Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/268

244 languages of modern Europe have well-established racial affinities. They group themselves round four centres, which, again, are further reducible to two. Let us regard the map of Europe as a rhomboidal figure with its greater axis lying east and west, and corresponding to the line of the Alps with their prolongations. In the lower half place the classical tongues—Greek right, Latin and her Romance sisters central and left. In the upper half, again, across the snowy peaks and stretching far northwards over the great central plain, lost amid elfin meres and gnome-haunted forest, roam the Teutons. By the eastern angle, pressing close for hundreds of years upon Roman and Teuton alike, come the Slavs of the Southern Steppes and the Sarmatian plain ; while, thrust far away into the western angle, the old-world Celt looks sadly on the mist-clad mountain and the melancholy western main. These four groups, with a wide range of dialectic variation peculiar to each, have yet innumerable features in common that constitute them a distinct European unity. They range themselves, however, under two distinct types—a Classical and a Teutonic. The Slav is a link of connection to east, Celt to west, but both lean to south, and, as far as phonetic affinities are concerned, are Aryan dialects of the Classical type.

The discovery of Sanskrit to western scholars, dating from the foundation of the Calcutta Asiatic Society (1784), revealed a singularly suggestive Aryan unity existing in the far east, and possessing in its sacred books a literature that was old long before the Homeric poems took definite shape. The ancestors of the Hindoos and the old Persians reached the Indus together, and there developed a common religious and social system. They named the great river (the Indus), Sindhu, the goer, the runner. The country beyond was named, from the river, Sindhya, the Scinde of Napier's punning despatch, Peccavi (I have sinned). After this people divided, the western or Persian branch developed phonetic laws of their own, such as the use of an h for a Sanskrit s, so that, when the Greeks came in contact with them, these transmitted to us the name of the river as the Hindus or Indus, and the country as Hindia or India. This Persian or Iranic branch spread over the plateau of Iran, and their speech is now known as that of the Zend-Avesta and the cuneiform