Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/31

2 the Latin arare and the English ear. Some have thought that Iran in the East and Erin in the West alike take their names from the old Aryans, the ‘ploughing’ folk, men more civilised than the roving Tartar hordes around them.

These tillers of the ground ‘knew the arts of plough&shy;ing, of making roads, of building ships, of weaving and sewing, of erecting houses; they had counted at least as far as one hundred. They had domesticated the most important animals, the cow, the horse, the sheep, the dog; they were acquainted with the most useful metals, and armed with hatchets, whether for peaceful or warlike purposes. They had recognised the bonds of blood and the laws of marriage; they followed their leaders and kings; and the distinction between right and wrong was fixed by customs and laws.’ As to their God, traces of him are found in the Sanscrit Dyaus, in the Latin Dies-piter, in the Greek Zeus, in the English Tiw; from this last comes our Tuesday. More&shy;over, the Aryans had a settled framework of grammar: theirs was that Mother Speech, whence most of the men dwelling between the Shannon and the Ganges inherit the words used in daily life.

The Sanscrit and the English are two out of the many channels that have brought the water from the old Aryan well-head down to our days. The Sanscrit lan&shy;guage, having been set down in writing two thousand years before the earliest English, shows us far more of the great Mother Speech than our own tongue does. I