Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

The name, then, itself of each ancient population requires a preliminary investigation. And these names are numerous—more so in Europe than elsewhere.

The importance of the populations to which such names apply is greater in Europe than elsewhere. It is safe to say this; because there is a reason for it. From its excessive amount of displacement, Europe is that part of the world where there are the best grounds for believing in the previous existence of absolutely extinct families, or rather in the absolute extinction of families previously existing. There are no names in Asia that raise so many problems as those of the European Pelasgi and Etrurians.

The changes and complications involved in the foregoing observations (and they are but few out of many) are the results of comparatively recent movements; of conquests accomplished within the last twenty-five centuries; of migrations within (or nearly within) the historical period. Those truly ethnological phænomena which belong to the distribution itself of the existing families of Europe are, at least, of equal importance.

The most marked instances of philological isolation are European; the two chief specimens being the Basque and Albanian languages.

The Basque language of the Pyrenees has the same relation to the ancient language of the Spanish Peninsula that the present Welsh has to the old speech of Britain. It represents it in its fragments; fragments, whereof the preservation is due to the existence of a mountain stronghold for the aborigines to retire to. Now so isolated is this same Basque that there is no language in the world which is placed in the same class with it—no matter what the magnitude and import of that class may be.

The Albanian is just as isolated. As different from the Greek, Turkish and Slavonic tongues of the countries in its neighbourhood, as the Basque is from the French, Spanish and Breton, it is equally destitute of relations at a distance. It is unclassed—at least its position as Indo-European is doubtful.

What the Pelasgian and old Etruscan tongues were is uncertain. They were probably sufficiently different from the languages of their neighbourhood for the speakers of them to be mutually unintelligible. Beyond this, however, they may have been anything or nothing in the way of isolation. They may have been as peculiar as the Basque and Albanian. They may, on the other hand, have been just so unlike the Greek and Latin as to have belonged to another class—the value of that class being unascertained. Again, that class may or may not have existing representatives amongst the tongues at present existing. I give no opinion on this point. I only give prominence to the isolation of the Basque and Albanian. We know these last to be so different from each other, and from all other tongues, as to come under none of the recognized divisions in the way of ethnographical philology and its classifications.

Indo-Germanic.—This brings us to the term Indo-Germanic; and the term Indo-Germanic brings us to the retrospect of the European populations—all of which, now in existence, have been enumerated, but all of which have not been classified.

I. The Ugrians are a branch of the Turanians.

The Turanians form either a whole class or the part of one, according to the light in which we view them; in other words, the group has one value in philology, and another in anatomy. This is nothing extraordinary. It merely means that their speech has more prominent characters than their physical conformation.