Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/78

66 especially the inscriptions must be considered and studied with reference to their probable age, whether before or after the Gaulish conquests. It is possible too that different tribes of Gauls had taken possession of different cities of the Tyrrhenians, so that different dialects amounting to different languages might have arisen amongst them. For as the name Gauls was applied indiscriminately to different people, so it is possible that the conquerors might have been of different nationalities, Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, or Scandinavians. Polybius says that even in his time the language spoken by the Romans was so different from that spoken in the time of the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings, that frequently the best learned in it were unable to understand it, p. 311. Cicero says the same thing though it is less remarkable as he wrote 100 years later. The same result must be supposed to have taken place in Etruria, and under this point of view we cannot but pronounce it vain to suppose that in the Augustan age, 150 years afterwards, the languages of Etruria and Lydia could have remained alike though so many changes, though they might have been cognate 800 or 1000 years previously. In that age the language of Etruria might even have become Gallic, and in that case we can understand how Livy, Justin, and even Pliny, connect the Etruscans of their day with the Ræti of the Alps so much so as to pronounce them the same people. In this point of view also the lucubrations of Sir W. Betham in his Etruria Celtica may not be altogether so erroneous as has been charged upon him, though he might not have clearly perceived how the analogies arose for which he contended. They are certainly as well founded as any claimed on behalf of the Scandinavian or any other Northern language, and as successfully advocated. Niebuhr and those who adopt his opinions of the Etruscan nationality do not tell us one word of the peculiar character of the dialect spoken in the Tyrol with which they suppose its affinity. From what we learn from other sources of those dialects they appear to be mere jargons corrupted from the various languages in their neighbourhood. Until they show something more reliable than mere surmises we can however only meet them with scepticism. For a solution of the question in the attempt to decipher the inscriptions it appears to me that the first consideration should be the probable age of the monument in which it is preserved. If it appear to be so late as the historic period of Rome, then it may chance to be explicable by means of the Celtic or some other Northern language provided it be out of the pale of the Greek or