BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
Our inquiry in the first paper of this series led us to follow the emigration of the Aryan, or Indo-European, peoples from their original seat in Central Asia until we found them in possession of the whole of Europe;—the whole, from Siberia to the western shore of Ireland, from the Arctic Sea to the Mediterranean. The people who were there before them, they seem to have totally displaced, with the exception of a small remnant in the Pyrenees, now and long known as the Basques. That there were people in Europe before the Aryans has been clearly established by inquiries which here need only be thus referred to. Neither the inquiries nor the people are anything to our present purpose. As the Aryans began their westward march more than four thousand years ago, this fact of preëxisting European peoples is strong confirmatory evidence of the truth of a quaint line in a little song in “Twelfth Night” (not written by Shakspere, however),
A great while ago the world began.
That the Aryans killed all their predecessors in Europe is hardly credible, even if possible; but that they were very thorough in the performance of this function, is also more than probable. The improving of other people off the face of the earth is by no means an original American invention. It is a process which long antedates the introduction of the arts of civilization; and looking at the subject from the cold heights of history and social science, it seems to have been a necessity, preliminary to the introduction of those arts. The civilization which now fills the best part of the earth, although not the largest, and which seems destined to fill the whole, is in its origin and development altogether Aryan. Probably much the greater part of the primitive European peoples—primitive, if they indeed had not also predecessors—were destroyed. Certainly by the two processes of destruction and absorption they were extinguished. The Aryans, however, were not mere bands of armed men, armies large or small; they were emigrating nations. The men were accompanied by their women and children; and the probability therefore is that there was little mingling of the blood of the superior and conquering race with the blood of the inferior race, or races, whom they conquered and displaced. At least, of such an intermingling no appreciable traces have been discovered. There is in the language of any of the Aryan peoples now in possession of Europe no remnant, either verbal or constructive, of a language like that of the Basques. The consequences in this respect of the Aryan immigration into Europe were probably much like the consequences of the entrance of that people into this country. The American races have disappeared here before the European, and have not in the slightest degree affected, in the United States, at least, the blood, or the civilization or the speech of the latter. “Indians,” as we strangely call them (the real Indians being in Asia, and the “Indians” of America having been so called because America on its discovery was supposed to be the eastern part of Asia)—“Indians” should be treated with justice and with all the humanity that can be shown them; but it is a narrow and really an inhuman sentimentality which mourns their displacement from the great country which they once occupied as a savage hunting-ground.
We have now to inquire what English is; what is the substance and the structure of the language which within only two hundred and fifty years has choked and stilled even the echoes of the speech of Sitting Bull, Squatting Bear, and their forefathers and kindred. But before we go directly into this inquiry it may be instructive, and I hope interesting, to glance briefly at a few of the evidences which the discovery of Sanskrit, and the consequent development of the science of comparative philology, have revealed of the original identity of all the Aryan peoples (those in Europe and those in Asia—that is in Persia and India) and to make a rudimentary acquaintance with the modes and processes by which this identity was discovered.
No single word is so good an example of the testimony of language to the common origin of the Indo-European peoples as one of the commonest that we use, one which expresses the first, or at least the second, thought that enters the human mind—me. An infant, a worm, if it can think, has awakened in it on its first touch of another object the consciousness of something else and of itself:—that is not me, this is me. Now the expression in sound of this first perception of the human mind is the most widely diffused, and one of the most ancient, of existing words. In English, Frisian, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Mæso-Gothic, German, Irish, Gælic, Welsh, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, the word expressing the objective recognition of self-hood is either absolutely the same, or like with so little difference that the slightness of the variation is remarkable. When we get to the Latin and the Greek me (the accusative case—so-called—of ego, I, which is common to both languages) we have gone back more than two thousand years; and when we reach the Sanskrit mahyam, with its dative me and its accusative má, we are four thousand years in the past, and as many thousand miles in Central Asia.
This one word, it should seem, was sufficient to indicate identity of origin in all the European languages, ancient and modern; and if not to produce conviction, to arouse attention and stimulate investigation. When the word was found in Sanskrit, it is not too much to say that identity of origin in all the Indo-European tongues was so clear that further investigation could discover only an accumulation of evidence. For otherwise it would be necessary to assume some inherent, intrinsic, or, as we say, some natural, relations between the idea of objective self-hood and the sound me, or that very ancient original sound of which it is a slight modification. But there is no such relation. There is no such relation between any word and any thought. If there were, then all the peoples of the world would have expressed that idea, and would now express it, by this sound, or by some modification of it. This, however, is not true. It is and it has been so used only by the peoples of the great Aryan or Indo-European family. But what a tremendous fact it is, the use of this little word by hundreds and thousands of millions of people over half the civilized world for more than four thousand years, to express this first thought that enters the mind of man!—people who were strangers, and enemies, who were slaughtering each other as they fought through the dark cycles of centuries for land, for life, for supremacy; who hated each other as foreign and alien; and who were all calling themselves, each to himself and each to the other, me, and in doing so were telling each other that they were of one blood and one speech!
It should be very distinctly remembered that the me (with its variations) of the various European peoples is not derived from the Sanskrit mahyam, má, or me, but that the Sanskrit form, like the others, is derived from a root in the yet more ancient, and now wholly lost, original Aryan speech. That word, according to evidence which I believe is satisfactory to all the great comparative philologists, is the pronominal root ma, which, for reasons undiscovered, and which are probably undiscoverable, was used to express the first person. Many verbal roots have been thus satisfactorily unearthed; but in the consideration of our subject it must never be forgotten, that the Sanskrit, although it has proved to be the key that unlocks the mysteries of language, and makes them no longer mysteries, but mere successions of related facts, is not the original fact or form of Aryan or Indo-European speech. No word in Latin, Greek, in the Celtic, Teutonic, Slavic, or other European tongues is derived from a Sanskrit word, although the two may seem identical. Both are derived alike from an elder word or root. The supreme importance of Sanskrit in the study of language is in the fact that it is the oldest, very much the oldest, of all the existing Aryan languages, and that it has been preserved for thousands of years with a minute accuracy and a religious devotion.
Having made this discovery about the word for that very important, that most important, individual, I, we should naturally expect that the words expressive of the first and most important relation of that individual—that to his progenitors—would be in like manner general, and in like manner preserved among the various families of the Aryan race. This proved to be the case. The word for mother, is, with very slight variation, the same in all of them. For example, English mother, Anglo-Saxon moder, Dutch moeder, Icelandic mothir, Danish moder, German mutter, Celtic mathair, Russian mat-e, Latin mater, Greek meter,[A] Sanskrit matri; and on the other side, the male, we have, English father, Anglo-Saxon fæder, Dutch vader, Danish fader, Icelandic fathir, Mæso-Gothic fadar, German vater, Latin pater, Greek pater, Persian pedar, and Sanskrit pitri. Here again we have followed these household words through Europe and four thousand years into Central Asia. The root of mother, or mater, is assumed to be ma; although its significance is, I believe, yet unknown. That of father, or pater, is assumed by most of the best scholars (although on grounds which, with a hesitation only becoming in me, I venture to think not absolutely satisfactory) to be pa, conveying the idea of protection. In both cases, however, there can be no doubt of the radical positions of the syllables ma and pa; and thus we see a fact at once whimsically and touchingly significant; that the two childish household words ma and pa, so commonly, although not universally, used, are at least representatives of a speech of such hoary antiquity that it lies beyond the bounds of history and within the realm of conjecture. Ma and pa antedate not only mother and father, but the Sanskrit matri and pitri.