Opuscula: Essays chiefly Philological and Ethnographical

by R. G. Latham

In the account of Herodotus a population named Neuri occupied a marshy district at the back of the Scythian area; probably the marshes of Pinsk. This is, perhaps, a Fin gloss. The town of Narym in the Ostiak country takes its name from the marshes round it.

The Lithuanian language avoids the letter f.—using p. instead; sometimes m. The Greek [a]φιλεω] is mylu in Lithuanic. The name, then, that a Fin locality would take in the mouth of a Lithuanian would not be Finsk but Minsk, or Pinsk, and these are the names we find on what I think was, at one time, the Finno-Lithuanic frontier.

I should add that the Kour- in Kour-sk seems to be the Kour- in Kour-land, the Kor- in Kor-alli (a Fin population of the Middle Ages), and the Car- in the eminently, and almost typically, Fin Karelians.

This is not much in the way of evidence. Much or little, however, it is more than can be got for any other population. Much or little it is got at by a very cursory investigation. No special research has been instituted. No tumulus has been appealed to. No local dialect has been analysed. No ordnance map has been pored over. All this will, doubtless, be done in time, and if, when it has been done, no confirmation of the present doctrine be found, the propounder will reconsider it. If the evidence point elsewhere he will abandon it. At present he brings the early Fin frontier to Minsk and Pinsk:

There it touched that of the Lithuanians. To make these the most eastern members of the Sarmatian stock is, at the first view, to fly in the face of the testimony of their present position. They are, in one sense, the most western. The Germans of Prussia touch them on the side of Europe. Between them and the Fins of Asia, the vast Russian area of the Governments of Smolensko, Novogorod &c. intervene. Speaking laxly, one may say that all Russia lies beyond them. Nevertheless, it is with the Fins of Estonia that they are also in contact; whilst the explanation of the German and Russian contact is transparently clear. The Germans (as a matter of history) cut their way through whole masses of Slavonians in Pomerania, before they reached them; so displacing the Slavonians to the west of them. The Russians (again a matter of history) pressed up to them by a circuit from the south and west. The Lithuanians have kept their position—but one population has stretched beyond, and another has pressed up to them. Their language is eminently akin to the Sanskrit. Their physiognomy is the most Fin of any thoroughly European population.

There were no Slavonians, in situ, to the East of the Lithuanic area; none originally. By encroachment and change of place there are, in later times, many. There are, as aforesaid, all the Russians of the present moment. The question, however, before us is the original area, the primordial situs.

The westward extension of the Lithuanians is a matter upon which I do not press the details. I think that the Vistula may have been to them and the Slavonians what the Rhine was to the Gauls and Germans. The main question is how far can we bring them south? What justifies us in making them reach the Carpathians? At present we find them in Livonia, Courland, East Prussia, Vilna, and Grodno; but further south than Grodno nowhere; nowhere, at least, with the definite characteristics of name and language. Every inch that is given them south of Grodno must have its proper evidence to support it.

The Gothini of Tacitus are the first population that we may make Lithuanic. What says Tacitus? They were not Germans; their language proved this. They were not Sarmatians. The Sarmatians imposed a tribute upon, as on men of another stock—tributa ut alienigenis imponunt. The Quadi did the same. If neither Germans nor Sarmatians what were they? Members of a stock now extinct? The rule against the unnecessary multiplication of causes forbids us to resort to this supposition. Do so once and we may always be doing it. Were they Fins? Say that they were, and what do we gain by it? We may as well prolong the Lithuania area from Grodno as the Fin from Pinsk. Nay, better. That Grodno is Lithuanian we know. That Pinsk was Fin we infer. Were they Scythians? We know of no Scythians beyond the Maros; so that the reasoning which told against the Fin hypothesis tells equally against the Turk. Beyond the Germans, the Slavonians, the Fins, the[6]Turks, and the Lithuanians we have nothing to choose from; and I submit that the minimum amount of assumption lies with the population last named.

Now comes the name of their Language. The Language of the Gothini was Gallica—Osos Pannonica, Gothinos Gallica arguit non esse Romanos. I have given reasons elsewhere (Germania of Tacitus with Ethnological notes) for translating Gallica Gallician,—not Gallic. Say, however, that the latter is the better translation; Gothini would still be the name of the people.

There is a country, then, of the Gothini sufficiently far south to be in contact with the Quadi and Sarmatæ—the Quadi in Moravia and Upper Hungary, the Sarmatæ in the parts between the Theiss and the Danube. Gallicia meets these conditions. It was a mining country. Gallicia is this. It was on the Upper Vistula—probably at its head-waters. At the mouth of the same river the name re-appears, in that of the Gothones, Guttones, Gythones &c. of the Amber country. These were either the nearest neighbours of the Aestyii, or the Aestyii themselves under a name other than German—for Aestyii is an undoubted German gloss, just like Est- in Est- onia.