan languages, it was sometimes assumed that that object was not known to the Aryans before their dispersion. ”

“ It is not pretended that the European languages were subjected to non-Aryan or any other external influence to make them undergo these changes; it is admitted that they grew naturally out of the course taken by the human tongue and the human mind. The flower of synthesis budded and opened, and when full blown began, like all other flowers, to fade. Its petals, that is its inflections, dropped off one by one; and in due course the fruit of analytical structure sprung up beneath it, and grew and ripened in its stead. ”

“ I am very imperfectly acquainted with the non-Aryan languages; and with those which impinge most closely upon the Aryan area, very few persons can pretend to be familiar. But it seems advisable once again to raise a warning voice against the rash speculations which are the bane of philology more than of any other science, and which have so frequently been the cause of the science itself being turned into ridicule. ”

“ From the cradle of Aryan speech various tribes migrated at different periods in different directions, establishing themselves in distant lands, in which their speech prevailed, though the aborigines cannot have been exterminated, since the speakers of Aryan languages in historical times belong to many races, and it is still matter of dispute which of these has the best claim to be regarded as representing the original Aryans. ”

“ If there were primitive Aryan dialects, there must have been primitive Aryan people who used them; and these people must have resided somewhere or other on the earth's surface. Hence philology, without stepping beyond its legitimate bounds and keeping speculation within the limits of bare necessity, arrives, not only at the conceptions of Aryan languages and of a primitive Aryan language, but of a primitive Aryan people and of a primitive Aryan home, or country occupied by them. ”

“ Aryan languages are spoken by people of the most diverse racial types; nevertheless there are scientists who try to identify the blond north-European with the ancient pure Aryan, and who claim for the race pre-eminent hereditary gifts, because the people who at present and in our concept are the leaders of the world speak Aryan languages. ”

“ The Aryan languages are the languages of a civilized race; the parent-speech to which we may inductively trace them back was spoken by men who stood on a relatively high level of culture, and was as fully developed, as inflectional, in short, as Sanskrit or Latin themselves. Such a speech can tell us far less of the early condition of language than the Bushman dialects of our own day, and to make the conclusions derived from the examination of it of universal validity, or so many revelations of the primitive state of speech, would be a serious error. ”

“ If we call them Aryans, we are told there were no such people, that Aryan is a language-term only, and indicates that one language has conquered other languages, and that the people who differentiated this all-powerful speech perhaps lived somewhere in Asia, but most probably in northern Europe, and, at all events, do not live now. ”

“ The whole framework of grammar—the elements of derivation, declension, and conjugation—had become settled before the separation of the Aryan family. Hence the broad outlines of grammar, in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and the rest, are in reality the same; and the apparent differences can be explained by phonetic corruption, which is determined by the phonetic peculiarities of each nation. On the whole, the history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but a gradual process of decay. ”

“ ORIGIN OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES By the process of elimination set forth in the preceding chapter we are competed to acknowledge that the strongest claimant for the honor of being the race of the original Aryans, is the tall, blond Nordic. An analysis of the various languages of the Aryan group reveals an extreme diversity which can be best explained by the hypothesis that the existing languages are now spoken by people upon whom Aryan speech has been forced from without. ”

“ A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship—the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago. ”

“ And in the [72] days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist, [67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent ”

“ This theory, however, has pretty well broken down, since it has been shown that other branches of the Aryan languages, specially the Lithuanian, contain more archaic elements than either Sanscrit or Zend; that language is often no conclusive test of race; that Aryan migrations have quite as often or oftener been from west to east than from east to west; and that all history, prehistoric traditions, and linguistic palæontology point to the principal Aryan races having been located in Northern and Central Europe and in Central and 412 Southern Russia very much as we find them at the present day. ”

“ The Aryan languages are mainly post-positional, with occasional use of prefixes, most of which, however, are of later origin.”
It must not be supposed that languages fall into absolutely distinct categories because of their structure. No language to-day is purely of one type or another. There have been too many centuries of borrowing and change for that condition to now be possible for any language, nor are there any longer what might be called primitive tongues. ”

“ According to a theory which is very widely accepted, the Dravidian languages exerted a different influence on the Aryan languages when the Aryans first set foot on Indian soil, in making them adopt the ‘cacuminal’ (or ‘inverted’) sounds ḍ, ṭ, ṇ with ḍh and ṭh, which were not found in primitive Aryan. But even this theory does not seem to be quite proof against objections. It is easy to admit that natives accustomed to one place of articulation of their d, t, n will unconsciously produce the d, t, n of a new language they are learning in the same place; but then they will do it everywhere. ”

“ Professor Max Müller has drawn up similar lists in his "Biographies of Words," and there he lays it down as a general rules that whatever words are shared in common by Sanskrit and Zend on one side, and any one of the Aryan languages on the other, existed before the great Aryan separation took place, and may be used as throwing light on Aryan civilisation, such as it was at that distant time." ”

“ The Aryan dialects remained purely synthetical for many centuries after the race entered this country. When it first came here, it found the land covered with non-Aryan races, and it is almost certain that it came more into contact with them during those early ages than it did in later times, because these alien races were after a time either driven out altogether, or remained and were absorbed into the conquering body, where they took rank at the bottom of the social system as Sudras, and learnt the speech of their conquerors, which speech in those days was Prakrit in some form or other. ”

“ A parent language is not necessarily isolated; analogy rather suggests the contrary. As Latin, which is the parent of the Romance languages, is derived from Aryan and allied to the other Aryan languages, so Aryan itself must be derived from some remote ancestor, and it is improbable that it is the only descendant of it which survived. ”

“ If the Aryan language were invented and developed by these Armenoid Alpines we should be obliged to assume that they introduced it along with bronze culture into Europe about 3000 B. C. and taught the Nordics both their language and their metal culture. There are, however, in western Asia many Alpine peoples who do not speak Aryan languages and yet are Alpine in type, such as the Turcomans and in Asia Minor the so-called Turks are also largely Islamized Alpines of the Armenoid subspecies who speak Turki. ”

“ Again, the languages upon whose vocabulary and grammar the international language is to be based must be Aryan (Indo-European) . This is a practical point. The non-European peoples will consent to learn "simplified Aryan" just as they are adopting Aryan civilization; but the converse is not true. The Europeans will go without an international language rather than learn one based to some extent upon Japanese or Mongolian. The only prescription for securing a large field is—greatest ease for greatest number, with a handicap in favour of Europeans, to induce them to enter. ”

“ Moreover, the works of modern philologists, with Oscar Schrader [366] at their head, show that we can no longer speak to-day of an “Aryan race,” but solely of a family of [Pg 319] Aryan languages, and perhaps of a primitive Aryan civilisation which had preceded the separation of the different Aryan dialects from their common stock. ”

“ Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life [pg 127] to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. ”

“ It is quite proper to speak of Aryan "people," because, as we have seen, the existence of the language implies that of a people who speak it; it might be equally permissible to call Latin people all those who speak Romance dialects. But, just as the application of the term Latin "race" to the divers people who speak Romance languages, at the present day, is none the less absurd because it is common; so it is quite possible that it may be equally wrong to call the people who spoke the primitive Aryan dialects and inhabited the primitive home, the Aryan race. ”

“ When children are learning about England and its place in Europe and the World, they might as well be taught that English is an Aryan language, and that all Aryan languages have grown from the same roots, whereas Semitic languages are of another growth. ”

“ The languages of white men mostly belong to two great families, the Aryan and Semitic. First as to the Aryan family, called also Indo-European, which takes in the languages of part of South and West Asia, and almost the whole of Europe. The original tongue whence these are all descended may be called the Primitive Aryan. What the roots of this ancient language were like, and how they were put together into words, the student may gain an idea from Greek and Latin, but a still better from Sanskrit, where both roots and inflexions have been kept up in a more perfect and regular state. ”

“ Yet its kinship with Lith. blandýti, ‘to cast down the eyes,’ blindo, blísti, ‘to grow dark,’ is more probable (comp. OIc. blunda, ‘to close, blink the eyes,’ E. to blunder) . — Another word for ‘blind’ in the Aryan group is Lat. caecus, OIr. cáech; Goth. haihs, corresponding to these, means ‘one-eyed.’ It seems, moreover, that in the Aryan languages there were no terms for ‘blind, deaf, lame, dumb,’ and other infirmities, common to all of them; there is only an agreement between two or three languages at most. ”