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isolated instances of etymological resemblance lost much of its force. Moreover he noticed that a few of the instances adduced by Mr. Aston were very questionable. To take the first in the list;—Japanese na, alleged to be akin to English name, Latin nomen, Greek onoma, etc. Now Mr. Aston, as an Aryan scholar, must be aware that an initial hard or soft guttural formed an essential part of this root in all the Aryan tongues, and though in the process of phonetic decay this guttural had in nearly every instance disappeared in the case of the substantive for name, still abundant traces of it survived in other offshoots of the same root, as in ken, know, ignominy, &c.: it would be difficult for Mr. Aston to find any trace of this guttural having ever existed in the Japanese na or any words cognate with it. However, a mere slip of this kind would scarcely affect the general scientific soundness of Mr. Aston’s work, which was as undoubted as its philological acumen was conspicuous.
Professor W. E. Ayrton remarked that, as Mr. Aston had mentioned that the Aryans possessed a system of counting up to one hundred, he would like to ask whether the names for the numerals resembled those in Japanese. He presumed not, since the Japanese numerals, with perhaps the exception of fatatsu, differed entirely from the numerals of all the languages he was acquainted with, whereas the Chinese ichi, ni, san resembled, of course, closely the numerals found in many countries of Asia and Europe.
He would also feel obliged if Mr. Aston would inform them whether the word “riyo”, a yen, pronounced in Tokei “ro” and frequently “do,” and which was written in Japanese by the same characters as the word “riyo”, meaning “both”, had any connection with the root “do” and “du” meaning “two” which occurs in so many languages. Or was the Tokei word “do” simply short for dollar?
Mr. Aston. Japanese numerals have no connection with European.
Mr. Hall contrasted Mr. Aston’s admission that he could find no connection between the Japanese and Aryan numerals, with Mr. Edkins’s confident identification of two of them. This instance, afforded a capital illustration of the difference between the philology of Mr. Aston and that of Mr. Edkins. The latter, in his paper on the Japanese language had laid it down without any misgivings, that hitotsu is the English “first,” and futatsu the English “both!” Of course riyô, which Mr. Ayrton affirmed was sometimes pronounced dô, had no connection whatever with the Aryan numeral for two, but was simply the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word liang.
In answer to an inquiry from Sir H. Parkes, Mr. Aston explained, in part, the grounds of discriminating the ancient from the modern forms of Japanese words.
Mr. Ayrton remarked on the resemblance of the numerals to those of European languages.
Rev. Nathan Brown thought the paper had by no means claimed too much for the affinities of Japanese with the Aryan
