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colossus, Mussulman fanaticism threw upon the world the Arab hordes which had remained till that time intact and free in their deserts.

In enumerating the general features of Semitic speech, the invariability of the consonants and the flexion of the vowels, we have said that this important particular alone renders vain any attempt to establish a relationship between the Semitic family and the Indo-European.

Finally, by a few dates and quotations we have characterised their groups and sub-groups, pointed out their points of resemblance and of difference, noted their duration, their respective merits, the importance and the bearing of their literatures

CHAPTER VIII.

THE INDO-EUROPEANS.

The science of language leaves untouched the domain of ethnographyInattention of the ancients with regard to the manners, languages, and origin of their neighbours-Philology, long forbidden by Christian prejudice, was thrown open by Leibnitz-Discovery of Sanscrit -The Indo-European family of languages constituted by F. Schlegel -Summary sketch of its eight branches: Celtic, Teutonic, Slav, Lettic, Italic, Hellenic, Iranian, and Hindu-Original unity, dialectic alteration-The mother-tongue and the organic forms— The cradle of the language should be sought between the two great sub-groups, Eastern and Western-The social, moral, and intellectual condition revealed by the elements which are common to all the Indo-European idioms-The Semitic history of Bossuet is effaced by the history of the Indo-Europeans-The Aryans reign throughout the world.

THE indigenous populations of quaternary Europe have been replaced, or rather over-laid, several times in succession, by migrations coming from the south and from the east. Successive crossings, modifying at once the type of the conquerors and of the conquered, have resulted in an extreme diversity in the height, build, and physiognomy, not only of the fifteen or twenty peoples who have shaped themselves during the historical period, but also of the far more numerous elements which geographical necessities and the course of events have united into nations. There is no doubt that these ethnical differences have had a very considerable influence on the construction and aspect of the idioms which have prevailed in a given region

of Europe. It is to them that we must attribute the peculiarities of pronunciation, of accent, and of syntax which separate and characterise the Hellenic, Latin, Teutonic, and Slav groups and sub-groups.

But ethnography and the science of language do not coincide. It is very rarely found that a people speaks the original language of its ancestors. Unless the disproportion in numbers or cultivation be too great, the language of the immigrant conquering minority is imposed upon the conquered majority, and even survives the race which imported it. Hundreds of millions of men may employ an idiom, altering it more or less, but without destroying the basis of it, which has been created in its entirety by a race, a people, a tribe, which disappeared thousands of years ago from the distant and unknown land where it had its birth. And when a wonderful discovery reveals this fundamental identity between the languages of rival nations, enemies, or at least separated by manners, aspirations and distance, it arouses, together with a legitimate astonishment, erroneous confusions, protestations, controversies, which are occasionally useful, more often idle or exaggerated. Some infer brotherhood of race from kinship of tongues; others deny the existence of the human group which has invented this unique vocabulary and grammar; others again claim for their country and their ancestors the honour of having conceived and propagated them. Philology is, I submit, in a position to resolve these difficulties and to put aside these objections; and that without trespassing on the domain which properly belongs to ethnography; it does not minimise the differences, the special characters of peoples; it does not maintain that at a given time, at any time, the inhabitants of

Western Asia, of Italy and Germany had a common ancestor; it only establishes that they owe to a single definite group, and not to their own initiative, their languages, their institutions, the germ of their destiny. The ancients were not unaware that the world was peopled before their arrival in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Italy. In many regions their predecessors maintained themselves beside and amongst them. From the texts collected by M. Arbois de Jubainville credible traditions showed that the Iberians, nearly related to the Atlantides, were established in the west as far as the Rhone, and even threw off a branch into Italy, the Sicani; the Pelasgians, under the name of Phrygians, Sardinians, Lydians, Lycians, Cares, Leleges, Tursenes, were scattered over the coast of Asia, in the archipelagoes of the Ægean, throughout Greece, and in southern Italy; then came the successive arrivals of the Ligurians and the Siculi, of the Illyrians, Thracians, and Bithynians, closely followed by the little group of the Hellenic tribes. These vague traditions were all sufficient for the most enlightened Greeks. As for the different languages, which they certainly knew, and which were not extinct in the sixth century before our era, in the time of Peisistratus and Solon, it does not appear that they ever thought of collecting them. Their own idiom was enough for them; all others were barbarous jargons, useless and negligible. Plato having remarked the resemblance of the names for fire and dog in Greek and Phrygian, contents himself with supposing that the Hellenes had perhaps received certain words from the autochthonous races. Even the prolonged contact with the Persians, whose language was learned by a few Greeks, notably by Alcibiades, did not win them from their indifference.

The expedition of Alexander taught the invaders nothing; the Sanscrit dialect spoken by Porus remained a closed book to the learned men who surrounded the king of Macedonia; and if we did not know that the Emperor Claudian had written sixteen books on the history and the language of the Etruscans, we might affirm that the sense of language was as absolutely unknown to the Latins as to the Greeks.

We shall not expect to find the Middle Ages more enlightened than antiquity. It took the ancestors of modern peoples centuries to learn that which intelligent humanity had already acquired before them. Christianity, retaining a few scraps of Latin, the science of the day, preached to the new populations resignation, humility, obedience, and ignorance. The fall of Constantinople, the exile from thence of the scholars, and the dispersal of the Byzantine manuscripts, the discovery of printing, were necessary to rouse Europe from its torpor. This was the Renaissance; the veil was lifted, at least for a few, and day began to dawn on Europe. Man turned again to things of earth, and regaining an interest in all the manifestations of human activity, leaving faith for reason, recognised in speech the necessary instrument of thought and analysed its organism. Nevertheless, despite the efforts of Bibliander, Henri Estienne, Roccha, and Scaliger, who attempted some comparisons between Greek, Latin, and French, and of Guichard, who in his Harmonie Etymologique (1606) distinguished the Teutonic and the Romance dialects, and constituted a separate family, including Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, a capital error long turned philology from the right path. Orthodox logic could not seek elsewhere than in Hebrew the origin of all

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