History in English words

by Owen Barfield

At the time it was no more than a brilliant conjecture, but with it the comparative philology of the Aryan languages may be said to have begun.

Secondly, with the advent of phonology certain immutable laws were discovered governing the sounds made by the human throat, and the way in which these sounds change with the passing of time and react upon each other when they are knit together in a spoken word. Henceforward it was possible to say for certain that, for example, the English word wit (from the old verb ‘witan’, to know) was not derived from the Latin ‘videre’, but cognate, or related, with it. Many words derived from ‘videre’, such as advice, envy, review, seem at first sight infinitely farther off from the stem ‘vid-’ than wit, but it was now possible for scholars to say for certain that a Latin stem ‘vid’ adopted into English could not possibly have changed into wit. They could be equally certain that, if the Romans had borrowed the Greek word ‘idein’ (to see) into their language, it could never have changed its form to ‘videre’, so that, innumerable as are the words which Rome borrowed from Greece, ‘videre’ is not one of them. Thus, it was clear that such groups of three words as idein, videre, and wit, or astēr, stella, and star, were not father, son, and grandson (as is the case, for instance, with poenē, poena, and penal), but three brothers or cousins all descended from a common ancestor with a stem something like ‘weid’ belonging to some other language. This, put very briefly and with many omissions, was the contribution made by phonology to the science of comparative philology.

Perhaps it is not altogether insignificant that the study of that seemingly dull subject—phonology—should be associated in our minds with one of the most charming collection of fairy-tales in Europe. It is thanks to the labours of Jacob Grimm during the first half of the last century that we are now able to reconstruct the remote pasts of words, not, it is true, with absolute certainty, but with a degree of it which makes a chapter such as the present one worth writing. And while Grimm was burrowing into the rich, loamy soil of German speech and German folk-lore, another German scholar, Franz Bopp, was laying the foundations, with the help of this knowledge and of the results of the study of Sanskrit, of a genuinely scientific comparative philology. Nor was it long before less scholarly but more imaginative minds, such as Max Müller’s, were interpreting the meaning of their researches to a wider public.

We can imagine the suppressed excitement of the philologists of that time as they began to discover in that remote Eastern language, the sacred language of the Vedic hymns, words such as ‘vid’ (to see), ‘tara’ (a star), ‘sad’ (to sit), ‘bhratar’ (a brother). For it was not only the evident relation of Sanskrit to the languages of Europe that was exciting. Sanskrit, which had preserved the forms of its words more unchanged than any other Aryan tongue, threw a brilliant light on the close relations existing between those other languages themselves. For instance, although the sisterhood of words such as the Greek ‘onoma’, Latin ‘nomen’, and name, had long been suspected, yet there had been no way of distinguishing such a sisterhood from purely accidental resemblances like Hebrew ‘gol’, Greek ‘kaleo’, and call, and the connection between ‘brother’ and ‘frater’ was by no means obvious. But when the older Sanskrit form ‘bhratar’ was brought to light, the gap between these words was at once bridged. It could be seen at a glance how the three of them, brother, bhratar, and frater, had started from the same original form and diverged through the years. Gradually all doubt was blown away, and Sanskrit, the language of a race with whom Europeans had thought, and for the most part still think, that they had nothing whatever in common, stood revealed as an obvious relative of Latin, Greek, Modern English, and practically all the other languages of Europe. It seemed, therefore, to follow that our ancestors and those of the Hindoos were at one time living together, that our ancestors and theirs were, in fact, the same.

At first it was thought that Sanskrit itself was the parent-language from which all the others had derived, and that the nations of Europe were descended from a body of Hindoos, some of whom had migrated westwards. We called ourselves “Aryans” because the people who had once spoken Sanskrit were known as “Aryas”, or worshippers of the God of the Brahmins. But soon the accurate methods of analysis which philology had now acquired made it plain that this could not be so. Therefore a still older language was postulated and called indifferently the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, or the Indo-European parent-language. If there was a language, there must have been a people who spoke it, and attention was soon focused on the character, civilization, and whereabouts in space and time of the people who spoke the lost Indo-European, or “Aryan” parent-language.

The fascination of this particular branch of philological research is apparent when we recollect that in this case, in the case of these remote Eastern ancestors of ours, philology is almost the only window through which we can look out on them. In most subsequent periods of history we have many other ways, besides the study of language, of discovering the outward circumstances of men’s lives. Historical records, archaeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature, all come to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization; but it is not so with the Aryans. Here ethnology and archaeology tell us practically nothing, anthropology a little, and the rest nothing at all. If we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from this period we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it. And in such romantic circumstances it is hardly surprising that we should find a veritable army of scholars and philosophers, both professional and amateur, jostling each other upon that plank with such vigour that the bridge and its burden have often seemed in danger of vanishing quietly together into the abyss.

The central principle upon which philologists have worked is this, that if a word occurs to-day in a fair sprinkling of the Aryan languages, then that word existed in the Aryan parent-language, and therefore the thing of which it is the label existed in some form or other in the primitive Aryan civilization. Conversely, if an object or an idea is found to have a different name in most of the Aryan languages, it was sometimes assumed that that object was not known to the Aryans before their dispersion. But this negative deduction soon came to be regarded as unsafe, and there are indeed many reasons why the whole method is limited and uncertain. For instance, even in one language it is constantly happening that when a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it. This is inevitable. We have to proceed from the known to the unknown in language as in life; but language lags behind life and words change more slowly than things or ideas. When railways first came in, their rolling-stock consisted of a string of vehicles resembling the old horse coach so exactly that it was said later that “the ghost of a horse stalked in front of the engine”. Although this is no longer the case, we still call these vehicles carriages or coaches, and look like continuing to do so. To take an even more patent example, when a modern Englishman or American uses the very old Celtic word car, we all know what he means: yet it would be an error to deduce from this that the principle of internal combustion was known in pre-Christian times in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, and probably Rome (Latin ‘carrus’, a cognate word). Moreover, we can see at once that the fraction of error is infinitely greater when we are dealing, not with the development of a word in one language, but with its history as it descended from one language to another; for example, from the hypothetical parent-tongue into the languages with which we are familiar to-day. Indeed, this kind of reasoning, if no other evidence were available, would lead us to conclude that the Greeks were acquainted with electricity.

Fortunately, however, it is not the object of this little book to put forward theories and discuss the extent to which they can be proved or disproved by words. And though it has been interesting to observe that in some cases—and notably when we are endeavouring to reconstruct the life and thought of our Aryan ancestors—our knowledge, such as it is, is derived very largely from the evidence of words, yet in these pages, even when that particular period is being dealt with, the words chosen for description will by no means necessarily be those which provide the most conclusive evidence for what is said. A great deal has been done in quite recent years by way of collating the results of comparative philology with those of anthropology, ethnology, comparative mythology, etc., and reconstructing from the combined data something of the past history of our own and other races or cultures. We are concerned here, not with the way in which those results were arrived at, but with the results themselves. The reconstruction itself has been and is being done by scholars; here the endeavour is rather to make use of their labours; not to think about the past, as it were, but to look at it. Consequently the words chosen are not the most useful ones, but those which are the best telescopes; for while the nineteenth century spent itself prodigally in multitudinous endeavours to know what the past was, it is now possible for us, by penetrating language with the knowledge thus accumulated, to feel how the past is.

Who are the Aryans? Where did they come from? Looking back down the corridors of time from the particular perspective to which we have attained in the twentieth century, far away in the past—it may be in the Stone Age—we seem to be able to perceive a remarkable phenomenon. At some particular spot in the vast plains stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia it was as though a fresh spring bubbled up into the pool of humanity. Whether it represented the advent of a new “race-type”, what a race-type exactly is, and how it begins are questions which we must leave to others to settle. That spring was the Aryan culture.

Throughout much of Europe and Asia there were already in existence different civilizations in different stages of development; such were the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and farther west the great Minoan civilization, which in its Bronze Age was to ray out an influence from Crete all over the Aegean world. It may be that there was something static[2] in the very nature of these pre-Aryan cultures, or it may be that they were ageing and passing in the natural course of events; what is certain is that there was something dynamic, some organic, out-pushing quality in the waters of this Aryan spring. For these waters spread. They have been spreading over the world ever since that time, now quickly, now slowly, down into India and Persia, north to the Baltic, west over all Europe and the New World, until in the persons of the three Aryan explorers, Peary, Amundsen, and Scott, their waves have licked the poles. It appears to have been the tendency of the Aryan settler, whether he came as a conquering invader or as a peaceful immigrant, to obliterate more than he absorbed of the aboriginal culture on which he imposed himself. In this the Celts and Teutons who ages ago overran most of Europe appear to have resembled the English-speaking settlers who long afterwards almost annihilated the North American Indian with his gods and traditions. It is true that we English owe to this latter pre-Aryan race the ability to express just that shade of contempt which is conveyed by the word skunk, also the charming blend of whimsicality and reprobation crystallized in mugwump. But such survivals really only emphasize the extent to which, as the Aryan waters spread, the pre-Aryan past has been covered over. The past does indeed live in the language we speak and in those with which we are familiar, but it is the past of the Aryans. If we dig down far enough into the English language, we reach an old civilization flourishing somewhere round the banks of the Dnieper; of what was going on in these islands at that time we hear scarcely the faintest reverberation.