Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/22

 CHAPTER I THE STORY OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE

have been seven Celtic languages not all at once, of course and indeed it is possible that there may have been more; but seven are known to have existed. One other may have been a Celtic speech, or it may have been something pre-Celtic, but of it we know too little to judge.

The Celtic languages belong to the type known as Aryan or Indo-European, the language of the higher or white races whose original habitat was once taken to have been near or among the Himalayas, but is now located with much less exactness than heretofore. To this class belong the Sanscrit, with its multitude of Indian derivatives; the Persian, ancient and modern; the Greek, the Latin with all its descendants, the Lithuanian, the Slavonic, the Teutonic and Scandinavian, the Albanian and the Celtic. It is not to be supposed that the possession of an Aryan language is necessarily a proof of the possession of Aryan blood. In many cases the conquering white race imposed its language on the aborigines whom it subjugated and enslaved. This must have been very much the case in Britain, and it is probable that the lower classes of a great part of England, though they now speak a language of mixed Teutonic and Latin origin, as they once spoke Celtic, are largely the descendants, through the slaves successively of Britons, Romans, and Saxons, and the "villains" or nativi of the Norman manorial system, of the aboriginal palæolithic "cave" man, and have far less in common 3