form are instead of beoth, now common over the whole language; perhaps by the northern conjugation I is, thou is, he is, which remind us of the Danish jeg er, du er, han er (in which stands for s); perhaps (though this is disputed) by the north country article t, 't house,' 't ky,' which looks very like the Norse et, a very different form of the article from the English the. He can tell the different times at which words of Latin have been introduced into England (Primer of English Grammar, p. 5), and could thus draw out a rough sketch of English history.

19. Still more light can be thrown on the history of this country by the names of places. 'Craig,' 'glen,' 'combe' and 'pool' still speak to us of the time when land and water were the heritage of the Kelt; and many a scattered 'pen' from Cornwall to Cumberland, from Yorkshire to the Grampians, many a 'tor' in Devonshire and Derbyshire, attest the same fact. Language can tell him, what he knows from history, that the Scandinavian pirates who settled in Cumberland were mainly Norse, he knows it by the 'thwaites' in which they settled, the 'garths' which they built, the gills' and the 'forces' to which they gave their names; for thwaite is the Icelandic 'thveit' (a piece of land); garth is the same in meaning as the English 'yard' but different in form; gil is frequent as a local name in Iceland for a narrow cleft at the side of a main valley; fors, a waterfall, is now a 'foss' in Iceland, as in Norway; but the preservation of the rin England led to its confusion (in spelling) with our English 'force.' He will connect this cluster of Norse names with the Norse word ford in Milford, Waterford, and Wexford; and so will be able by language alone to trace the course of the pirates who sailed round the north of Scotland, and settling themselves in the Isle of Man, spread forth to Cumberland and down the Irish Channel. On the other hand, he will see that the Scandinavian occupants on the east were Danes

by the extraordinary number of places which end in by in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and northward through East Yorkshire. This is a regular local suffix for a town or village, in Denmark and Sweden; the corresponding Icelandic word 'bær' is used of a farm or farm buildings. In Cleveland (N.E. Yorkshire) it is reckoned that at least three-fourths of the nouns which occur in Domesday are Danish. Lastly, in Cornwall the evidence to be derived from the names of places is overpowering. Though nothing but English is now spoken there, nevertheless, until the rivers, hills and towns have all changed their names, the history of the country will remain written therein as plain as any book to those who have eyes to see. Even in Australia the names of some of the rivers seem likely to be perpetuated; and such a name as the Murrumbidjee would be fair proof that the English were not the first inhabitants of the country.

20. When two different languages contend for mastery in the same country, there are many causes which may determine the victory, and it is not possible to do more than to lay down as a general rule that the language of the more civilised people will remain predominant, whether they are the conquerors or the conquered. They have names for things which are strange to the ruder race; and these are naturally adopted at once into the poorer language. Thus although the Franks became masters of Gaul, yet the language of the Romanised Kelts survived, though modified in many strange ways. Perhaps the strangest of all is the translation of Teutonic words brought by the invaders into a Latin form, as l'avenir for zukunft, the future; contrée, for gegend, country. Again, a conquering race is generally less in number than the conquered; whom it rarely attempts to extirpate, preferring to keep them in a state of greater or less servitude. Thus the English language could survive the Norman Conquest; and appear English after

centuries, only full of Norman French words and with a very much reduced grammar.

21. The case is somewhat different in an invasion by a numerous savage horde; this either sweeps past in its desolating course, and leaves no other trace behind; or it permanently occupies a country and its language takes the empty place, as that of the Huns. We have seen that the same may be the case when a European nation eradicates a savage one. But mixture of vocabulary and modification of grammar is the common result of the coalescence of two races not utterly diverse in civilisation; and this mixed language indicates mixture of blood. But there is no reason to suppose that any people speaking an Aryan language has ever been so utterly displaced by some non-Aryan tribe, that the blood of the succeeding race should be utterly changed and yet the language remain Aryan. On the other hand it is highly probable that some Aryan races (especially the Indian) have invaded a non-Aryan country and dispossessed the older people. Here there was doubtless some mixture of race, the amount of which we may very roughly estimate by the traces of mixture in the resulting language; though this test is far from certain, because languages change internally as well as from external causes. But clearly in such a case a large portion of the blood is Aryan; and the result would seem to be that in each nation of Aryan speech there must be some cousinship however distant: there is community, not identity, of blood.

22. It is possible to trace back singly the different lines of speech which we have briefly described, and to arrive at a common Indo-European language, which must have been spoken by a fairly civilised tribe. This language contained words for all the common relations of life-father, mother, brother, sister, son, and daughter. Some of these can be still further analysed; others probably trace back to an earlier

time, and it is useless to try to find out why such names came to be used. Patar (father) and matar (mother) may even belong to the childhood of speech itself, the suffix only being peculiar to the Indo-European speech: we cannot say. But son means 'one who is begotten' and the daughter was the 'milkmaid' of this primitive family. The connections by marriage have their terms; there was a name for the daughter-in-law-'she who belonged to the son'--for the father-in-law and for the brother-in-law, of doubtful meaning. The house existed, not the cave or hole in the rock; and it had doors, not the halfunderground passage of the Siberians. The people had sheep and herds, the tendance of which was their main employment, and of agriculture we see the beginnings, the knowledge of some one grain, perhaps barley. They had horses to drive, not to ride, goats, dogs, and bees; from the honey they made a sweet drink (madhu our 'mead'); they made clothing of the wool of the sheep and the skins of beasts. They had to guard against the wolf, the bear, and the snake (of some sort). They dressed their food at the fire and they were acquainted with soup. They also knew and could work three metals, gold, silver, and copper. They used in battle the sword and the bow. They made boats, but they knew not the sea. They could reckon up to a hundred, and they divided their time by months, according to the moon (the measurer). In religion they had no clear term for God, but seem to have personified the sky as the Heaven-father, the source of light and life. Clearly such a race as this, so far advanced in the knowledge of the necessaries and even of many of the comforts of life, differed widely from the infinite number of savage races which even now occupy the world; it is not among the IndoEuropeans that we must look for the first beginning of man upon the earth.

9

CHAPTER IV.

HOW OUR WORDS WERE MADE.

1. How did this people and the different peoples descended from it make their words? We have seen already (Ch. II., 10) that their languages were inflectional in the main in their earlier days, and therefore synthetic; that they become analytical later

on.

We therefore expect to find words composed of different elements, which are not capable of separate use; these may at first be unrecognisable, but by analysis of the word, and by comparison of the different forms which it takes in different languages they may often be recovered. And so in that primitive Indo-European language which we have described, we do find syllables, called suffixes, which denote relation, attached to other syllables which denote an idea generally. These last are called roots, and of them we shall soon have more to say. Thus we know, because the derived languages attest the fact, that in Indo-European ad-mi meant I eat,' the idea of eating in relation to me; vāk-as meant of speech,' speech considered in relation to something else, as 'the sound of speech.' These inflectional suffixes, as they are called, mi, as, and the like, will require ful! explanation.

2. But there is something else to occupy us first. These two words ad-mi and vāk-as are simple forms, where the inflectional suffix is added at once to the root; but this is not commonly the case. There were other suffixes, called formative suffixes, which were used to make roots into nouns and verbs, to which inflectional suffixes were added afterwards. Thus to the root da (= give) was added the suffix tar, and datar meant a giver,' but not yet