Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/283

Rh set of phonetic symbols such new peculiar forms as characterise the Sans. alphabet. But the most striking proofs of an imperfectly-developed common civilisation remain to be noted. For example, whereas the ear for phonetic variations was so developed as to produce a rich flexional system, and perpetuate minute shades of accentuation, the colour sense, as might be expected, was a late growth. The Sans. for colour is varna, lit. what covers, and is the same as vellus and our wool. It was also chosen to express caste, a most significant specialisation of its force. But this vagueness in colour-naming is best shown in the case of the metals. Gold is S. hir-anya, hár-ita, Z. zaranya, zairita, Sl. zlūtu, zelenu, Go. gulth and our gold, Gr. chrusos. These all agree in naming the metal from its colour, the yellow. From the same stem, however, come S. hari, green, and Lat. gilvus, flavus, and our yellow; from S. harit, red, Lat. fulvus. The neutral tint of silver is more easily decided; it is S. ragata, the white, or ragata hiranyam, white gold, just as in Scotland zinc was called white iron. The Lat. arg-entum has the radical sense, but it is lost in the Teut. dialects. The third metal shows the greatest variations of colour-naming, so much so that it may have been applied to copper, bronze, or iron. It is in Sans. ayas, Lat. aes, Go. aiz. In Wulfila the apostles are to take no aiz (money) in their girdles. Gr., Lat., and Teut. have developed their words for iron on quite independent lines. When we deal with the names of commodities that are the products of an advanced civilisation, we are in the region of loan-words, interesting as evidence of a very early commerce, and this necessarily complicates the question as to the higher culture of the proto-Aryans. Some of these loan-words are extremely old—sugar- candy, for example, came from India in the remotest times, crystallised on sticks of cane or bamboo. Sugar is the S. çarkara = gravel, Pers. shakar, Lat. saccharum, and Gr. with slight change, M.E. sugre. Candy is S. kandha, a stick, and Pers. quandat, quandi (sugared). The word lives in Lowland Sc. as gundy.

The only point that now remains to be discussed is the home of the Aryas. We were long satisfied with locating it somewhere in Western Asia, probably in the region stretching south from the Caspian and along the valley of the Oxus, on the one