The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c16.2

v1.c16.2

THROUGHOUT the greater part of Europe and of Asia as far as India there exist now, or can be shown to have existed in past time, a great number of languages, the forms and sounds of which when scientifically examined are seen to have a common origin. The languages in question are generally known to scholars under the name of the Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European languages. The name Indo-European seems to have been invented by Dr Thomas Young, the well-known physicist and Egyptologist. The first occurrence known of the word is in an article by him in *The Quarterly Review* for 1813. Examination of the article, however, shows that Dr Young meant by Indo-European something quite different from its ordinarily accepted signification. For under the term he included not only the languages now known as Indo-European, but also Basque, Finnish, and Semitic languages. The name Indo-Germanic, which was used by the German philologist Klaproth as early as 1823, but the inventor of which is unknown, is an attempt to indicate the family by the furthest east and west members of the chain extending from India to the Atlantic ocean. The main languages of the family had been indicated in a famous address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, delivered by the President Sir William Jones in 1786¹. He had the insight to observe that the sacred language of India (Sanskrit), the language of Persia, the languages of Greece and Rome, the languages of the Celts, Germans, and Slavs, were all closely connected. To Sir William Jones, as Chief Justice of Bengal, law was his profession and the comparison of languages only an amusement. But this epoch-making address laid the foundations of Comparative Philology on which Bopp in his *Comparative Grammar* built the first superstructure. But the study of this family of languages has from the beginning been beset with a subtle fallacy. There has been throughout an almost constant confusion between the languages and the persons who spoke them. It is hardly necessary to point out that in many parts of the world the speaker of a particular language at a given time was not by lineal descent the representative of its speakers at an earlier period. In the island of Britain many persons of Welsh blood, many persons of Irish Celtic and Scottish Celtic origin speak English. It is many centuries since it was observed that Normans and English who had settled in Ireland had learned to speak the Irish language and had become more Irish than the Irish themselves. It is well known that by descent the Bulgarians are of Asiatic origin, and of an entirely different stock from the Slavs, a branch of whose language is now their mother tongue. It is therefore clear that it is impossible, without historical evidence, to be certain that the language spoken by any particular people was the language of their ancestors at a remote period. The name Indo-Germanic therefore suffers from the ambiguity that it characterises not only languages but also peoples. As has been suggested elsewhere, it would be well to abandon both the term Indo-European and the term Indo-Germanic and adopt some entirely colourless word which would indicate only the speakers of such languages. A convenient term for the speakers of the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic languages would be the Wiros, this being the word for ‘men’ in the great majority of the languages in question.