Page:TASJ-1-1-2.djvu/391

 roots produced by him were transparently illusory, still there seemed a grain of truth in his contention. But it went no further than to show that possibly all languages have begun with a common vocabulary, all languages have some common features, as all men have the organs common to the human family. The question is how far, and at what period, such have diverged from the common type, so as to form an essentially distinct family.

Mr. Hall, mentioning an instance of an absurd attempt to identify a Japanese word with an English word of somewhat similar sound, said that this was a fair sample of some of the writing which even at the present day, in the case of the less known languages, passed current for philological enquiry. He had not seen the work of Mr. Edkins to which Mr. Aston had referred in terms of commendation; but if it were no better than certain other of that gentleman’s contributions to philology, and notably than his paper on the Japanese language read before the Society last year, it was easy to conjecture how small its value must be. Mr. Aston, accepting as proved Mr. Edkins’ views as to the common origin of Chinese and Aryan roots, professed to apply the same method of investigation to Japanese with a similar result. It was doubtful if he had succeeded in this attempt. He himself (Mr. H.) had failed to find in Japanese any traces of an element common to its roots and those of European languages. But while he could not but agree with Dr. Hepburn in questioning the conclusion at which Mr. Aston had arrived, he thought that Mr. Goodwin had underrated the scientific value of the paper. It was highly desirable that the prevailing theory of the common origin of all the families of speech should be tested by the light of such evidence as could be obtained from examination of the various Turanian tongues. In the case of so old and highly developped a speech as Japanese—he meant of course, pure Japanese, the Yamato Kotoba—this evidence could hardly fail to be of especial importance; and to extract and set forth this evidence was the professed object of the paper. Mr. Aston had executed this task with a completeness and mastery of his subject that had left little to be gleaned by any subsequent enquirers in the same field. He was astonished at the number and verisimilitude of the resemblances discovered by Mr. Aston between Japanese and Aryan words. It would be impossible for him, and difficult, he thought, for any one, on the bare hearing of so condensed a paper on so wide a subject, to pronounce off-hand a correct estimate of the value of the evidence and arguments adduced in it; each separate instance of alleged affinity between Japanese and Aryan root would have to be examined in detail by itself, a work requiring time and care; but it must not be forgotten that behind all the etymological identities revealed by Grimm’s law in the various members of the Aryan family, lay the great fact of the close structural affinity of those languages; and that this support was entirely wanting in the case of Japanese, the grammatical structure of which was essentially different; consequently the inference from