The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c16.9

v1.c16.9

If, as some scholars suppose, modern Albanian is the descendant in a very corrupt condition of ancient Thracian, and not of ancient Illyrian, the interrelation of the ancient branches of the Indo-Germanic family of languages can be outlined. The family is divided by a well-marked difference in the treatment of certain *k*, *g*, and *gh* sounds into two parts, one of which keeps the *k*, *g*, and *gh* sounds, though submitting them to a variety of changes in later times, while the other part changes *k* and *g* into some kind of sibilant sounds which are represented in the Slavonic and Irānian languages by *s* and *z*, in Sanskrit by *ç* and *j*. The *gh* sound appears as *z* in Zend, the Irānian dialects confusing together *g* and *gh*, while in Sanskrit it appears as *h*. The languages which present these changes are the easternmost members of the family: Āryan (i.e. Indian and Irānian); Armenian; Slavonic; and Albanian. The Albanian it is suggested has been driven westward through the Pindus range into its present position within historical times, the ancient Illyrians having in this area been swept away in the devastation wrought by a sequence of Roman invasions, initiated in the second century B.C. by Aemilius Paulus. The languages mentioned would thus have started from the eastern side of the original habitat, while the tribes which (with an admixture of the population already in possession) ultimately became the Greeks, moved through Macedonia and Thessaly southwards, and the Latin stock, the Celts, and the Germans westwards and northwards. It is more than likely that the ancestors of the Slavs found their way from the original home by the ‘Moravian Gap.’ The exact manner, or the exact date, at which these movements took place we cannot tell, but there is no reason to suppose that any of them antedate at earliest the third millennium, B.C. Nor is it likely that they took place all at once. The same causes, though in different degrees, were operative then which have produced movements of peoples in historical times, one of the most pressing probably being the growth of population in a limited area, which drove sections or whole tribes to seek sustenance for themselves, their families, and cattle in land beyond their original boundaries, without regard to whether these lands were already occupied by other peoples or not. The movements of the Gauls in historical times were probably not at all unlike those of their ancestors and kinsmen in prehistoric times.