The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

Is any one prepared to consider it the result of an intermixture of two or more dialects?

Or to limit its original area to a district not twenty miles across?

For myself I do neither one nor the other. I look upon it as a separate and independent mode of speech, even as the Umbrian and the Oscan, and, I cannot think that the Seven Hills of Rome were sufficient to constitute the area of its development. Yet to these it must be limited; for the Etruscan reached below Veii, the Oscan to the neighbourhood of Ardea and Præneste, and the Sabine below Cures; and it must be remembered that, however like the two dialects may have been, the Sabine was not Latin.

The Etruscans of Tuscany were an intrusive and foreign population (if this be not admitted the reasoning on it falls to the ground), and the earlier tribes that they dispersed were the Italians of the Latin type; for assuredly, if such Italians, other than those of Latium, ever existed it is in the parts north of the Tiber that they are to be sought in the first instance; since it is there that the evidence of displacement is strongest. Something earlier than the Etruscans of Etruria must have existed in the Patrimonio di San Pietro and the southern part of Tuscany, and these, I imagine to have been Latins—just as Devonshire was once Cornish, and would have been so again, had the Cornishmen been to England, what the Romans were to Italy.

At the same time some extension southwards and eastwards must be allowed; since tradition, perhaps history, makes both the Sabines and the Volscians more or less intrusive. The main extension, however, of the populations of the Latin type was Etruria.

And now, before we go to Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, we must revert to the parts on the Lower Po, the parts which, at the beginning of the historical period, were occupied by Etruscans, more or less displaced by Gauls—partially, at first, wholly, afterwards; the Gauls themselves being about to be superseded by the Romans.

A statement has already been made to the effect that in Ferrara and the country northwards, the Etruscans were necessarily intruders rather than aboriginal inhabitants. The reasons for this statement were reserved. They will now be given.

The earliest populations of the Lower Po must have come under conditions which, unless we suppose them to have been intermediate to the Umbrians and Liburnians, the ancient Etruscans (unless they were themselves similarly intermediate) did not meet. They must have connected the languages allied to the ancient tongues of Central Italy, with those of ancient Noricum—the former being (as is admitted and generally known) allied to the Latin, the latter (as is assumed for the present, but as will be supported by reasons in the sequel) being Slavonic and allied to the Servian, i.e., just what they are now, only in an older stage.

Now, whoever admits the validity of the valuable philological researches of those scholars, who, by showing the extent to which languages apparently as different as the German, the Greek, the Latin, the Lithuanian, or the Russian, are essentially cognate, have reduced the leading tongues of Europe to a single great class, falling, after the manner of the classes in zoology and botany, into definite divisions and subdivisions—a class which, though somewhat inconveniently denominated Indo-European, is still, as far as it goes, a true and natural group—must see the necessity of bringing the languages thus allied into as close geographical contact as possible; since the divisions to which they, respectively, belong, are the two most allied members of the class in question. For that the Sarmatian and classical tongues are nearer each other than the classical and German, the classical and Keltic, notwithstanding the opinions of several eminent scholars to the contrary, is a safe assertion; perhaps it is also the preponderating opinion.

To connect, therefore, the areas where languages thus allied are spoken, by areas belonging to transitional and intermediate populations is an ethnological necessity; and, however much subsequent changes may have obliterated such areas of connexion, however early those changes may have occurred; however complete they may have been; and however much they may have been followed up by others, the original continuity must, at one time or other, earlier or later, have had an existence.