Chapter VI: Preface (6)

It is from Auxentius, as copied by Maximinus, that we learn that Ulfilas died at Constantinople, where he had been invited by the emperor to a disputation. This could not have been later than the year 381, because, according to the same Auxentius, Ulfilas had been bishop for forty years, and, according to Philostorgius, he had been consecrated by Eusebius. Now Eusebius of Nicomedia died 341, and as Philostorgius says that Ulfilas was consecrated by “Eusebius and the bishops who were with him,” the consecration has been referred with great plausibility to the beginning of the year 341, when Eusebius presided at the Synod of Antioch. As Ulfilas was thirty years old at the time of his consecration, he must have been born in 311, and as he was seventy years of age when he died at Constantinople, his death must have taken place in 381.

Professor Waitz fixed the death of Ulfilas in 388, because it is stated by Auxentius that other Arian bishops had come with Ulfilas on his last journey to Constantinople, and had actually obtained the promise of a new council from the emperors, but that the heretical party, _i.e._, the Athanasians, succeeded in getting a law published, prohibiting all disputation on the faith, whether in public or private. Maximinus, to whom we owe this notice, has added two laws from the Codex Theodosianus, which he supposed to have reference to this controversy, dated respectively 388 and 386. This shows that Maximinus himself was doubtful as to the exact date. Neither of these laws, however, is applicable to the case, as has been fully shown by Dr. Bessell. They are quotations from the Codex Theodosianus made by Maximinus at his own risk, and made in error. If the death of Ulfilas were fixed in 388, the important notice of Philostorgius, that Ulfilas was consecrated by Eusebius, would have to be surrendered, and we should have to suppose that as late as 388 Theodosius had been in treaty with the Arians, whereas after the year 383, when the last attempt at a reconciliation bad been made by Theodosius, and had failed, no mercy was any longer shown to the party of Ulfilas and his friends.

If, on the contrary, Ulfilas died at Constantinople in 381, he might well have been called there by the Emperor Theodosius, not to a council, but to a disputation (ad disputationem), as Dr. Bessell ingeniously maintains, against the Psathyropolistæ,(170) a new sect of Arians at Constantinople. About the same time, in 380, Sozomen(171) refers to efforts made by the Arians to gain influence with Theodosius. He mentions, like Auxentius, that these efforts were defeated, and a law published to forbid disputations on the nature of God. This law exists in the Codex Theodosianus, and is dated January 10, 381. But what is most important is, that this law actually revokes a rescript that had been obtained fraudulently by the Arian heretics, thus confirming the statement of Auxentius that the emperor had held out to him and his party a promise of a new council.

We now return to Ulfilas. He was born in 311. His parents, as Philostorgius tells us, were of Cappadocian origin, and had been carried away by the Goths as captives from a place called Sadagolthina, near the town of Parnassus. It was under Valerian and Gallienus (about 267) that the Goths made this raid from Europe to Asia, Galatia, and Cappadocia, and the Christian captives whom they carried back to the Danube were the first to spread the light of the Gospel among the Goths. Philostorgius was himself a Cappadocian, and there is no reason to doubt this statement of his on the parentage of Ulfilas. Ulfilas was born among the Goths; Gothic was his native language, though he was able in after-life to speak and write both in Latin and Greek. Philostorgius, after speaking of the death of Crispus (326), and before proceeding to the last years of Constantine, says, that “about that time” Ulfilas led his Goths from beyond the Danube into the Roman empire. They had to leave their country, being persecuted on account of their Christianity. Ulfilas was the leader of the faithful flock, and came to Constantine, (not Constantius,) as ambassador. This must have been before 337, the year of Constantine’s death. It may have been in 328, when Constantine had gained a victory over the Goths; and though Ulfilas was then only seventeen years of age, this would be no reason for rejecting the testimony of Philostorgius, who says that Constantine treated Ulfilas with great respect, and called him the Moses of his time. Having led his faithful flock across the Danube into Mœsia, he might well have been compared by the emperor to Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt through the Red Sea. It is true that Auxentius institutes the same comparison between Ulfilas and Moses, after stating that Ulfilas had been received with great honors by Constantius. But this refers to what took place after Ulfilas had been for seven years bishop among the Goths, in 348, and does not invalidate the statement of Philostorgius as to the earlier intercourse between Ulfilas and Constantine. Sozomen (H. E. vi. 3, 7) clearly distinguishes between the first crossing of the Danube by the Goths, with Ulfilas as their ambassador, and the later attacks of Athanarich on Fridigern or Fritiger, which led to the settlement of the Goths in the Roman empire. We must suppose that after having crossed the Danube, Ulfilas remained for some time with his Goths, or at Constantinople. Auxentius says that he officiated as Lector, and it was only when he had reached the requisite age of thirty, that he was made bishop by Eusebius in 341. He passed the first seven years of his episcopate among the Goths, and the remaining thirty-three of his life “in solo Romaniæ,” where he had migrated together with Fritiger and the Thervingi. There is some confusion as to the exact date of the Gothic Exodus, but it is not at all unlikely that Ulfilas acted as their leader on more than one occasion.

There is little more to be learnt about Ulfilas from other sources. What is said by ecclesiastical historians about the motives of his adopting the doctrines of Arius, and his changing from one side to the other, deserves no credit. Ulfilas, according to his own confession, was always an Arian (semper sic credidi). Socrates says that Ulfilas was present at the Synod of Constantinople in 360, which may be true, though neither Auxentius nor Philostorgius mentions it. The author of the Acts of Nicetas speaks of Ulfilas as present at the Council of Nicæa, in company with Theophilus. Theophilus, it is true, signed his name as a Gothic bishop at that council, but there is nothing to confirm the statement that Ulfilas, then fourteen years of age, was with Theophilus.

Ulfilas translated the whole Bible, except the Books of Kings. For the Old Testament he used the Septuagint; for the New, the Greek text; but not exactly in that form in which we have it. Unfortunately, the greater part of his work has been lost, and we have only considerable portions of the Gospels, all the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, though again not complete; fragments of a Psalm, of Ezra, and Nehemiah.(172)

Though Ulfilas belonged to the western Goths, his translation was used by all Gothic tribes, when they advanced into Spain and Italy. The Gothic language died out in the ninth century, and after the extinction of the great Gothic empires, the translation of Ulfilas was lost and forgotten. But a MS. of the fifth century had been preserved in the Abbey of Werden, and towards the end of the sixteenth century, a man of the name of Arnold Mercator, who was in the service of William IV., the Landgrave of Hessia, drew attention to this old parchment containing large fragments of the translation of Ulfilas. The MS., known as the Codex Argenteus, was afterwards transferred to Prague, and when Prague was taken in 1648 by Count Königsmark, he carried this Codex to Upsala in Sweden, where it is still preserved as one of the greatest treasures. The parchment is purple, the letters in silver, and the MS. bound in solid silver.

In 1818, Cardinal Mai and Count Castiglione discovered some more fragments in the Monastery of Bobbio, where they had probably been preserved ever since the Gothic empire of Theodoric the Great in Italy had been destroyed.

Ulfilas must have been a man of extraordinary power to conceive, for the first time, the idea of translating the Bible into the vulgar language of his people. At his time, there existed in Europe but two languages which a Christian bishop would have thought himself justified in employing, Greek and Latin. All other languages were still considered as barbarous. It required a prophetic sight, and a faith in the destinies of these half-savage tribes, and a conviction also of the utter effeteness of the Roman and Byzantine empires, before a bishop could have brought himself to translate the Bible into the vulgar dialect of his barbarous countrymen. Soon after the death of Ulfilas, the number of Christian Goths at Constantinople had so much increased as to induce Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople (397-405), to establish a church in the capital, where the service was to be read in Gothic.(173)

The language of Ulfilas, the Gothic, belongs, through its phonetic structure, to the Low-German class, but in its grammar it is, _with few exceptions_, far more primitive than the Anglo-Saxon of the Beowulf, or the Old High-German of Charlemagne. These few exceptions, however, are very important, for they show that it would be grammatically, and therefore historically, impossible to derive either Anglo-Saxon or High-German, or both,(174) from Gothic. It would be impossible, for instance, to treat the first person plural of the indicative present, the Old High-German _nerjamês_, as a corruption of the Gothic _nasjam_; for we know, from the Sanskrit _masi_, the Greek _mes_, the Latin _mus_, that this was the original termination of the first person plural.

Gothic is but one of the numerous dialects of the German race; some of which became the feeders of the literary languages of the British Isles, of Holland, Friesia, and of Low and High Germany, while others became extinct, and others rolled on from century to century unheeded, and without ever producing any literature at all. It is because Gothic is the only one of these parallel dialects that can be traced back to the fourth century, whereas the others disappear from our sight in the seventh, that it has been mistaken by some for the original source of all Teutonic speech. The same arguments, however, which we used against Raynouard, to show that Provençal could not be considered as the parent of the Six Romance dialects, would tell with equal force against the pretensions of Gothic to be considered as more than the eldest sister of the Teutonic branch of speech.

There is, in fact, a third stream of Teutonic speech, which asserts its independence as much as High-German and Low-German, and which it would be impossible to place in any but a co-ordinate position with regard to Gothic, Low and High German. This is the _Scandinavian_ branch. It consists at present of three literary dialects, those of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, and of various local dialects, particularly in secluded valleys and fiords of Norway,(175) where, however, the literary language is Danish.

It is commonly supposed(176) that, as late as the eleventh century, identically the same language was spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and that this language was preserved almost intact in Iceland, while in Sweden and Denmark it grew into two new national dialects. Nor is there any doubt that the Icelandic skald recited his poems in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, nay, even among his countrymen in England and Gardariki, without fear of not being understood, till, as it is said, William introduced Welsh, _i.e._ French, into England, and Slavonic tongues grew up in the east.(177) But though one and the same language (then called Danish or Norrænish) was understood, I doubt whether one and the same language was spoken by all Northmen, and whether the first germs of Swedish and Danish did not exist long before the eleventh century, in the dialects of the numerous clans and tribes of the Scandinavian race. That race is clearly divided into two branches, called by Swedish scholars the East and West Scandinavian. The former would be represented by the old language of Norway and Iceland, the latter by Swedish and Danish. This division of the Scandinavian race had taken place before the Northmen settled in Sweden and Norway. The western division migrated westward from Russia, and crossed over from the continent to the Aland Islands, and from thence to the southern coast of the peninsula. The eastern division travelled along the Bothnian Gulf, passing the country occupied by the Finns and Lapps, and settled in the northern highlands, spreading toward the south and west.

The earliest fragments of Scandinavian speech are preserved in the two _Eddas_, the elder or poetical Edda, containing old mythic poems, the younger or Snorri’s Edda giving an account of the ancient mythology in prose. Both Eddas were composed, not in Norway, but in Iceland, an island about as large as Ireland, and which became first known through some Irish monks who settled there in the eighth century.(178) In the ninth century voyages of discovery were made to Iceland by Naddodd, Gardar, and Flokki, 860-870, and soon after the distant island, distant about 750 English miles from Norway, became a kind of America to the Puritans and Republicans of the Scandinavian peninsula. Harald Haarfagr (850-933) had conquered most of the Norwegian kings, and his despotic sway tended to reduce the northern freemen to a state of vassalage. Those who could not resist, and could not bring themselves to yield to the sceptre of Harald, left their country and migrated to France, to England, and to Iceland (874). They were mostly nobles and freemen, and they soon established in Iceland an aristocratic republic, such as they had had in Norway before the days of Harald. This northern republic flourished; it adopted Christianity in the year 1000. Schools were founded, two bishoprics were established, and classical literature was studied with the same zeal with which their own national poems and laws had been collected and interpreted by native scholars and historians. The Icelanders were famous travellers, and the names of Icelandic students are found not only in the chief cities of Europe, but in the holy places of the East. At the beginning of the twelfth century Iceland counted 50,000 inhabitants. Their intellectual and literary activity lasted to the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the island was conquered by Hakon VI., king of Norway. In 1380, Norway, together with Iceland, was united with Denmark; and when, in 1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden, Iceland remained, as it is still, under Danish sway.

The old poetry which flourished in Norway in the eighth century, and which was cultivated by the skalds in the ninth, would have been lost in Norway itself had it not been for the jealous care with which it was preserved by the emigrants of Iceland. The most important branch of their traditional poetry were short songs (hliod or Quida), relating the deeds of their gods and heroes. It is impossible to determine their age, but they existed at least previous to the migration of the Northmen to Iceland, and probably as early as the seventh century, the same century which yields the oldest remnants of Anglo-Saxon, Low-German, and High-German. They were collected in the middle of the twelfth century by _Saemund Sigfusson_ (died 1133). In 1643 a similar collection was discovered in MSS. of the thirteenth century, and published under the title of _Edda_, or Great-Grandmother. This collection is called the old or poetic Edda, in order to distinguish it from a later work ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (died 1241). This, the younger or prose Edda, consists of three parts: the mocking of Gylfi, the speeches of Bragi, and the Skalda, or _Ars poetica_. Snorri Sturluson has been called the Herodotus of Iceland; and his chief work is the “Heimskringla,” the world-ring, which contains the northern history from the mythic times to the time of King Magnus Erlingsson (died 1177). It was probably in preparing his history that, like Cassiodorus, Saxo Grammaticus, Paulus Diaconus, and other historians of the same class, Snorri collected the old songs of the people; for his “Edda,” and particularly his “Skalda,” are full of ancient poetic fragments.

The “Skalda,” and the rules which it contains, represent the state of poetry in the thirteenth century; and nothing can be more artificial, nothing more different from the genuine poetry of the old “Edda” than this _Ars poetica_ of Snorri Sturluson. One of the chief features of this artificial or skaldic poetry was this, that nothing should be called by its proper name. A ship was not to be called a ship, but the beast of the sea; blood, not blood, but the dew of pain, or the water of the sword. A warrior was not spoken of as a warrior, but as an armed tree, the tree of battle. A sword was the flame of wounds. In this poetical language, which every skald was bound to speak, there were no less than 115 names for Odin; an island could be called by 120 synonymous titles. The specimens of ancient poetry which Snorri quotes are taken from the skalds, whose names are well known in history, and who lived from the tenth to the thirteenth century. But he never quotes from any song contained in the old “Edda,”(179) whether it be that those songs were considered by himself as belonging to a different and much more ancient period of literature, or that they could not be used in illustration of the scholastic rules of skaldic poets, these very rules being put to shame by the simple style of the national poetry, which expressed what it had to express without effort and circumlocution.

We have thus traced the modern Teutonic dialects back to four principal channels,—the _High-German_, _Low-German_, _Gothic_, and _Scandinavian_; and we have seen that these four, together with several minor dialects, must be placed in a co-ordinate position from the beginning, as so many varieties of Teutonic speech. This Teutonic speech may, for convenience’ sake, be spoken of as one,—as one branch of that great family of language to which, as we shall see, it belongs; but it should always be borne in mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several distinct national deposits.

We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld’s Great Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic, form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.

And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian,—the languages of Portugal, of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,(180) and of the Grisons of Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.(181) The Provençal, which, in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere _patois_. The earliest Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d’Oil, or the ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen of the Langue d’Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan languages than a careful perusal of the “Comparative Grammar of the Six Romance Languages” by Professor Diez.

Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north, and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen, had produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are still called _vulgar_ or _popular_.(182) A great deal, no doubt, of the corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a smaller extent, the same _barbarizing_ has affected all other Roman dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local, provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by the Teutonic conquerors.

The next branch of the Indo-European family of speech is the _Hellenic_. Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious refutation.

The fourth branch of our family is the _Celtic_. The Celts seem to have been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and Gadhelic. The _Kymric_ comprises the _Welsh_; the _Cornish_, lately extinct; and the _Armorican_, of Brittany. The _Gadhelic_ comprises the _Irish_; the _Galic_ of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the _Isle of Man_. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated inroads into the regions of civilization, familiarizing Latin and Greek writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh _brennin_. A Brennus conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls. Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed. A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin might, in their turn, be derived.

The fifth branch, which is commonly called _Slavonic_, I prefer to designate by the name of _Windic_, _Winidae_ being one of the most ancient and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions, the _Lettic_ and the _Slavonic_, and we shall have to subdivide the Slavonic again into a _South-East Slavonic_ and a _West Slavonic_ branch.

The _Lettic_ division consists of languages hardly known to the student of literature, but of great importance to the student of language. _Lettish_ is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. _Lithuanian_ is the name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism of 1547.(183) In this, and even in the language as now spoken by the Lithuanian peasant, there are some grammatical forms more primitive, and more like Sanskrit, than the corresponding forms in Greek and Latin.

The _Old Prussian_, which is nearly related to Lithuanian, became extinct in the seventeenth century, and the entire literature which it has left behind consists in an old catechism.

_Lettish_ is the language of Kurland and Livonia, more modern in its grammar than Lithuanian, yet not immediately derived from it.

We now come to the _Slavonic_ languages, properly so called. The eastern branch comprehends the _Russian_ with various local dialects; the _Bulgarian_, and the _Illyrian_. The most ancient document of this eastern branch is the so-called Ecclesiastical Slavonic, _i.e._ the ancient Bulgarian, into which Cyrillus and Methodius translated the Bible, in the middle of the ninth century. This is still the authorized version(184) of the Bible for the whole Slavonic race; and to the student of the Slavonic languages, it is what Gothic is to the student of German. The modern Bulgarian, on the contrary, as far as grammatical forms are concerned, is the most reduced among the Slavonic dialects.

_Illyrian_ is a convenient or inconvenient name to comprehend the _Servian_, _Croatian_, and _Slovinian_ dialects. Literary fragments of _Slovinian_ go back as far as the tenth century.(185)

The western branch comprehends the language of _Poland_, _Bohemia_, and _Lusatia_. The oldest specimen of Polish belongs to the fourteenth century: the Psalter of Margarite. The Bohemian language was, till lately, traced back to the ninth century. But most of these old Bohemian poems are now considered spurious; and it is doubtful, even, whether an ancient interlinear translation of the Gospel of St. John can be ascribed to the tenth century.(186)

The language of Lusatia is spoken, probably, by no more than 150,000 people, known in Germany by the name of _Wends_.

We have examined all the languages of our first or Aryan family, which are spoken in Europe, with one exception, the _Albanian_. This language is clearly a member of the same family; and as it is sufficiently distinct from Greek or any other recognized language, it has been traced back to one of the neighboring races of the Greeks, the Illyrians, and is supposed to be the only surviving representative of the various so-called barbarous tongues which surrounded and interpenetrated the dialects of Greece.

We now pass on from Europe to Asia; and here we begin at once, on the extreme south, with the languages of India. As I sketched the history of Sanskrit in one of my former Lectures, it must suffice, at present, to mark the different periods of that language, beginning, about 1500 B. C., with the dialect of the Vedas, which is followed by the modern Sanskrit; the popular dialects of the third century B. C.; the Prakrit dialects of the plays; and the spoken dialects, such as Hindí, Hindústání, Mahrattí, Bengalí. There are many points of great interest to the student of language, in the long history of the speech of India; and it has been truly said that Sanskrit is to the science of language what mathematics are to astronomy. In an introductory course of lectures, however, like the present, it would be out of place to enter on a minute analysis of the grammatical organism of this language of languages.

There is one point only on which I may be allowed to say a few words. I have frequently been asked, “But how can you prove that Sanskrit literature is so old as it is supposed to be? How can you fix any Indian dates before the time of Alexander’s conquest? What dependence can be placed on Sanskrit manuscripts which may have been forged or interpolated?” It is easier to ask such questions than to answer them, at least to answer them briefly and intelligibly. But, perhaps, the following argument will serve as a partial answer, and show that Sanskrit was the spoken language of India at least some centuries before the time of Solomon. In the hymns of the Veda, which are the oldest literary compositions in Sanskrit, the geographical horizon of the poets is, for the greater part, limited to the north-west of India. There are very few passages in which any allusions to the sea or the sea-coast occur, whereas the snowy mountains, and the rivers of the Penjáb, and the scenery of the Upper Ganges valley are familiar objects to the ancient bards. There is no doubt, in fact, that the people who spoke Sanskrit came into India from the north, and gradually extended their sway to the south and east. Now, at the time of Solomon, it can be proved that Sanskrit was spoken at least as far south as the mouth of the Indus.

You remember the fleet of Tharshish(187) which Solomon had at sea, together with the navy of Hiram, and which came once in three years, bringing _gold_ and _silver_, _ivory_, _apes_, and _peacocks_. The same navy, which was stationed on the shore of the Red Sea, is said to have fetched gold from _Ophir_,(188) and to have brought, likewise, great plenty of _algum_(189) trees and precious stones from Ophir.

Well, a great deal has been written to find out where this Ophir was; but there can be no doubt that it was in India. The names for _apes_, _peacocks_, _ivory_ and _algum_-trees are foreign words in Hebrew, as much as _gutta-percha_ or _tobacco_ are in English. Now, if we wished to know from what part of the world _gutta-percha_ was first imported into England, we might safely conclude that it came from that country where the name, _gutta-percha_, formed part of the spoken language.(190) If, therefore, we can find a language in which the names for peacock, apes, ivory, and algum-tree, which are foreign in Hebrew, are indigenous, we may be certain that the country in which that language was spoken must have been the Ophir of the Bible. That language is no other but Sanskrit.

_Apes_ are called, in Hebrew, _koph_, a word without an etymology in the Semitic languages, but nearly identical in sound with the Sanskrit name of ape, _kapi_.

_Ivory_ is called either _karnoth-shen_, horns of tooth; or _shen habbim_. This _habbim_ is again without a derivation in Hebrew, but it is most likely a corruption of the Sanskrit name for elephant, _ibha_, preceded by the Semitic article.(191)

_Peacocks_ are called in Hebrew _tukhi-im_, and this finds its explanation in the name still used for peacock on the coast of Malabar, _togëi_, which in turn has been derived from the Sanskrit _śikhin_, meaning furnished with a crest.

All these articles, ivory, gold, apes, peacocks, are indigenous in India, though of course they might have been found in other countries likewise. Not so the _algum-tree_, at least if interpreters are right in taking _algum_ or _almug_ for sandalwood. Sandalwood is found indigenous on the coast of Malabar only; and one of its numerous names there, and in Sanskrit, is _valguka_. This _valgu_(_ka_) is clearly the name which Jewish and Phœnician merchants corrupted into _algum_, and which in Hebrew was still further changed into _almug_.

Now, the place where the navy of Solomon and Hiram, coming down the Red Sea, would naturally have landed, was the mouth of the Indus. There _gold_ and _precious stones_ from the north would have been brought down the Indus; and _sandalwood_, _peacocks_, and _apes_ would have been brought from Central and Southern India. In this very locality Ptolemy (vii. 1) gives us the name of _Abiria_, above _Pattalene_. In the same locality Hindu geographers place the people called _Abhîra_ or _Âbhîra_; and in the same neighborhood MacMurdo, in his account of the province of Cutch, still knows a race of _Ahirs_,(192) the descendants, in all probability, of the people who sold to Hiram and Solomon their gold and precious stones, their apes, peacocks, and sandalwood.(193)

If, then, in the Veda the people who spoke Sanskrit were still settled in the north of India, whereas at the time of Solomon their language had extended to Cutch and even the Malabar coast, this will show that at all events Sanskrit is not of yesterday, and that it is as old, at least, as the book of Job, in which the gold of Ophir is mentioned.(194)

Most closely allied to Sanskrit, more particularly to the Sanskrit of the Veda, is the ancient language of the Zend-avesta,(195) the so-called _Zend_, or sacred language of the Zoroastrians or Fire-worshippers. It was, in fact, chiefly through the Sanskrit, and with the help of comparative philology, that the ancient dialect of the Parsis or Fire-worshippers was deciphered. The MSS. had been preserved by the Parsi priests at Bombay, where a colony of fire-worshippers had fled in the tenth century,(196) and where it has risen since to considerable wealth and influence. Other settlements of Guebres are to be found in Yezd and parts of Kerman. A Frenchman, Anquetil Duperron, was the first to translate the Zend-avesta, but his translation was not from the original, but from a modern Persian translation. The first European who attempted to read the original words of Zoroaster was Rask, the Dane; and after his premature death, Burnouf, in France, achieved one of the greatest triumphs in modern scholarship by deciphering the language of the Zend-avesta, and establishing its close relationship with Sanskrit. The same doubts which were expressed about the age and the genuineness of the Veda, were repeated with regard to the Zend-avesta, by men of high authority as oriental scholars, by Sir W. Jones himself, and even by the late Professor Wilson. But Burnouf’s arguments, based at first on grammatical evidence only, were irresistible, and have of late been most signally confirmed by the discovery of the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes. That there was a Zoroaster, an ancient sage, was known long before Burnouf. Plato speaks of a teacher of Zoroaster’s Magic (Μαγεία), and calls Zoroaster the son of _Oromazes_.(197)

This name of Oromazes is important; for Oromazes is clearly meant for _Ormuzd_, the god of the Zoroastrians. The name of this god, as read in the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, is _Auramazdâ_, which comes very near to Plato’s Oromazes.(198) Thus Darius says, in one passage: “Through the grace of Auramazda I am king; Auramazda gave me the kingdom.” But what is the meaning of _Auramazda_? We receive a hint from one passage in the Achæmenian inscriptions, where Auramazda is divided into two words, both being declined. The genitive of Auramazda occurs there as _Aurahya mazdâha_. But even this is unintelligible, and is, in fact, nothing but a phonetic corruption of the name of the supreme Deity as it occurs on every page of the Zend-avesta, namely, _Ahurô mazdâo_ (nom.). Here, too, both words are declined; and instead of _Ahurô mazdâo_, we also find _Mazdâo ahurô_.(199) Well, this _Ahurô mazdâo_ is represented in the Zend-avesta as the creator and ruler of the world; as good, holy, and true; and as doing battle against all that is evil, dark, and false. “The wicked perish through the wisdom and holiness of the living wise Spirit.” In the oldest hymns, the power of darkness, which is opposed to _Ahurô mazdâo_ has not yet received its proper name, which is _Angrô mainyus_, the later _Ahriman_; but it is spoken of as a power, as _Drukhs_ or deceit; and the principal doctrine which Zoroaster came to preach was that we must choose between these two powers, that we must be good, and not bad. These are his words:—

“In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the Good and the Base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits; Be good, not base!”(200)

Or again:—

“Ahuramazda is holy, true, to be honored through veracity, through holy deeds.” “You cannot serve both.”

Now, if we wanted to prove that Anglo-Saxon was a real language, and more ancient than English, a mere comparison of a few words such as _lord_ and _hlafford_, _gospel_ and _godspel_ would be sufficient. _Hlafford_ has a meaning; _lord_ has none; therefore we may safely say that without such a compound as _hlafford_, the word _lord_ could never have arisen. The same, if we compare the language of the Zend-avesta with that of the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius. _Auramazdâ_ is clearly a corruption of _Ahurô mazdâo_, and if the language of the Mountain-records of Behistun is genuine, then, _à fortiori_, is the language of the Zend-avesta genuine, as deciphered by Burnouf, long before he had deciphered the language of Cyrus and Darius. But what is the meaning of _Ahurô mazdâo_? Here Zend does not give us an answer; but we must look to Sanskrit, as the more primitive language, just as we looked from French to Italian, in order to discover the original form and meaning of _feu_. According to the rules which govern the changes of words, common to Zend and Sanskrit, _Ahurô mazdâo_ corresponds to the Sanskrit _Asuro medhas_; and this would mean the “Wise Spirit,” neither more nor less.

We have editions, translations, and commentaries of the Zend-avesta by Burnouf, Brockhaus, Spiegel, and Westergaard. Yet there still remains much to be done. Dr. Haug, now settled at Poona, has lately taken up the work which Burnouf left unfinished. He has pointed out that the text of the Zend-avesta, as we have it, comprises fragments of very different antiquity, and that the most ancient only, the so-called Gâthâs, can be ascribed to Zarathustra. “This portion,” he writes in a lecture just received from India, “compared with the whole bulk of the Zend fragments is very small; but by the difference of dialect it is easily recognized. The most important pieces written in this peculiar dialect are called Gâthâs or songs, arranged in five small collections; they have different metres, which mostly agree with those of the Veda; their language is very near to the Vedic dialect.” It is to be regretted that in the same lecture, which holds out the promise of so much that will be extremely valuable, Dr. Haug should have lent his authority to the opinion that Zoroaster or Zarathustra is mentioned in the Rig-Veda as Jaradashṭi. The meaning of jaradashti in the Rig-Veda may be seen in the Sanskrit Dictionary of the Russian Academy, and no Sanskrit scholar would seriously think of translating the word by Zoroaster.

At what time Zoroaster lived, is a more difficult question which we cannot discuss at present.(201) It must suffice if we have proved that he lived, and that his language, the Zend, is a real language, and anterior in time to the language of the cuneiform inscriptions.

We trace the subsequent history of the Persian language from Zend to the inscriptions of the Achæmenian dynasty; from thence to what is called _Pehlevi_ or _Huzvaresh_ (better Huzûresh), the language of the Sassanian dynasty (226-651), as it is found in the dialect of the translations of the Zend-avesta, and in the official language of the Sassanian coins and inscriptions. This is considerably mixed with Semitic elements, probably imported from Syria. In a still later form, freed also from the Semitic elements which abound in Pehlevi, the language of Persia appears again as _Parsi_, which differs but little from the language of _Firdusi_, the great epic poet of Persia, the author of the Shahnámeh, about 1000 A. D. The later history of Persian consists entirely in the gradual increase of Arabic words, which have crept into the language since the conquest of Persia and the conversion of the Persians to the religion of Mohammed.

The other languages which evince by their grammar and vocabulary a general relationship with Sanskrit and Persian, but which have received too distinct and national a character to be classed as mere dialects, are the languages _of Afghanistan_ or the _Pushtú_, the language of _Bokhára_, the language of the _Kurds_, the _Ossetian_ language in the Caucasus, and the _Armenian_. Much might be said on every one of these tongues and their claims to be classed as independent members of the Aryan family; but our time is limited, nor has any one of them acquired, as yet, that importance which belongs to the vernaculars of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany, and to other branches of Aryan speech which have been analyzed critically, and may be studied historically in the successive periods of their literary existence. There is, however, one more language which we have omitted to mention, and which belongs equally to Asia and Europe, the language of the _Gipsies_. This language, though most degraded in its grammar, and with a dictionary stolen from all the countries through which the Zingaris passed, is clearly an exile from Hindústán.

You see, from the diagram before you,(202) that it is possible to divide the whole Aryan family into two divisions: the _Southern_, including the Indic and Iranic classes, and the _Northern_ or _North-western_, comprising all the rest. Sanskrit and Zend share certain words and grammatical forms in common which do not exist in any of the other Aryan languages; and there can be no doubt that the ancestors of the poets of the Veda and of the worshippers of _Ahurô mazdâo_ lived together for some time after they had left the original home of the whole Aryan race. For let us see this clearly: the genealogical classification of languages, as drawn in this diagram, has an historical meaning. As sure as the six Romance dialects point to an original home of Italian shepherds on the seven hills at Rome, the Aryan languages together point to an earlier period of language, when the first ancestors of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and the Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay under the same roof. There was a time when out of many possible names for _father_, _mother_, _daughter_, _son_, _dog_ and _cow_, _heaven_ and _earth_, those which we find in all the Aryan languages were framed, and obtained a mastery _in the struggle for life_ which is carried on among synonymous words as much as among plants and animals. Look at the comparative table of the auxiliary verb AS, to be, in the different Aryan languages. The selection of the root AS out of many roots, equally applicable to the idea of being, and the joining of this root with one set of personal terminations, all originally personal pronouns, were individual acts, or if you like, historical events. They took place once, at a certain date and in a certain place; and as we find the same forms preserved by all the members of the Aryan family, it follows that before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectical germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state of agricultural civilization; that had recognized the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage; and that invoked the Giver of Light and Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.

After this clan broke up, the ancestors of the Indians and Zoroastrians must have remained together for some time in their migrations or new settlements; and I believe that it was the reform of Zoroaster which produced at last the split between the worshippers of the Vedic gods and the worshippers of Ormuzd. Whether, besides this division into a southern and northern branch, it is possible by the same test (the community of particular words and forms), to discover the successive periods when the Germans separated from the Slaves, the Celts from the Italians, or the Italians from the Greeks, seems more than doubtful. The attempts made by different scholars have led to different and by no means satisfactory results;(203) and it seems best, for the present, to trace each of the northern classes back to its own dialect, and to account for the more special coincidences between such languages as, for instance, the Slavonic and Teutonic, by admitting that the ancestors of these races preserved from the beginning certain dialectical peculiarities which existed before, as well as after, the separation of the Aryan family.

LECTURE VI. COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR.

The genealogical classification of the Aryan languages was founded, as we saw, on a close comparison of the grammatical characteristics of each; and it is the object of such works as Bopp’s “Comparative Grammar” to show that the grammatical articulation of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic, was produced once and for all; and that the apparent differences in the terminations of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, must be explained by laws of phonetic decay, peculiar to each dialect, which modified the original common Aryan type, and changed it into so many national languages. It might seem, therefore, as if the object of comparative grammar was attained as soon as the exact genealogical relationship of languages had been settled; and those who only look to the higher problems of the science of language have not hesitated to declare that “there is no painsworthy difficulty nor dispute about declension, number, case, and gender of nouns.” But although it is certainly true that comparative grammar is only a means, and that it has well nigh taught us all that it has to teach,—at least in the Aryan family of speech,—it is to be hoped that, in the science of language, it will always retain that prominent place which it has obtained through the labors of Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Benfey, Curtius, Kuhn, and others. Besides, comparative grammar has more to do than simply to compare. It would be easy enough to place side by side the paradigms of declension and conjugation in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the other Aryan dialects, and to mark both their coincidences and their differences. But after we have done this, and after we have explained the phonetic laws which cause the primitive Aryan type to assume that national variety which we admire in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, new problems arise of a more interesting nature. We know that grammatical terminations, as they are now called, were originally independent words, and had their own purpose and meaning. Is it possible, after comparative grammar has established the original forms of the Aryan terminations, to trace them back to independent words, and to discover their original purpose and meaning? You will remember that this was the point from which we started. We wanted to know why the termination _d_ in _I loved_ should change a present into a past act. We saw that before answering this question we had to discover the most original form of this termination by tracing it from English to Gothic, and afterwards, if necessary, from Gothic to Sanskrit. We now return to our original question, namely, What is language that a mere formal change, such as that of _I love_ into _I loved_, should produce so very material a difference?

Let us clearly see what we mean if we make a distinction between the radical and formal elements of a language; and by formal elements I mean not only the terminations of declension and conjugation, but all derivative elements; all, in fact, that is not radical. Our view on the origin of language must chiefly depend on the view which we take of these formal, as opposed to the radical, elements of speech. Those who consider that language is a conventional production, base their arguments principally on these formal elements. The inflections of words, they maintain, are the best proof that language was made by mutual agreement. They look upon them as mere letters or syllables without any meaning by themselves; and if they were asked why the mere addition of a _d_ changes _I love_ into _I loved_, or why the addition of the syllable _rai_ gave to _j’aime_, I love, the power of a future, _j’aimerai_, they would answer, that it was so because, at a very early time in the history of the world, certain persons, or families, or clans, agreed that it should be so.

This view was opposed by another which represents language as an organic and almost a living being, and explains its formal elements as produced by a principle of growth inherent in its very nature. “Languages,”(204) it is maintained, “are formed by a process, not of crystalline accretion, but of germinal development. Every essential part of language existed as completely (although only implicitly) in the primitive germ, as the petals of a flower exist in the bud before the mingled influences of the sun and the air caused it to unfold.” This view was first propounded by Frederick Schlegel,(205) and it is still held by many with whom poetical phraseology takes the place of sound and severe reasoning.

The science of language adopts neither of these views. As to imagining a congress for settling the proper exponents of such relations as nominative, genitive, singular, plural, active, and passive, it stands to reason that if such abstruse problems could have been discussed in a language void of inflections, there was no inducement for agreeing on a more perfect means of communication. And as to imagining language, that is to say nouns and verbs, endowed with an inward principle of growth, all we can say is, that such a conception is really inconceivable. Language may be conceived as a production, but it cannot be conceived as a substance that could itself produce. But the science of language has nothing to do with mere theories, whether conceivable or not. It collects facts, and its only object is to account for these facts, as far as possible. Instead of looking on inflections in general either as conventional signs or natural excrescences, it takes each termination by itself, establishes its most primitive form by means of comparison, and then treats that primitive syllable as it would treat any other part of language,—namely, as something which was originally intended to convey a meaning. Whether we are still able to discover the original intention of every part of language is quite a different question, and it should be admitted at once that many grammatical forms, after they have been restored to their most primitive type, are still without an explanation. But with every year new discoveries are made by means of careful inductive reasoning. We become more familiar every day with the secret ways of language, and there is no reason to doubt that in the end grammatical analysis will be as successful as chemical analysis. Grammar, though sometimes very bewildering to us in its later stages, is originally a much less formidable undertaking than is commonly supposed. What is grammar after all but declension and conjugation? Originally declension could not have been anything but the composition of a noun with some other word expressive of number and case. How the number was expressed, we saw in a former lecture; and the same process led to the formation of cases.

Thus the locative is formed in various ways in Chinese:(206) one is by adding such words as _ćung_, the middle, or _néi_, inside. Thus, _kûŏ-ćung_, in the empire; _i sûí ćung_, within a year. The instrumental is formed by the preposition _ẏ_, which preposition is an old root, meaning _to use_. Thus _ẏ ting_, with a stick, where in Latin we should use the ablative, in Greek the dative. Now, however complicated the declensions, regular and irregular, may be in Greek and Latin, we may be certain that originally they were formed by this simple method of composition.