It is proper that I should say to my readers that in proclaiming this I am teaching heresy. This is not orthodoxy, but my doxy. I am willing to confess, like one who went long before me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose, that I speak as a fool; but I shall be content with the final verdict that shall be passed upon me, whatever it may be.
Emphasizing for the moment the fact that this grammar which increases with barbarism and which diminishes with civilization, coexists only with inflection and depends upon it, and that its diminution in the Latin development of Aryan speech as compared with the Greek, was a purely rational, although perhaps an unconsciously rational, movement, let us defer the further consideration of this subject until another occasion.
One minute but very largely significant fact connected with the Latin and Greek languages, which will be appreciated to a certain degree at least by every schoolboy who has studied those languages, may here properly be set forth and considered. In Latin, the name of the supreme god, whose name in Greek is Zeus, is Jupiter. Now Jupiter is no form of Zeus. It can not “come from” Zeus by any mode of phonetic modification or decay. Moreover, the declension of Jupiter through the various substantive cases is notably irregular. It is:
| Nom. | Jupiter, | Jupiter. |
| Gen. | Jovis, | of Jupiter. |
| Dat. | Jovi, | to or for Jupiter. |
| Accus. | Jovem, | Jupiter (objectively). |
| Voc. | Jupiter, | O, Jupiter. |
| Abl. | Jove, | with, in, from, or by Jupiter. |
Now, Jovis, Jovi, Jovem and Jove can not be formed from Jupiter. Jovis is no more a real case of Jupiter than ours is a real case of we. How came the simple name of this god, used absolutely or in the way of invocation, to be Jupiter, and yet when used possessively to be Jovis, datively Jovi, etc.? To the young student of Latin this is a barren, brutal fact with which he is confronted, and which he is obliged to accept and to remember. It has no relation to any other fact. So at least it was forty years ago, as I and my contemporaries can testify.[B] But Jovis, although it can not be derived from Jupiter may be derived from or at least connected with Zeus. In fact it is so derived or connected. The supreme god of the Latin and the Greek mythology was the same god, and he had originally the same name, which was Dyus, or some like form. But the Latins did not derive this personage of their mythology from the Greeks, nor take his name from them, as it was once assumed they did. This is shown by the name they gave him, Jupiter; yet that very name, unlike as it is to Zeus, and impossible to be derived from it, has in it the witness of identity of origin. The fact is that the Latins and the Greeks derived both their conception of the supreme god and his name from a common source; a fact which has been revealed by the discovery of Sanskrit.
In the mythology of the Vedas, the sacred books of the Brahmins, which are written in Sanskrit, the supreme god, the primum mobile of divine power is Dyaus, which is from the root dyu, meaning to beam, to emit light. Dyaus is therefore the sky god, a record and an expression of the recognition of divinity in the heavens.[C] So both to the Greeks and the Latins the supreme divinity was originally the sky god. Now, Dyaus and Zeus are the same word with little phonetic modification. But whence comes Jupiter? Hence. We have seen above that the Sanskrit word for father is pitri, which seems to be corrupted from pàtri, a protector,[D] and the simple union of these two words gives us, Dyaus-patri, which, as an earlier, if not an original form, of Zeus-pater, or Ju-piter, would be an unexceptional etymology. We are however not left to conjecture nor to etymological construction for the origin of this name; for, according to Max Müller, in the Veda Dyaushpitar or Dyupitar become almost as much one word as Jupiter in Latin. Here we have the otherwise anomalous Latin Jupiter completely accounted for, not only in accordance with etymology and reason, but by positive historical evidence. To the Latins Jupiter was merely a name, coming to them they knew not whence nor how; but they had received it in a direct line of communication from their Aryan forefathers, who were also the forefathers of the writers of the Sanskrit Vedas. Yet more; when the Roman said Jupiter he merely called his supreme god the Heavenly Father. So near, in the very idea of divinity, does the evidence found in the history of language bring the modern Christian to the primitive pagan.
This name Dyaus, or Zeus, is also regarded by some of the most eminent philologists as identical with the name of the Eddic god Tyr and the Saxon word Tiw, and as present in our Tues-day or Tiws-daeg. It may be so; but specialists who may claim submissive deference as to matters of fact within their specialty are often led by enthusiasm into theory and speculation which respect for their learning does not oblige us to accept.
But space fails me, and with a brief exposition of a very few points of my previous paper this one must be closed.
The records of possession left in the names of places by advancing tribes of Aryans may be well illustrated by two names more widely known, perhaps, than any other two in the world—Thames and Avon. Now, both these names mean merely river, running water. Why, then, do we say the river Thames and the river Avon; which is merely to say in each case the river River. Simply because our English (or Anglo-Saxon) forefathers going to England and conquering it, found those streams so called by the natives. In the old Welsh (Celtic) which was spoken in ancient Britain both tam or tama and afon mean a river, and the rude and simple people naturally called the running water nearest them merely the river. When there was but one theater in London, and when there was but one in New York, in each case it was called merely the theater, without any other name, which indeed was needless. But when the Anglo-Saxons heard the stream on which London stands called tam, and that on which Stratford stands called afon, those words did not mean running water to them; they were mere names; and names they have remained. There are no less than nine rivers in England called Avon (merely because they were the river to the old Britons in their neighborhood); and tam is found in composition in names of places (Tamworth, Tamarton) with the same meaning. The Celts have left these name-traces upon hills, forests, and streams, not only in England, but all over southern and western Europe. Other families have left similar vestiges. A moderate illustration of this one point would require a paper by itself. In this way the march and the dwelling places of the principal divisions of the great race can be discovered.
It was said in the foregoing paper that the development and the various stages of knowledge attained by the Aryans had left traces in the history of their language; and it was remarked that the facts that words for boat and oars are common to all the languages of the race, while those which pertain to navigation are radically unlike, shows that before the great separation took place, the Aryans had rowed small boats on rivers, but knew nothing of ships and deep-sea sailing. From similar evidence we infer that they never saw salt water before the separation; for at that time they did not know the oyster, which is found in the Caspian Sea. The name oyster is common to all the European peoples, ancient as well as modern (Latin ostrea, Greek ostreon, with the meaning bone, shell); but in Sanskrit the word for the much eaten bivalve is pushtika. Plainly the southeastern moving and the northwestern moving Aryans severally named the oyster after they had parted. It is also remarkable that the only tree of which the name is common to all the Indo-European peoples, Asiatic as well as European, is the birch; the name of which in Sanskrit is bhúrja (observe how like in sound the two words are); and that this tree is the most widely dispersed of all the forest flora, and is found in great variety and large quantity in Central Asia.