Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/400

By some it is even assumed that the correspondences of words and forms exhibited by the so-called Indo-European tongues are not fundamental and pervading, but superficial, consisting in scattered particulars only, in such designations of objects and conceptions as one race might naturally make over into the keeping of another, along with a knowledge of the things designated. This assumption, however, the expositions and reasonings of our fifth and seventh lectures will have shown to be wholly erroneous: the correspondences in question are fundamental and pervading; they constitute an identity which can only be explained by supposing those who founded these tongues to have been members together of the same community. Others, who know the European languages too well to maintain respecting their relations any so shallow and untenable theory, yet try to persuade themselves that the analogy of the Latin will sufficiently account for their extension over so wide a region; that, as Etruscans, Celts, Iberians, Germans, learned to speak a tongue of Roman origin, so the populations of Europe and Asia, of diverse lineage, learned to speak a common Indo-European dialect; and that, accordingly, the differences of Greek, Sanskrit, Celtic, and Slavonic are parallel to those of Italian, French, and Spanish. But this theory, though more plausible and defensible than the other, is hardly less untenable. It exhibits a like neglect of another class of linguistic principles: of those, namely, which underlie and explain the abnormal extension of tongues like the Latin and the Arabic: we have more than once had occasion to set them forth above. In order to establish an analogy between the history of Latin and that of Indo-European speech, and to make the former account satisfactorily for the latter, it would be necessary to prove, or at least to render probable, the existence in a very remote antiquity of those conditions which in modern times have been able to give such a career to the language of Rome. But, so far as we can at present see, there must have been a total lack of the required conditions. Force of character, warlike prowess, superiority of inherent mental capacity, undeveloped or partially developed, the Indo-Europeans may probably have possessed, as compared