What Halhed and Jones put forth as strong probability was ere long found, was clearly proved, to be the truth. Persian, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and of course all languages derived from them, were discovered to be identical in origin with Sanskrit. Now, what was this Sanskrit, this wonderful language which so suddenly and so surely unlocked the mystery of the world’s speech, and revealed the source of all the languages of civilized Europe, and some of those of Asia? Sanskrit, (the name means worked-together, elaborated, highly finished,) is the sacred language of the Brahmans, in which was preserved the religious teachings and legends of the people of India, whom we call Hindoos. It is quite four thousand years old in its existing form. For a very long time it was unwritten, the Brahmans having no letters; and the sacred books (so we must call them) were transmitted orally, but with such veneration not only for their doctrine and their story, but their phraseology in its minutest particulars, that among the Brahmans grammar became a religion, and the slightest variation from the text of the Vedas—this was the name of the sacred books—was regarded as a sin. Punctilio in this respect was carried so far that when letters were borrowed from the West, and an alphabet was formed, and the Vedas were written, it was protested against by the conservatives as a sacrilege. Common sense and convenience, however, carried the day. Sanskrit is the most elaborate, the most minutely divided, the most elaborately inflected speech known to man. The sight of a Sanskrit grammar is appalling to the common sense of our day. There are ten conjugations of verbs; and a verb has ten tenses; and each one of these tenses has three numbers, singular, dual and plural; and each tense has two sets of terminations. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are singular, dual and plural, and have eight cases. Inflections of all words are distracting for multitude and intricacy. Yet this elaborately intricate language was spoken in what we think of as the wilds of Asia long before the history of the human race is known; at least four thousand years ago.
A Frenchman named de Chésy learned Sanskrit from a British officer named Hamilton, who, on his way from India, was detained in France, and taught it, as he says, to Franz Bopp, a German philologist, who made use of it in a work on the system of conjugation, and thus became, unintentionally, a Columbus-like discoverer of the great science of Comparative Philology. For Bopp “builded better than he knew.” His purpose was merely to work out his system of conjugation; but in doing this he revealed and established the unity of speech in all the Aryan or Indo-European peoples. This he himself afterward elaborated in his “Comparative Grammar” of the chief Aryan languages. Then came another great German philologist, Jacob Grimm, who discovered the law, or method, according to which words changed their forms; and the great end was accomplished. This happened in 1816-19; and since that time Comparative Philology has worked upon the lines indicated by Bopp and Grimm. Bopp’s great “Comparative Grammar,” however, did not appear until 1833.
One of the most important, if not the most important of the results of the discovery of Sanskrit, and the consequent prosecution of the study of language upon the historical and comparative method—the only safe method for the study of any subject—is the revelation of the origin, and to a certain and very remarkable degree, of the early unrecorded history of the Aryan or Indo-European peoples; that race which has received the latter name because it occupies, and for two thousand years and more has occupied, all India and Europe. Let us glance at this history as it is thus revealed, for it is very much to our present purpose.
Take a good map of Asia, one which shows the eastern confines of Europe, and turn your attention to the country now called Joorkistan, lying between the Caspian Sea and the western boundary of the Chinese Empire. There, some five or six thousand years ago, (it will not do to be too particular, all the more because we can not, if we would,) about the foot of the Hindoo Kosh, and around the sources of the Oxus, there lived, we have good reason to believe, a people who called themselves Aryan. They were a white race; much fairer, at least, than the people who were then occupying Europe and the other parts of Asia. They were strong of body, intelligent and enterprising. They did not live only by hunting and herding, like the nomadic peoples, their neighbors, but cultivated the ground. Their name, Aryan, means honorable, noble; and there is some reason for believing that it is connected with their agricultural pursuits and distinction. For reasons which of course we do not know, but probably from the pressure of population, more than four thousand years ago this people began to send out bodies of emigrants. They moved westward, toward the Caspian Sea, of the existence of which they were probably ignorant. They had used boats upon the Oxus, but the history of their language shows that they knew nothing of what we call navigation. Their progress seems to have been slow, but continuous, one body of emigrants being ere long followed by another. We may be sure that they had to fight their way. So late as eight hundred years ago all emigration was armed. The strong took the land red-handed from the weak, or at least from those who were not so strong and so numerous as they were themselves. The Aryans reached the Caspian Sea; and took possession of the country lying south of it, since known as Persia. After a time, we know not how long, emigration began again from this point. But here the advancing people divided. Some of them moved in a south-westerly direction; and this stream of emigration continued until it overflowed all the vast territory now known as Afghanistan, Belochistan and Hindostan. Another stream moved westward and northward, and passed through Turkey in Asia into Europe.
We have reason for believing that up to the time when this division took place in the country south of the Caspian Sea, the Aryan people spoke one language; but sufficient time had already elapsed for a considerable change to have taken place in the tongue which was spoken on the plains at the foot of the Hindoo Kosh. Language changes rapidly among people in a low state of civilization, without literature, without letters which are the landmarks and conservators of speech. But this point of time and of place is that of a great division in the speech of the Aryan people. Of the language of those who moved westward into Europe there are no remains which date within many centuries of this period; but of the language of those who moved south into Hindostan, we have in the existing Sanskrit a representative which is of almost indefinable antiquity, and the perfect preservation of which is marvelous. It is no rude, ruinous relic, but complete, elaborate, and finished to the highest point of perfection in its kind. It will be seen (and this must be constantly borne in mind) that Sanskrit is not the original Aryan language, but only the oldest existing offshoot from that language. The great, the inestimable value of the discovery of Sanskrit was not that we find in it the source of other languages, not that in it was the origin of the words spoken by the various peoples of Europe; but that it furnished evidence of the most important fact in the history of language, one of the most important facts in the history of the world. It had been assumed that the countless words which were similar in the language of the European peoples, and the many which were identical, were derived one from another; that they were adopted by one people from the language of another; that they were the product of neighborhood, of intercourse, of imitation, of convection—that is that they were carried from one country and people into another. The discovery and the study of Sanskrit proved that these words, or most of them, came into the various languages in which they are found, not by any or by all of these methods, but by direct descent from a speech which was at one time common to the forefathers of all the peoples in India, in Persia, and in Europe. Of these various languages Sanskrit is not only the oldest, but so very much the oldest that it carries us up very far toward the original speech of the Aryan or Indo-European race; so far that we are not without reasonable hope that philological science may elaborate by its help a proximate form of the elements of the original Aryan speech.
It is worthy of remark that the European language most like the Sanskrit, most like it in substance, and notably most like it in grammatical structure, is the Greek; the language of the people nearest Asia, nearest the point of the division of the Aryan people into two great streams of emigration.[C] And here, too, it may well be remarked that the book of Genesis, in one of those ethnological passages which reveal a knowledge of prehistoric man so perfectly in accordance with the results of modern historical inquiry and scientific investigation that it would seem that they must have been a revelation from Omniscience, makes the confusion of tongues and the consequent dispersion of nations take place upon the plains of Shinar, in the very region, at least, where the Aryan dispersion began.
To resume our brief story of the Aryan advance to take possession of the world; for we are no longer concerned with what went on in India or the East. Many centuries had now elapsed, and the Aryan people had multiplied into many millions of men, and had formed themselves into nations or peoples ignorant of their common origin, and regarding each other as all peoples then regarded each other, as enemies, rivals in the possession of the earth and its products. The emigration continued; those in advance being driven and pushed on by those who followed. Europe once entered, there was again a division of the stream of advancing, conquering men. The dispersion was doubtless greater than before, but again there were two main bodies, one keeping to the south along the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the other moving northward, toward the Baltic. The former has been designated from the principal peoples involved in it, or resulting from it, the Italo-Græco-Celtic strain; the latter is the Gothic. It is with this that we are chiefly, but by no means exclusively, concerned. We are Goths.
It has just been said that those who were in the advance in this great emigration were pushed on by those who followed. Who were the advance of this westward movement, the first Aryans who entered Europe? There is no reasonable doubt that they were the Celts, the people who, some thirteen hundred years ago, were in absolute and complete possession of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and a small part of the northwestern coast of what is now, but was not then, France. These people, this head of the Aryan column, passed through southern Europe, (we know it by the names they left behind them, given to places during their temporary, but not short occupation of the soil,) and coming to the ocean, went northward, then crossed the English channel, and took possession of Britain and Ireland. There they stopped simply because they could go no farther. But they were still pushed by those who followed. The invasion of Britain by the Romans, and yet more, the after invasion and occupation of it by the so-called Anglo-Saxons, our forefathers, were a mere continuation of the Aryan emigration which had begun at the foot of the Hindoo Kosh, in Asia, thousands of years before.
These Celts who went first were followed by the people who, in close connection with them as to time and affiliation of blood, became the Latin races (old Romans, Italians, Spaniards, French), and the Greeks. It was natural that the first stream of Aryan emigration into Europe should take its course through the countries of these peoples, because they lie at the south, on the borders of the Mediterranean Sea. Men never go northward to find homes amid snows and ice one half the year, if they can find land of more genial clime unoccupied or occupyable. The leading bodies of the Celts having reached the ocean in the southern part of Europe, and being pushed on by the steady flow from behind, moved northward, and as we have already seen, at last left the continent, and rested in Britain and Ireland. Here, from their insular position, they were able to maintain their footing firmly, if not undisturbed, for many centuries. They were not displaced in Britain until about thirteen centuries ago; and then they were not driven onward, as before they had been driven; for there was no place whither to drive them. They were, in the words of an old adage, perhaps as old as this very time, “between the devil and the deep sea;” and most of them were slain to make room for their fellow Aryans, their far-away kindred, whom they knew not, and had no reason to know, and whom they hated with good reason.
The Goths, of whose race we are, and from whom we directly come, moved northwestward from the western shores of the Black Sea, where they are first heard of. Their language, in its original form, is lost like the great original Aryan tongue; but as in the case of that tongue, a very early offshoot of it has been happily preserved. This is the Mæso-Gothic, into which Ulphilas, a bishop of the Mæso-Goths, who had become Christians, translated the New Testament and part of the Old about one thousand five hundred years ago. Of the former a very considerable part remains. It is written in large silver letters, on parchment of a beautiful purple tint. This work shows us all of the structure and much of the substance of the Mæso-Gothic language; and in the former even more than in the latter affords, like the Greek, evidence of an origin identical with that of Sanskrit.