Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/837

 ARYAN RACE AND LANGUAGE 801 of language are not dependent on and measured by emigration. It is in reality only the testi- mony of the Bible as to the place of origin of the whole human race, and the long-rooted opinions which have grown up partly under its influence, partly under that of the known growth and spread of civilization, that have led men to look to southwestern Asia as the cradle of the Aryan race and speech. Some recent scholars, rebelling against these influences, have fixed it rather in Europe ; but there is nothing of definite value to say for this view. With reference, however, to the degree of cultivation reached by the Aryan mother tribe before its separation, more definite and trust- worthy information is obtainable : by inference, namely, from the words which, as occurring in all or nearly all the branches, must be sup- posed to have formed a part of the primitive vocabulary. The items of such information were first put together by A. Kuhn ; Pictet later produced an elaborate but uncritical and untrustworthy work on the subject ; the last attempt at reconstruction of the Aryan vo- cabulary is by Fick. The main facts established are that the tribe was already far past savagery, having all the principal domestic animals that we have, practising the arts of weaving and agriculture, being acquainted with one or two metals (whether iron is not certain), and pos- sessing some of the most important cereals ; it was rather pastoral-agricultural than nomadic in its way of life. It is, of course, vain to attempt tracing the history of dispersion and migration of the branches of the dismembered family into their present seats ; but such dis- persion must have taken place mainly by grad- ual spread and unconscious separation, not by a deliberate parting and marching off in different directions, as some seem to please themselves with fancying. Even the grade of kinship between the branches is not made out beyond dispute. That the Sanskrit-speaking race of India parted from the Iranians, on Iranian territory, and entered India by the northwest, not very long before the Vedic period, is, indeed, universally acknowledged. And the closer relationship of Greek and Italic, on the one hand, and of Germanic and Letto- Slavic, on the other, is quite generally held ; but which of these two pairs stands nearer to the Asiatic is a matter of less unanimity of opinion, though with a preponderance to the side of the classic tongues. The place of the Celtic, again, is still more disputed : some con- nect it closely with the Italic, others rather with the Germanic, &c. ; while yet others re- gard it as quite separate from all. These are matters which will doubtless be determined by and by; and their determination may throw more light than we have at present upon the general course of the movements of the family. There may have been other branches, as inde- pendent as the seven mentioned, but driven out of existence in the course of the historical changes that time haa brought ; it is doubtful 62 VOL. i. 52 whether the Albanian, or Shkipetar, is not a relic of such a branch, the Illyrian ; after long doubt, the best authorities at the present time appear to set it down as Aryan. What other races may have earlier occupied a part of the present seats of the Aryans is also mainly matter for conjecture ; but that the latter have encroached upon the domain of Finno-Hun- garian (" Turanian ") tribes in northern, and of Iberians (Basques) in southwestern Europe, does not admit of question. More or less of mixture with aboriginal races is a natural or unavoidable result of such wide extension ; so that Aryan speech is likely to be everywhere purer than Aryan blood ; and there may be nations or tribes in which, by successive in- termixture, Aryan blood is in a minority, even a decided one ; yet it is not at all to be questioned that, on the whole, the present geographical limits of the family have been reached by the growth and spread of the original Aryan community. No hypothesis of borrowing, or of the dominating influence of one tribe, propagating and imposing its own idiom through wide regions, can possibly ex- plain the facts of the case ; such influence is absolutely impossible without high culture, aided by literature and the art of writing, of which there are no traces in the pre-historic Aryan period. One of the evidences that there is a unity of race as well as of language among the branches of the Aryan family, is the emi- nence, historical or literary, or both, which most of them have won among mankind. The family was far from being the first to rise to impor- tance, but it has reached a higher place, and maintained itself there more persistently, than any other. The Persian empire may be re- garded as the earliest appearance of an Aryan people as a leading actor in the drama of his- tory ; then Greek and Roman supremacy fol- lowed one another ; and in the modern era, it is the European nations of this kindred, with their colonies, that have been and are almost monopolizing the progressive force of humanity. India has lived a more isolated life, but a grand and notable one ; and, through Buddhism, it has powerfully influenced a great part of Asia. This historical importance of the Aryans con- stitutes one great source of the importance and interest belonging to the study of their languages. Another is the high rank of those languages themselves, as being confessedly the most perfect instruments of human expression and aids to human thought. Moreover, the immense range and variety of Aryan dialects, taken in connection with their high develop- ment and with the legibility of their history, have made the study of this family the train- ing ground and the basis of general linguistic science. For more detailed discussion of the matters presented here, see the "Lectures on Language " of Professors Max Muller and W. D. Whitney ; the second volume of Duncker's GescJiicJite des Alterthums ; Pictet's Origines indo-europeennes ; and Tick's Vergleichendee