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Show 48 ON TilE DISTRIBUTION AND The labors of tho skilful philologuo of Bozicrs, M. BouDARD, have put tho finil:llting stroke iu bringing this fact to light. The Colts or Kelts oncountoro<l before them, therefore, tho Iboros; whom they 'pushed. ~nward into tho south of Gaul, whore we fi~d them established in tho time of Crosar. They amalgamated. w1th thorn as the uamo of Celt-Iberia teaches ; and very certainly in Langucd~ c al o, no less than in Aquitania. These Iborians-a. nation lively and impressionable, vain and stirring-may well hav.c wfu~cd into the Kcllic blood that clement of restlessness and lov1ty wh10h one perceives in tho Gauls, but which is .alien, ~~ the contrary, to the true Kelt,- at once so attached to h1s traditiOns, aud over so headstrong in his ideas. . . . Tho Basque tongue, otherwise called Ibonan, resembles m notlnng tho Indo-European idioms. It is "par excelleuco" a polysynthetical languago,-a tongue that, in its orgauism, reminds one, in a sufficiently- striking manner, ofthc languag s of Am rica. It composes "de toutes pieces" tho idea-word; suppresses often entire syllables; and, in this work of composition, preserving sometimes but a single letter of tho primitive word, it presents those a<ljunctivo particles that by philologists arc termed postpositions-as opposed to prepositions-which servo to distinguish cases. In this manner is it that tho Basque constructs its declension. This new characteristic re-appears in another groat family of languages which we shall discuss anon, viz : tho 'l'artar tongues belonging to central Asia. The Basque, conscq ucntly, denotes a very primitive intollcctnal state of tho people who occu1 ied western Europe previously to the arrival of tho Indo-Europeans; auu, were it allowable to draw an induction from an isolate charactcriHtic, one might suppose that the Ibet·cs were, as a race, allied to the Tartar. But this hypothesis, darino- as it is, receives a new dco-roe of probability from tho study of the second group of European languages, foreign to the Indo-Germanic source, viz: the Finnish group. 'l'his group is not restricted to a few idioms on tho north-cast of Europe. It cxtcn<ls itself over nll tho territory of northern Hussia oven to the extremity of Kamtschatka. Comparison of the numerous idioms spoken by tribes spread over Siberia bas revealed a common bond between them, as well of grammar as (')f vocabulary. These tono-ucs, which might be comprehended under the general appellation of 11inno-Japonic (from tho name of those occupying upon tho map the two extremes oftheir chain), offer this same charactcril:ltic of agglutination that hn.s just been signalized in the Basque; but in a much less degree. They make use of that curious system of postpositions which appertains also to the ancient idiom of the Ib01·es. rrbose tor- CLASSIFICATION OF TONGUES. 49 m i nations destined to represent cases are replaced by propositions distinct from the word,-whicb, in our languages, precede, on the contrary, tho words of which they modify tho case. It mu t be noted that the apparition of these postpositions invariably antccedes, in tho gradual formation of tongues, the employment of cases; whereas, prepositions replace these when the tongue becomes altered and simplified. Cases arc nothing, indeed, but the result of the coupling of the postposition to words. The organic march of the declension presents itself, therefore, throughout the evolution of languages, in the following manner, viz: at first tho root (or radical), ordinarily monosyllabic; next, tho radical followed by postpositions, -corresponding to tho period of agglutination; again, the radical submitted to the :fl.exion,-corresponding to the ancient period of our Indo,Europoan tongues; and, finally, the preposition follo·wod by tho radical,- corrosponsi vo to the modern period of these same languages. It is to be noted that the postposition (in relative age) never returns subsequently to the prcposition,-any more than can the milk-teeth gww again in an old man after the loss of his molar~. Thus, then, the ago of the Finnish tongues and of tho Basque IS fixed. They were idioms of analogous organization, and of which the arrest of development announces a sufficiently feeble degree of intellectual powcr.16 Tho brethren of tho Aryas and Iranians, upon penetrating into Europe, had only, therefore, to combat populations living in a state analogous to that in which we find the hordes of Siboria,-spccics of Ostiaks or of Vogouls, of rrchcrcmiss or of Morelvines. With their intellectual superiority, tho people coming from occidental Asia had no need of being very numerous to vanquish such barbarous· tribes; with whom, doubtless, they frequently amalgamated, but of whom they ever constituted the aristocracy. This wan·ior and haughty spirit of those Asiatic conquerors preserved itself above all among the Germans, and it is to be perceived also amid the Latins and the Greeks. Let it not, howovor, be imagined that, beneath the in:fl.ucnco of the neighborhood vyhich new migrations created for them, such tribes of Finnish stock thrown off to tho north-cast of Europe, and those tc Tho study of tho voco.bnl~:~ry of the Finnish tongues, ~:~ncl oven th~:~t of tho 1'o.rt~:~rian, provos to us that those popul~:~tions were w~:~nting in a qu~:~ntity of knowledge th~:~t wo find, from the very beginning, ~:~midst tho Indo-European populations, and which the former were afterwards forced to borrow from the l~:~tter. For oxamplo, the no.me of 1alt, in all the idioms of that family ns well as in Hungarian, oxpressocl by a derivative of the Sanscrit, Greek, or Latin nnme. Indeed, it is oortnin thu.t the usc of salt remained for n long time unknown to tho inhllbitauts of Northern Europe; and that Christian II, king of Denmark, ho.d gained over the Swedish peasants by bringing to thorn this precious condiment. 4 |