Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. If therefore we find Dyu, nom. Dyaus in Sanskrit, Zeús for Ayevs in Greek, Iu-piter for Dyu-piter in Latin, we trace them back to Gothic, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, in fact, to Low German, by simply replacing the media by the tenuis. This gives us the Icelandic Týr, which is preserved in Týsdagr, dies Martis, and in Tuesday, the AngloSaxon Tiwesdag. But all this gives us no right to treat Týr as a later corruption of the Vedic Dyaus.

Wodan and Wednesday.

Comparison, no doubt, helps us in discovering the origin of the names of the Aryan gods, and as the ancient mythology of the Veda is more richly developed, or, at all events, has been more carefully preserved than that of any other Aryan race, we generally look upon the Sanskrit names as the most primitive. But historically this is a false position. We may, for instance, derive the name of the Teutonic god Wodan or Odin from a Sanskrit root which, if we replaced d by dh, would be vadh, to strike. From it we have the Vedic vadh-ar, thunderbolt, the AngloSaxon weder, storm and weather, and from it we may guess the original purport of Wod-an to have been the god of the thunderstorm, who still lives in the name of Wednesday, as Wódnes-dag. But there is no god in the Veda who could be represented as the exact prototype of Wodan, though there are several Vedic gods running parallel to him, just as the Gothic language runs parallel to Vedic Sanskrit.

High German.

Distinct from these three branches of the Teutonic class is the fourth, the High German, which as a rule

U

represents classical tenuis by media, classical aspirate by tenuis, and classical media by an aspirate. In other respects, however, High German is very close to Low German, so that many scholars now group Low and High German together as West-Teutonic, and Gothic and Scandinavian as East-Teutonic.

Old High German is known to us from about 700 to 1100; it is then succeeded by Middle High German from 1100 to 1500, and this by Modern High German spoken and written to the present day.

Celtic.

Besides the Low German which took possession of Britain in historic times, chiefly after the fall of the Roman dominion, another branch of Aryan speech overspread these isles in prehistoric times, the Celtic. The Celts too came from the Continent, where we find them migrating from East to West through Gaul and Spain, occasionally bursting into the Balkan and the Italian peninsulas, and sending out one colony as far as Galatia in Asia.

The Celtic class is divided into two branches, the Cymric and the Goidelic. The former comprises Welsh, the extinct Cornish, and the Armorican of Brittany; the Goidelic, the Irish, Gaelic, and Manx. There are besides the ancient inscriptions of Gaul which are sometimes treated as a third branch, the Gallic. Interesting as the Celtic languages are for etymological and grammatical purposes, their literature is recent, not going back beyond the eighth century A. D. Whatever there is of mythology and ancient religion has evidently passed through a Christian and Romanic filtering, and has to be used

therefore with extreme caution for

for comparative

purposes1.

Italic.

The next class of Aryan speech which has likewise reached the shores of the British isles, is the Italic. The literary language of Rome was but one of several dialects, elaborated by the Aryas when they settled in Italy. Besides the Latin we find the Oscan and the Umbrian, and several smaller dialects of which we possess monumental fragments. After reaching its classical culmination, Latin became the lingua vulgaris of the civilised portion of Western Europe, and developed new vulgar and afterwards literary languages in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Portugal, in the Grisons, and, by colonies, in Roumania. We have the earliest documents of French in the ninth century, of Provençal in the tenth, of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese in the twelfth.

The language of England was touched twice by the waves of the Latin river, the first time through the Roman legions who took possession of Britain, the second time through the Norman conquerors, warriors of Teutonic extraction and Scandinavian blood, who after their conquest of Normandy had exchanged their Teutonic speech for that of Northern Gaul. They brought with them into England a Romanic language, Romanic thought, manners, and tastes, but little of Romanic blood. There may be some Celtic admixture in the Teutonic blood of England; but the grammar, the blood of the English language, has remained Teutonic throughout.

1 See Professor Rhŷs, Hibbert Lectures, 1886.

Hellenic.

And here we must

The next class is the Hellenic. guard against what was formerly a very common view, namely that the Aryas who came to people Greece and Italy were more closely related than the other scions of the Aryan family. Many scholars

went so far as to suppose that the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans remained united for a time after they had become separated from the rest. There is no foundation, however, for this hypothesis, at least not so far as language is concerned. Greek shows greater similarity with Sanskrit than with Latin, Latin shows greater similarity with Celtic than with Greek. This is a point of great importance to us in our mythological and religious researches. In historical times the Latin language and the Roman mythology and religion have borrowed so much from Greek that scholars are apt to forget that the borrower was not altogether a pauper, that there was in fact a fully developed religion and mythology in Italy before the contact with Greece, and that it is this prehistoric phase of Italian life which is of chief interest to the student of ancient folk-lore.

The Hellenic class, in its four dialects, the Doric, Aeolic, Attic, and Ionic, is so well known that I need say no more about it in this place.

Slavonic.

We have still one more class of Aryan languages in Europe, the Slavonic, or, as I prefer to call it, the Windic. I prefer the name of Windic, because the oldest name under which the tribes speaking those

languages became known to us, is not Slaves, but Winidae.

This class is divided into three branches, the Lettic, the South-East Slavonic, and the West Slavonic.

The Lettic comprises (1) the Lettish, now spoken in Kurland and Livonia, the Baltic provinces of Russia. Its literature dates from the sixteenth century.

(2) The Lithuanian, spoken in Eastern Prussia and in Russia, by about a million of people. Its literature dates from 1547, of which date we possess a small catechism.

(3) The old Prussian, which became extinct in the seventeenth century, and left behind a few fragments only of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

6

The South-East Slavonic comprises the old Bulgarian, in which we possess the translation of the Bible, of the ninth century, which is still used as the authorised version'; the Slovenian, Servian, and Croatian (sometimes comprehended under the common designation of Illyrian), with literary remains of the tenth century, and the Russian, the literary language of the Russian Empire.

The West Slavonic consists of the Polish, with a literature dating from the fourteenth century; the Bohemian, with a literature dating from the tenth century, and the dialects still spoken by Wends and Sorbs in Lusatia.

North-Western Division.

These five classes of Aryan speech which we have hitherto passed in review belong all to Europe, and form together what I call the North-Western division. of the Aryan family.