Pezron* and Bulletf have discovered in the Bas Breton the root of all languages. Dr. Armstrong has gone so far as to show Celtic words in the names of places in the New World; leaving us to infer thereby that the Celts had discovered America before the time of Columbus. According to Goropius, the Low Dutch was the language of Paradise. Chardin tells us the Persians believe three languages to have been spoken in Paradise; Arabic by the serpent, Persian by Adam, and Turkish by Gabriel. André Kempe says God spoke to Adam in Swedish, Adam answered in Danish, and the serpent spoke to Eve in French.§ Erro|| claims Basque as the language spoken by Adam. If we are to believe some writers, the Iberians were the fathers of the human race; and the Basque was not only the original language of Spain, but the primæval language, and that from it all languages have been derived. Their grammarians tell us that it existed before the Tower of Babel, and was brought into Spain by Tubal himself. Perhaps of all writers upon this subject, Larramendi has furnished us with the largest amount of trash. This truth-hating scholiast, in the preface to his Diccionario Trilingue del Castellano, Bascuence y Latin, asserts that of all languages the Basque is the most perfect, the most harmonious, the most copious and rich, the most eloquent, the most easy, and the most pleasing in the variety of its dialects; that it cannot be traced to any Oriental language; and that it is not only a primitive language, but the primitive language. He states that 1,951 Basque words are found in the Spanish, and that the Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, have derived many words from it. According to D'Abbadie,** "La langue euskarienne date des premiers siècles de notre temps historique; elle naquit durant le premier âge, dans le midi; sa vocalization vierge est divine, sa nomenclature est originale et sans mélange; l'architecture merveilleusement régulière et simple de son système grammatical achève d'en faire le dialecte le plus philosophique, le plus complet du verbe humain. Conservée jusqu'au milieu de l'âge ancien, par les Apothomites, les Anherrites, les Churites, les Muthugores et autres peuplades de la * Pezron, Antiquité de la langue Celtique. + Bullet, Mémoire sur la langue Celtique. Hermathena Joannis Goropii Becani, Antwerpiæ, 1580. Origines, Antverpianæ, 1569. § On the Language of Paradise. Cf. Max Müller, p. 131. El Mundo primitivo filosofico de la Antiquedad y Cultura de la Nacion Bascongada, by J. B. Erro. Madrid: 1815. San Sebastian, 1745. **Etudes grammaticales sur la langage Euskarienne, par A. Th. d'Abbadie et J. Augustin Chabo. Paris: 1836. Première partie, p. 3. Mauritanie primitive, cette langue fleurit en Espagne pendant trois milles ans, avec les Ibères-Euskariens,* jusqu'à l'invasion des Celtes ou Tartares, dont les dialectes grossiers et ténébreux enfantèrent dans nos contrées méridionales la confusion de Babel. Il est donc vrai de dire, en allégorie, que la langue Eskuera, bien antérieure à l'établissement des barbares dans le midi, tire son origine d'Adam; puisque ce mythe génésique représente l'humanité des premiers âges." Again, another writert contends that as the uncultivated populations of the two Americas could not have sprung from the ground like mushrooms, they must have emigrated from Asia, and the period of their emigration was unknown until recently. He recommends to notice a book written by Ethan Smith, a pastor in Poultney in the United States, entitled View of the Hebrews, etc., and comprehending accounts of various English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese tourists, who had made diligent inquiries relative to the aborigines. He says they agree in their accounts as to the primitive settlers of America, that they were all of one stock, viz., of the ten tribes of Israel, "who were carried away by the Assyrian kings to Halah and Habbor, the river Gozen (or Ganges), and the cities of Media"; who in a short time, making their way towards the east of Asia, crossed the ice of Behring's Straits, and in time multiplied and extended themselves all over America from north to south. That although the primitive discoverers of America declared the natives to be savages, because they did not possess letters, and were treated as such by the European savages who conquered them, yet modern tourists find them (by the traditions preserved among the natives) to possess religious principles, sentiments, customs and manners, far surpassing our opinions regarding them; all which afford testimony to their having been once of the patriarchal seed of Israel. Quoting from the same work, he says, "they all inform us, agreeably to their traditions, that their primitive parent had twelve sons, of whose descendants they are a portion; that their forefathers, having transgressed against God, were made captives, and carried off far from their own country; that 2,500 years ago their ancestors left the country of their captivity, proceeded towards the east, crossed a river of hardened water, and settled themselves in America. Regarding their religion, they acknowledge a supreme power; they have priests, and some sort of sacrifices; they believe in a future state, and in rewards and punishments; and it is asserted * Voyage en Navarre pendant l'insurrection des Basques, 1830-1835. + See Theological and Critical Treatise on the Primogeniture of the Holy Language, by Solomon Bennett. London: 1835. Note, p. 8. that they use in their prayers many sacred terms with very little deviation in dialect from the original Hebrew; as Yohewah, ‘Ale and Aleim'; Yah, Halleluwah; in their political language, shemin, ‘heaven'; Shilu, 'Shiloh'; abba, 'father'; ish or ishte, a man'; ishto, a woman'; Awah, 'Eve', liani, a wife or concubine'; nichiri, nostrils'; kora, 'cold'; Canaai, 'Canaan'; Ararat, 'high mountain', etc." Professor Müller devotes considerable space to the discovery of Sanskrit, its development in Europe, its philology, and its affinity with Greek and Latin. It is a singular circumstance that this, the most perfect of all known languages, should have been scarcely known to us before the close of the last century. It was about this epoch that it received a powerful impulse, principally from the necessities of our own government in India. The way was first opened in India by Anquetil Duperron, who was soon followed by Sir Wm. Jones, Colebrooke, Wilkins, Prinsep, and Wilson, author of the celebrated Sanskrit dictionary. In England, the study of this language is chiefly indebted to Haughton; in France,* to Chézy and Eugène Burnouf. In Germany it of course obtained a most cordial reception, its study being principally made known by A. W. von Schlegel, G. von Humboldt, Bopp, Rosen, and Lassen. Von Schlegel and Lassen subsequently founded a Sanskrit school, having for its object not only a well grounded and complete knowledge of the language, but also of the literature and antiquities of India ;† and at the present day there are few continental universities where there is not a professor of Sanskrit. It was, indeed, the introduction of Sanskrit to the learned of Europe that gave rise to "Comparative Philology". For this new science we are chiefly indebted to the labours of Bopp, Pott, Grimm, Schlegel, Pictet, Eichhoff, and Vans Kennedy, whose able work on the affinities of languages contains a comparative table of upwards of nine hundred words in Sanskrit, English, Anglo-Saxon, German, Latin, Greek, and Persian. I am, however, disposed to think that many of the words given by these writers as derivatives of Sanskrit are very doubtful; and I could name many that have been omitted. Considering the interest that the subject has of late awakened, it may not be here thought out of the way to adduce some of the statistics that I have been able to gather on the Sanskrit element to be found in the Old World languages. Upwards of 900 Sanskrit roots have been discovered in the Greek, Latin, Persian, and Gotho-Teu *Where it was chiefly introduced through Hamilton in 1804. tonic languages. Of these, 263 are found in Persian; 43 in German and not in English, 132 in English and not in German, whilst 119 are common to both English and German. There are 208 in Greek and not in Latin, 188 in Latin and not in Greek, and 131 are common to both Latin and Greek; whilst 31 words are common to all these languages. There are, of course, many Sanskrit roots in the Celtic and Slavonic languages; but the number has not, as far as I am aware, been ascertained. Indeed the Sanskrit roots in some Slavonic dialects probably exceed those in any European language. The Gypsy language, which is of Hindústání origin, possesses a large number of Sanskrit roots;* and the attempt to show a connexion between the Gypsy and Slavonic languages proves rather that analogous words have been derived from a common root-the Sanskrit. In the Siamese, or language of Thai, the Peguan, the Avanese, the Malayalam, Telugu, Karnáta, and Tamil, are found many Sanskrit words. The Malay has 516; the Javanese still more; the Zend has 53, the Cingalese, which is spoken in a great part of Ceylon, has many from the same source. Indeed, not only are most of the proper names in this island mentioned by Ptolemy, but most of the river names found on modern maps may be traced to the Sanskrit. On the other hand, what are termed the Semitic languages, as the Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Amharic; the Bugis, or language of the Celebes,† the Turkish, the Egyptian dialects, and the Chinese, contain very few words of Sanskrit origin; and the Armenian has probably none which have not crept in through the Greek; and, notwithstanding all that has been advanced to the contrary, I am disposed to think that the Basque does not contain any Sanskrit words which have not been derived through the Greek or Latin. And now with respect to the two hundred and fifty-one Sanskrit roots which have found their way, directly or indirectly, through Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, etc., into the English language. Some of these Sanskrit words are represented by only one English word; whilst others may be discovered in composition of from two words to four thousand words; and if a proper calculation were made, I am disposed to think that these two hundred and fifty-one Sanskrit roots would be found to form part of thirty thousand English words.‡ Cf. Histoire des Bohémiens, par H. M. G. Grellmann, 8vo, Paris, 1810; also Adelung's Mithridates (Vater), Berlin, 1817, iv, 82-86, which contains a comparative vocabulary of a great many Slavonic and Gypsy words. + The Bugis has many words from Malay, Tagalish, and Javanese. As a sample of the fecundity of one Sanscrit word, Professor Müller gives the root pa's (with the s found in spa'sa, a spy), from which he derives, indirectly, the following :-aspect, auspicious, circumspect, conspicuous, expect, inspect, inspection, prospect, prospective, respective, respectable, respite, special, Indeed to such an extent is the English language impregnated with Sanskrit and Hebrew, that we can scarcely utter a sentence which does contain one or more words derived from one or both of those languages. Professor Müller makes the Celtic a branch of what he designates the Aryan family. He says, "Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than is 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." In these remarks I entirely coincide. It has indeed often occurred to my mind that the attempt of Celtic scholars to trace, by implication, the Latin, Greek, and other languages to the Celtic, is puerile in the extreme. After a comparison of the Celtic dialects with the Greek, Latin, and derivative languages, the Gotho-Teutonic languages, and the Sanskrit, my own impression is that one-half of the words now found in Gaelic, Erse, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Bas Breton owe their origin to the modern European languages, and that two-thirds of the remaining moiety may be traced to Greek and Latin. With regard to the Celtic element in English, urged with so much assurance by some writers, I do not believe that in the whole body of the language there will be found thirty Celtic words; which is above the number that exists in Latin and Greek. On Ethnology, Professor Müller says, "The science of language and the science of ethnology have both suffered most seriously from being mixed up together. The classification of races and languages should be quite independent of each other. Races may change their languages, and history supplies us with several instances where one race adopted the language of another. Different languages therefore may be spoken by one race, or the same language may be spoken by different races; so that any attempt at squaring the classification of races and tongues must necessarily fail." This is quite true. Instance the French, a nation chiefly of Celtic origin, whose native tongue has been replaced by the Latin; for what is the French language of the present day but one in which sixteen out of every twenty words have been corrupted from Latin? Again, in Cornwall, the ancient language, a sister dialect of the Welsh, has specialty, species, specific, specimen, specious, spectacles, spectator, spectrum, speculate, speculative, spices, spicy, spite, spiteful, spy, suspect, suspicious; and I may add, among others, despection, despicable, despise, disrespect, episcopal, inauspicious, retrospect, retrospective, and spectre. |