Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/479

Rh sands of the sea during a storm. The linguistic status of the British Isles, above described, shows us one of these waves—the Keltic—which is, to put it somewhat flippantly, now upon its last lap on the shores of the western ocean.

We may discover how slippery speech is upon men's tongues in yet another way—namely, by observing it actually on the move in a physically quiescent population, leaving a trail behind to mark its passage. Language becomes truly sedentary when a distinctive name is given by men to a place of settlement; it may be a clearing in the virgin wilderness or a renaming of a village after a clearing away by conquest of the former possessors. In either case the result is the same. The name, be it Slavic, Keltic, or other, tends to remain as a permanent witness that a people speaking such a tongue once passed that way. A place name of this kind may and often does outlive the spoken language in that locality. It remains as a monument to mark the former confines of the speech, since it can no more migrate than can the houses and barns within the town. Of course, newcomers may adapt the old name to the peculiar pronunciation of their own tongue, but the savor of antiquity gives it a persistent power which is very great. For this reason we find that after every migration of a spoken language there follows a trail of such place names to indicate a former condition. Our maps, both of the British Isles and of Spain, show this phenomenon very clearly. In the one case the Keltic speech has receded before the Teutonic influence, leaving a belt of its peculiar village names behind. In the other the Basque place names, far outside the present limits of the spoken Basque, indicate no less clearly that the speech is on the move toward the north, where no such intermediate zone exists.

Then, after the village names have been replaced by the newcomers, or else become so far mutilated as to lose their identity, there still linger the names of rivers, mountains, bays, headlands, and other natural features of the country. Hallowed by folklore or superstition, their outlandish sounds only serve the more to insure them against disturbance. All over England such names are not uncommon, pointing to a remote past when the Keltic speech was omnipresent. Nay, more, not only from all over the British Isles, but from a large area of the mainland of Europe as well, comes testimony of this kind to a former wide expansion of this Keltic language. Such geographical names represent the third and final stage of the erosion of language prior to its utter disappearance. Nevertheless, as we shall show, the physical features of men outlive even these, so inherent and deep rooted have they become. It is indeed true, as Rhys, himself a linguist, has aptly put it, that "skulls are harder than consonants, and races lurk behind when languages slip away."