Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/287

Rh her hardest frontier question, while their kith and kin were soon to sweep the North Sea as Angles, Frisians, and Norsemen.

On every page of the foregoing Studies there will be found evidence of the continuity and persistency, within the Lowland Scots vernacular, of those features that are most distinctive of this Western Teutonism.

It may help the student to have, as footnotes to this article, a conspectus of Professor Sayce's views on the origines of the Aryans. As a distinguished Egyptologist and Assyriologist, he has a wider grasp of the situation than the earlier Orientalists could have had:—

(1) To Greek, and not to Sanskrit, we have to look for light on Aryan speech.

(2) Sanskrit not now regarded as the parent Aryan speech.

(3) The primitive Aryan, a coarse, squalid savage, defending himself against the climate, clad in skins.

(4) Early Aryans' presence in Asia Minor given up: no Aryan names on cuneiform monuments between Kurdistan and the Halys.

(5) Whole strip from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf Turanian at the earliest date known: cuneiform tablets due to a Turanian inrush.

(6) Eastern Aryans of India and Iran, the latest and most distinct branch.

(7) Westward flow of Aryans not likely begun before the Turanian inrush.

(8) This flow not south by the Caspian but over the Tartar steppes on its northern shore: therefore little sea influence shown.

(9) European Aryan home a track, bleak and wintry; want of a common name for same object in East and West Aryan may be due to loss, as well as to ignorance, of the object itself.

(10) A primitive European Aryan language, hence the original branching—East and West—repeated in Europe into Kelt.-Ital., Hell., Teut., Slav.

(11) Not till the West Aryans settled on the shores of the Baltic, or, possibly, of the Black Sea, did they break up—shown by agreement in the word for sea, and in the beech, which grows only to the west of line, Koenigsberg-Crimea.