Vedic and Philological Studies

Aryan Origins

Introductory

Among all the many promising beginnings of which the nineteenth century was the witness, none perhaps was hailed with greater eagerness by the world of culture and science than the triumphant debut of Comparative Philology. None perhaps has been more disappointing in its results. The philologists indeed place a high value on their line of study,—nor is that to be wondered at, in spite of all its defects,—and persist in giving it the name of Science; but the scientists are of a very different opinion. In Germany, in the very metropolis both of Science and of philology, the word Philologe has become a term of disparagement; nor are the philologists in a position to retort. Physical Science has proceeded by the soundest and most scrupulous methods and produced a mass of indisputable results which, by their magnitude and far-reaching consequences, have revolutionised the world and justly entitled the age of their development to the title of the wonderful century. Comparative Philology has hardly moved a step beyond its origins; all the rest has been a mass of conjectural and ingenious learning of which the brilliance is only equalled by the uncertainty and unsoundness. Even so great a philologist as Renan was obliged in the later part of his career, begun with such unlimited hopes, to a deprecating apology for the “little conjectural sciences” to which he had devoted his life’s energies. At the beginning of the century’s philological researches, when the Sanscrit tongue had been discovered, when Max Muller was exulting in his fatal formula, “patēr, pater, pitā, Vater, father”, the Science of Language seemed to be on the point of self-revelation; as the result of the century’s toil it can be asserted by thinkers of repute that the very idea of a Science of Language is a chimera! No doubt, the case against Comparative Philology has been overstated. if

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it has not discovered the Science of Language, it has at least swept out of existence the fantastic, arbitrary & almost lawless etymology of our forefathers. It has given us juster notions about the relations and history of extant languages and the processes by which old tongues have degenerated into that detritus out of which a new form of speech fashions itself. Above all, it has given us the firmly established notion that our investigations into language must be a search for rules & laws and not free & untrammelled gambollings among individual derivations. The way has been prepared; many difficulties have been cleared out of our way. Still scientific philology is non-existent; much less has there been any real approach to the discovery of the Science of Language.

Does it follow that a Science of Language is undiscoverable? In India, at least, with its great psychological systems mounting to the remotest prehistoric antiquity, we cannot easily believe that regular and systematic processes of Nature are not at the basis of all phenomena of sound and speech. European philology has missed the road to the truth because an excessive enthusiasm and eager haste to catch at and exaggerate imperfect, subordinate and often misleading formulae has involved it in bypaths that lead to no resting-place; but somewhere the road exists. If it exists, it can be found. The right clue alone is wanted, and a freedom of mind which can pursue it unencumbered by prepossessions and undeterred by the orthodoxies of the learned. Above all, if the science of philology is to cease to figure among the petty conjectural sciences, among which even Renan was compelled to classify it—and conjectural science means pseudo-science, since fixed, sound and verifiable bases and methods independent of conjecture are the primary condition of Science,—then the habit of hasty generalisations, of light and presumptuous inferences, of the chase after mere ingenuities and the satisfaction of curious & learned speculation which are the pitfalls of verbal scholarship must be rigidly eschewed and relegated to the waste paper basket of humanity, counted among its nursery toys which, having now issued out of the nursery, we should put away into their appropriate lumber-room.Where

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there is insufficient evidence or equal probability in conflicting solutions, Science admits conjectural hypotheses as a step towards discovery. But the abuse of this concession to our human ignorance, the habit of erecting flimsy conjectures as the assured gains of knowledge is the curse of philology. A Science which is nine-tenths conjecture has no right, at this stage of the human march, to make much of itself or seek to impose itself on the mind of the race. Its right attitude is humility, its chief business to seek always for surer foundations and a better justification for its existence.

To seek for such a stronger & surer foundation is the object of this work. In order that the attempt may succeed, it is necessary first to perceive the errors committed in the past and to eschew them. The first error committed by the philologists after their momentous discovery of the Sanscrit tongue, was to exaggerate the importance of their first superficial discoveries. The first glance is apt to be superficial; the perceptions drawn from an initial survey stand always in need of correction. If then we are so dazzled & led away by them as to make them the very key of our future knowledge, its central plank, its basic platform we prepare for ourselves grievous disappointments. Comparative Philology, guilty of this error, has seized on a minor clue and mistaken it for a major or chief clue. When Max Muller trumpeted forth to the world in his attractive studies the great rapprochement, pitā, patēr, pater, Vater, father, he was preparing the bankruptcy of the new Science; he was leading it away from the truer clues, the wider vistas that lay behind. The most extraordinary & imposingly unsubstantial structures were reared on the narrow basis of that unfortunate formula. First, there was the elaborate division of civilised humanity into the Aryan, Semitic, Dravidian & Turanian races, based upon the philological classification of the ancient and modern languages. More sensible & careful reflection has shown us that community of language is no proof of community of blood or ethnological identity; the French are not a Latin race because they speak a corrupt & nasalised Latin, nor are the Bulgars Slavs in blood because the Ugrofinnish race has been wholly Slavonicised in

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civilisation and language. Scientific researches of another kind have confirmed this useful and timely negation. The philologists have, for instance, split up, on the strength of linguistic differences, the Indian nationality into the northern Aryan race & the southern Dravidian, but sound observation shows a single physical type with minor variations pervading the whole of India from Cape Comorin to Afghanistan. Language is therefore discredited as an ethnological factor. The races of India may be all pure Dravidians, if indeed such an entity as a Dravidian race exists or ever existed, or they may be pure Aryans, if indeed such an entity as an Aryan race exists or ever existed, or they may be a mixed race with one predominant strain, but, in any case, the linguistic division of the tongues of India into the Sanscritic & the Tamilic counts for nothing in that problem. Yet so great is the force of attractive generalisations & widely popularised errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder, talking of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship & building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions.

But if language is no sound factor of ethnological research, it may be put forward as a proof of common civilisation and used as a useful & reliable guide to the phenomena of early civilisations. Enormous, most ingenious, most painstaking have been the efforts to extract from the meanings of words a picture of the early Aryan civilisation previous to the dispersion of their tribes. Vedic scholarship has built upon this conjectural science of philology, upon a brilliantly ingenious & attractive but wholly conjectural & unreliable interpretation of the Vedas, a remarkably minute & captivating picture of an early half-savage Aryan civilisation in India. How much value can we attach to these dazzling structures? None, for they have no assured scientific basis. They may be true & last; they may be partly true, yet have to be seriously modified; they may be entirely false & no trace of them be left in the ultimate conclusions of human knowledge on the subject: we have no means of determining between these three possibilities. The now settled rendering of Veda which reigns hitherto because it has never been critically & inimically

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examined, is sure, before long, to be powerfully attacked & questioned, & one thing may be confidently expected that even if India was ever invaded, colonised or civilised by northern worshippers of Sun & Fire, yet the picture of that invasion richly painted by philological scholarship from the Rigveda will prove to be a modern legend & not ancient history, & even if a half-savage Aryan civilisation existed in India in early times, the astonishingly elaborate modern descriptions of Vedic India will turn out a philological mirage & phantasmagoria. The wider question of an early Aryan civilisation must equally be postponed till we have sounder materials. The present theory is wholly illusory; for it assumes that common terms imply a common civilisation, an assumption which sins both by excess and by defect. It sins by excess; it cannot be argued, for instance, that because the Romans & Indians have a common term for a particular utensil, therefore that utensil was possessed by their ancestors in common previous to their separation. We must know first the history of the contact between the ancestors of the two races; we must be sure that the extant Roman word did not replace an original Latin term not possessed by the Indians; we must be sure that the Romans did not receive the term by transmission from Greek or Celt without ever having had any identity, connection or contact with our Aryan forefathers; we must be assured against many other possible solutions about which Philology can give us no guarantee either negative or affirmative. The Indian suraṅga, a tunnel, is supposed to be the Greek surinx. We cannot therefore argue that the Greeks & Indians possessed the common art of tunnel-making before their dispersion or even that the Indians who borrowed the word from Greece, never knew what an underground excavation might be till they learned it fromMacedonian engineers. The Bengali term for telescope is dūrbīn, a word not of European origin. We cannot conclude that the Bengalis had invented the telescope independently before their contact with the Europeans. Yet on the principles by which the philologists seem to be guided in their conjectural restorations of vanished cultures, these are precisely the conclusions at which we should arrive. Here we have a

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knowledge of the historical facts to correct our speculations; but the prehistoric ages are not similarly defended. Historical data are entirely wanting & we are left at the mercy of words and their misleading indications. But a little reflection on the vicissitudes of languages and especially some study of the peculiar linguistic phenomena created in India by the impact of the English tongue on our literary vernaculars, the first rush with which English words attempted to oust, in conversation & letter-writing, even common indigenous terms in their own favour and the reaction by which the vernaculars are now finding new Sanscritic terms to express the novel concepts introduced by the Europeans, will be sufficient to convince any thoughtful mind how rash are the premises of these philological culture-restorers & how excessive and precarious their conclusions. Nor do they sin by excess alone, but by defect also. They consistently ignore the patent fact that in prehistoric & preliterary times the vocabularies of primitive languages must have varied from century to century to an extent of which we with our ideas of language drawn from the classical & modern literary tongues can form little conception. It is, I believe, an established fact of anthropology that many savage tongues change their vocabulary almost from generation to generation. It is, therefore, perfectly possible that implements of civilisation and culture ideas for which no two Aryan tongues have a common term may yet have been common property before their dispersion; since each of them may have rejected after that dispersion the original common term for a neologism of its own manufacture. It is the preservation of common terms and not their disappearance that is the miracle of language.

I exclude, therefore, and exclude rigidly from the domain of philology as I conceive it all ethnological conclusions, all inferences from words to the culture & civilisation of the men or races who used them, however alluring may be these speculations, however attractive, interesting and probable may be the inferences which we are tempted to draw in the course of our study. The philologist has nothing to do with ethnology. The philologist has nothing to do with sociology, anthropology and archaeology. His sole business is or ought to be with the

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history of words and of the association of ideas with the sound-forms which they represent. By strictly confining himself to this province, by the self-denial with which he eschews all irrelevant distractions & delights on his somewhat dry and dusty road, he will increase his concentration on his own proper work and avoid lures which may draw him away from the great discoveries awaiting mankind in this badly-explored tract of knowledge.

But the affinities of languages to each other are, at least, a proper field for the labours of philology. Nevertheless even here I am compelled to hold that the scholarship of Europe has fallen into an error in giving this subject of study the first standing among the objects of philology. Are we really quite sure that we know what constitutes community or diversity of origin between two different languages—so different for instance as Latin and Sanscrit, Sanscrit & Tamil, Tamil and Latin? Latin, Greek & Sanscrit are supposed to be sister Aryan tongues, Tamil is set apart as of other & Dravidian origin. If we enquire on what foundation this distinct & contrary treatment rests, we shall find that community of origin is supposed on two main grounds, a common body of ordinary and familiar terms and a considerable community of grammatical forms and uses.We come back to the initial formula, pitā , patēr, pater, Vater, father.What other test, it may be asked, can be found for determining linguistic kinship? Possibly none, but a little dispassionate consideration will give us, it seems to me, ground to pause and reflect very long & seriously before we classify languages too confidently upon this slender basis. The mere possession of a large body of common terms is, it is recognised, insufficient to establish kinship; it may establish nothing more than contact or cohabitation. Tamil has a very large body of Sanscrit words in its rich vocabulary, but it is not therefore a Sanscritic language. The common terms must be those which express ordinary & familiar ideas & objects, such as domestic relations, numerals, pronouns, the heavenly bodies, the ideas of being, having etc,—those terms that are most commonly in the mouths of men, especially of primitive men, and are therefore, shall we say, least liable to variation? Sanscrit says, addressing the father, pitar, Greek pater, Latin

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pater, but Tamil says appā; Sanscrit says addressing the mother mātar, Greek mēter, Latin māter, but Tamil ammā; for the numeral seven Sanscrit says saptan or sapta, Greek hepta, Latin septem, but Tamil ēḷu; for the first person Sanscrit says aham, Greek egō or egōn, Latin ego, but Tamil nān; for the sun, Sanscrit says sūra or sūrya, Greek hēlios, Latin sol, but Tamil ñāyiru; for the idea of being Sanscrit has as, asmi, Greek has einai (esnai) and eimi, Latin esse and sum, but Tamil iru. The basis of the differentiation, then, appears with a striking clearness. There is no doubt about it, Sanscrit, Greek & Latin belong to one linguistic family which we may call conveniently the Aryan or Indo-European, Tamil to another for which we can get no more convenient term than Dravidian.

So far, good. We seem to be standing on a firm foundation, to be in possession of a rule which can be applied with something like scientific accuracy. But when we go a little farther, the fair prospect clouds a little, mists of doubt begin to creep into our field of vision. Mother & father we have; but there are other domestic relations. Over the daughter of the house, the primaeval milkmaid, the Aryan sisters show the slight beginnings of a spirit of disagreement. The Sanscrit father addresses her in the orthodox fashion duhitar, O milkmaid; Greek, as well as German & English parents follow suit with thugater, Tochter, and daughter, but Latin has abandoned its pastoral ideas, knows nothing of duhitā and uses a word filia which has no conceivable connection with the milk-pail & is not connected with any variant for daughter in the kindred tongues.Was Latin then amixed tongue, drawing from a non-Aryan stock for its conception of daughterhood? But this is only a single & negligible variation. We go farther and find, when we come to the word for son, these Aryan languages seem to differ hopelessly and give up all appearance of unity. Sanscrit says putra, Greek huios, Latin filius, the three languages use three words void of all mutual connection. We cannot indeed arrive at the conclusion that these languages were Aryan in their conception of fatherhood & motherhood, but sonhood is a Dravidian conception—like architecture, monism & most other civilised conceptions, according to some modern

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authorities,—for Sanscrit has a literary term for child or son, sūnuḥ , with which we can connect the German Sohn, English son & more remotely the Greek huios.We explain the difference then by supposing that these languages did possess an original common term for son, possibly sūnu, which was dropped by many of them at least as a colloquial expression, Sanscrit relegated it to the language of high literature, Greek adopted another form from the same root, Latin lost it altogether & substituted for it filius as it had substituted filia for duhitā. This sort of fluidity in the commonest terms seems to have been common —Greek has lost its original word for brother, phrātēr, which its sisters retain, & substituted adelphos, for which they have no correspondents; Sanscrit has abandoned the common word for the numeral one, unus, ein, one and substituted a word, eka, unknown to any other Aryan tongue; all differ over the third personal pronoun; for moon Greek has selēnē, Latin luna, Sanscrit candra. But when we admit these facts, a very important part of our scientific basis is sapped & the edifice begins to totter. For we come back to this fatal fact that even in the commonest terms the ancient languages tended to lose their original vocabulary & diverge from each other, so that if the process had not been arrested by an early literature all obvious proof of relationship might well have disappeared. It is only the accident of an early & continuous Sanscrit literature that enables us to establish the original unity of the Aryan tongues. If it were not for the old Sanscrit writings, if only the ordinary Sanscrit colloquial vocables had survived who could be certain of these connections? or who could confidently affiliate colloquial Bengali with its ordinary domestic terms to Latin any more certainly than Telugu or Tamil? How then are we to be sure that the dissonance of Tamil itself with the Aryan tongues is not due to an early separation and an extensive change of its vocabulary during its preliterary ages? I shall be able, at a later stage of this inquiry, to afford some ground for supposing the Tamil numerals to be early Aryan vocables abandoned by Sanscrit but still traceable in the Veda or scattered & imbedded in the various Aryan tongues & the Tamil pronouns similarly the primitive Aryan denominatives of

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which traces still remain in the ancient tongues. I shall be able to show also that large families of words supposed to be pure Tamil are identical in the mass though not in their units with the Aryan families. But then we are logically driven towards this conclusion that absence of a common vocabulary for common ideas & objects is not necessarily a proof of diverse origin. Diversity of grammatical forms? But are we certain that the Tamil forms are not equally old Aryan forms, corrupted but preserved by the early deliquescence of the Tamilic dialect? Some of them are common to the modern Aryan vernaculars, but unknown to Sanscrit, & it has even been thence concluded by some that the Aryan vernaculars were originally non-Aryan tongues linguistically overpowered by the foreign invader. But if so into what quagmires of uncertainty do we not descend? Our shadow of a scientific basis, our fixed classification of language families have disappeared into shifting vestibules of nothingness.

Nor is this all the havoc that more mature consideration works in the established theory of the philologists. We have found a wide divergence between the Tamil common terms and those shared in common by the “Aryan” dialects; but let us look a little more closely into these divergences. The Tamil for father is appā, not pitā; there is no corresponding word in Sanscrit, but we have what one might call a reverse of the word in apatyam, son, in aptyam, offspring and apna, offspring. These three words point decisively to a Sanscrit root ap, to produce or create, for which other evidence in abundance can be found. What is there to prevent us from supposing appā, father, to be the Tamil form for an old Aryan active derivative from this root corresponding to the passive derivative apatyam? Mother in Tamil is ammā not mātā; there is no Sanscrit word ammā, but there is the well-known Sanscrit vocable ambā, mother. What is to prevent us from understanding the Tamil ammā as an Aryan form equivalent to ambā, derived from the root amb, to produce, which gives us amba & ambaka, father, ambā, ambikā and ambi, mother and ambarīṣa, the colt of a horse or young of an animal. Sodara, a high Sanscrit word, is the common colloquial term in Tamil for brother and replaces the northern vernacular bhāī &

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classical bhrātā. Akkā, a Sanscrit word with many variants, is the colloquial term in Tamil for elder sister. In all these cases an obsolete or high literary term in Sanscrit is the ordinary colloquial term in Tamil,—just as we see the high literary Sanscrit sūnuḥ appearing in the colloquial German Sohn & English son, the obsolete & certainly high literary Aryan adalbha, undivided, appearing in the colloquial Greek adelphos, brother. What are we to conclude from these and a host of other instances which will appear in a later volume of this work? That Tamil is an Aryan dialect, like Greek, like German? Surely not;—the evidence is not sufficient;—but that it is possible for a non-Aryan tongue to substitute largely & freely Aryan vocables for its most common & familiar terms & lose its own native expressions. But then we are again driven by inexorable logic to this conclusion that just as the absence of a common vocabulary for common and domestic terms is not a sure proof of diverse origin, so also the possession of an almost identical vocabulary for these terms is not a sure proof of common origin. These things prove at the most intimate contact or separate development; they do not prove and in themselves cannot prove anything more. But on what basis then are we to distinguish & classify various language families? How can we positively say that Tamil is a non-Aryan or Greek, Latin & German Aryan tongues? From the indication of grammatical forms & uses, from the general impression created by the divergence or identity [of the] bulk of the vocables inherited by the languages we are comparing? But the first is too scanty & inconclusive, the second too empirical, uncertain & treacherous a test; both are the reverse of scientific, both, as reflection will show, might lead us into the largest & most radical errors. Rather than to form a conclusion by such a principle it is better to abstain from all conclusions and turn to a more thorough and profitable initial labour.

I conclude that it is too early in the history of philological research, we have made as yet too crude and slender a foundation to rear upon it the superstructure of scientific laws and scientific classifications. We cannot yet arrive at a sound & certain classification of human tongues still extant in speech, record

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or literature. We must recognise that our divisions are popular, not scientific, based upon superficial identities, not upon the one sound foundation for a science, the study of various species in their development from the embryo to the finished form or, failing the necessary material, a reverse study tracing back the finished forms to the embryonic and digging down into the hidden original facts of language. The reproach of the real scientist against the petty conjectural pseudo-science of philology is just; it must be removed by the adoption of a sounder method & greater self-restraint, the renunciation of brilliant superficialities and a more scrupulous, sceptical & patient system of research. In the present work I renounce, therefore, however alluring the temptation, however strong the facts may seem to a superficial study, all attempt to speculate on the identities or relationships of the different languages, on the evidence of philology as to the character & history of primitive human civilisations, or any other subject whatever not strictly within the four walls of my subject. That subject is the origin, growth and development of human language as it is shown to us by the embryology of the language ordinarily called Sanscrit and three ancient tongues, two dead & one living, which have evidently come at least into contact with it, the Latin, Greek & Tamil. I have called my work, for convenience’ sake, the Origins of Aryan Speech; but I would have it clearly understood that by using this familiar epithet I do not for a moment wish to imply any opinion as to the relationship of the four languages included in my survey, or the race-origin of the peoples speaking them or even of the ethnic origins of the Sanscrit speaking peoples. I did not wish to use the word Sanscrit, both because it is only a term meaning polished or correct and designating the literary tongue of ancient India as distinct from the vernaculars used by the women & the common people and because my scope is somewhat wider than the classical tongue of the northern Hindus. I base my conclusions on the evidence of the Sanscrit language helped out by those parts of the Greek, Latin & Tamil tongues which are cognate to the word-families of Sanscrit, and by the origins of Aryan speech, I mean, properly, the origin of human speech as

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used & developed by those who fashioned these word-families and their stocks & offshoots. The significance of the word Aryan as I use it, goes no farther.

In such an enquiry, it is obvious that a kind of science of linguistic embryology is the first necessity. In other words, it is only in proportion as we get away from the habits & notions & apparent facts of formed human speech in its use by modern & civilised people, only in proportion as we get nearer to the first roots & rudiments of the structure of the more ancient and primitive languages that we shall have any chance of making really fruitful discoveries. Just as from the study of the formed outward man, animal, plant, the great truths of evolution could not be discovered or, if discovered, not firmly fixed,—just as only by going back from the formed creature to its skeleton and from the skeleton to the embryo could the great truth be established that in matter also the great Vedantic formula holds good —of a world formed by development of many forms from one seed in the will of the Universal Being, ya ekaṁ bījaṁ bahudhā vidadhāti,—so also in language if the origin & unity of human speech can be found & established, if it can be shown that its development was governed by fixed laws & processes, it is only by going back to its earliest forms that the discovery is to be made & proofs established. Modern speech is largely a fixed and almost artificial form, not precisely a fossil, but an organism proceeding towards arrest and fossilisation. The ideas its study suggests to us, are well-calculated to lead us entirely astray. In modern language the word is a fixed conventional symbol having for no good reason that we know a significance we are bound by custom to attach [to] it. We mean by wolf a certain kind of animal, but why we use this sound and not another to mean [it], except as a mere lawless fact of historical development, we do not know & do not care to think. Any other sound would, for us, be equally good for the purpose, provided the custom-bound mentality prevailing in our environment could be persuaded to sanction it. It is only when we go back to the early tongues and find, for instance, that the Sanscrit word for wolf means radically “tearing” that we get a glimpse of one

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law at least of the development of language. Again in modern speech we have fixed parts of speech; noun, adjective, verb, adverb are to us different words even when their forms are the same. Only when we go back to the earlier tongues do we get a glimpse of the striking, the illuminating fact that in the most fundamental forms a single monosyllable did service equally for noun, adjective, verb & adverb & that man in his earliest use of speech probably made in his mind little or no conscious difference between these various uses. We see the word vṛka in modern Sanscrit used only as a noun signifying wolf; in the Veda it means simply tearing or a tearer, is used indifferently as a noun or adjective, even in its noun-use has much of the freedom of an adjective and can be applied freely to a wolf, a demon, an enemy, a disruptive force or anything that tears. We find in the Veda, although there are adverbial forms corresponding to the Latin adverb in e and ter, the adjective itself used continually as a pure adjective & yet in a relation to the verb & its action which corresponds to our modern use of adverbs and adverbial or prepositional phrases or subordinate adverbial clauses. Still more remarkable, we find nouns and adjectives used frequently as verbs with an object in the accusative case depending on the verbal idea in their root.We are prepared, therefore, to find that in the simplest & earliest forms of the Aryan tongue the use of a word was quite fluid, that a word like cit for instance might equally mean to know, knowing, knows, knower, knowledge or knowingly & be used by the speaker without any distinct idea of the particular employment he was making of the pliant vocable. Again, the tendency to fixity in modern tongues, the tendency to use words as mere counters & symbols of ideas, not as living entities themselves the parents of thought, creates a tendency to limit severely the use of a single word in several different senses and also a tendency to avoid the use of many different words for the expression of a single object or idea. When we have got the word strike to mean a voluntary & organised cessation of work by labourers, we are satisfied; we would be embarrassed if we had to choose between this and fifteen other words equally common and having the same significance; still more should

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we feel embarrassed if the same word could mean a blow, a sunbeam, anger, death, life, darkness, shelter, a house, food and prayer.Yet this is precisely the phenomenon—again, I suggest, a most striking & illuminative phenomenon—we find in the early history of speech. Even in later Sanscrit the wealth of apparently unconnected significances borne by a single word is phenomenal, but in Vedic Sanscrit it is more than phenomenal and offers a serious stumbling-block to any attempt by moderns to fix the exact & indisputable sense of the Aryan hymns. I shall give evidence in this work for concluding that in yet earlier speech the licence was much greater, that each word, not only exceptionally but ordinarily, was capable of numerous different meanings and each object or idea could be expressed by many, often by as many as fifty different words each derived from a different root. To our ideas such a state of things would be one merely of lawless confusion negativing the very idea of any law of speech or any possibility of a linguistic Science, but I shall show that this extraordinary freedom & pliancy arose inevitably out of the very nature of human speech in its beginnings & as a result of the very laws which presided over its pristine development.

By going back thus from the artificial use of a developed speech in modern language nearer to the natural use of primitive speech by our earlier forefathers we gain two important points.We get rid of the idea of a conventional fixed connection between the sound and its sense and we perceive that a certain object is expressed by a certain sound because for some reason it suggested a particular & striking action or characteristic which distinguished that object to the earlier human mind. Ancient man did not say in his mind, as would the sophisticated modern, “Here is a grey carnivorous animal, with four legs, of the canine species who hunts in packs and is particularly associated in my mind with Russia and the winter & snow & the steppes; let us find a suitable name for him”; he had fewer ideas about the wolf in his mind, no preoccupation with ideas of scientific classification and much preoccupation with the physical facts of his contact with the wolf. It was the chief all-important physical fact he selected, when he cried to his companion, not “Here is

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the wolf”, but simply “This tearer”, ayaṁ vṛkaḥ . The question remains, why the word vṛkaḥ more than another suggested the idea of tearing. The Sanscrit language carries us one step back, but not yet to the final step, by showing us that it is not the formed word vṛkaḥ with which we have to deal, but the word vṛc, that root of which vṛkais only one of several outgrowths. For the second obsession it helps us to get rid of is the modern connection of the developed word with some precise shade of an idea that we have accustomed it to convey. The word delimitation & the complex sense it conveys are with us wedded together; we need not remember that it comes from limes, a boundary, & that the single syllable lim, which is the backbone of the word, does not carry to us by itself the fundamental core of the sense. But I think it can be shown that even in the Vedic times men using the word vṛka, had the sense of the root vṛc foremost in their minds and it was that root which to their mentality was the rigid fixed significant part of speech; the full word being still fluid and depending for its use on the associations wakened by the root it contained. If that be so, we can see partly why words remained fluid in their sense, varying according to the particular idea wakened by the root-sound in the mentality of the speaker.We can see also why this root itself was fluid not only in its significance, but in its use & why even in the formed and developed word the nominal, adjective, verbal & adverbial uses were even in the comparatively late stage of speech we find in the Vedas, so imperfectly distinguished, so little rigid & separate, so much run into each other. We get back always to the root as the determining unit of language. In the particular inquiry we have before us, the basis for a science of language, we make a most important advance.We need not inquire why vṛka meant tearer; we shall inquire instead what the sound vṛc meant to the early Aryan-speaking races and why it bore the particular significance or significances we actually find imbedded in it. We have not to ask why dolabra in Latin means an axe, dalmi in Sanscrit means Indra’s thunderbolt, dalapa & dala are applied to weapons, or dalanam means crushing or Delphi in Greek is the name given to a place of caverns & ravines; but we may confine ourselves to an

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inquiry into the nature of the mother-root dal of which all these different but cognate uses are the result. Not that the variations noted have no importance, but their importance is minor & subsidiary. We may indeed divide the history of speech-origins into two parts, the embryonic into which research must be immediate as of the first importance, the structural which is less important & therefore may be kept for subsequent & subsidiary inquiry. In the first we note the roots of speech and inquire how vṛc came to mean to tear, dal to split or crush, whether arbitrarily or by the operation of some law of Nature; in the second we note the modifications and additions by which these roots grew into developed words, word-groups, word-families and word-clans and why those modifications & additions had the effect on sense & use which we find them to have exercised, why the termination ana turns dal into an adjective or a noun & what is the source & sense of the variant terminations ābra, bhi, bha (Delphoi, dalbhāḥ), ān (Grk. ōn) & ana.

This superior importance of the root in early language to the formed word is one of those submerged facts of language the neglect of which has been one of the chief causes of philology’s abortiveness as a Science. The first comparative philologists made, it seems tome, a fatal mistake when, misled by the modern preoccupation with the formed word, they fixed on the correlation pitā, patēr, pater, Vater, father as the clef, the mulamantra, of their Science & began to argue from it to all sorts of sound or unsound conclusions. The real clef, the real correlation is to be found in this other agreement, dalbha, dalana, dolabra, dolōn, delphi, leading to the idea of a common mother-root, common word-families, common word-clans, kindred word-nations or, as we call them, languages. And if it had been also noticed, that in all these languages dal means also pretence or fraud and has other common or kindred significances and some attempt made to discover the reason for one sound having these various significant uses, the foundation of a real Science of Languages might have been formed. We should incidentally have discovered, perhaps, the real connections of the ancient languages & the common mentality of the so-called Aryan peoples. We

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find dolabra in Latin for axe, we find no corresponding word in Greek or Sanscrit for axe; to argue thence that the Aryan forefathers had not invented or adopted the axe as a weapon before their dispersion, is to land oneself in a region of futile & nebulous uncertainties & rash inferences. But when we have noted that dolabra in Latin, dolōn in Greek, dala, dalapa & dalmi in Sanscrit were all various derivatives freely developed from dal, to split, and all used for some kind of weapon, we get hold of a fruitful and luminous certainty.We see the common or original mentality working, we see the apparently free & loose yet really regular processes by which words were formed; we see too that not the possession of the same identical formed words, but the selection of the root word and of one among several children of the same root word to express a particular object or idea was the secret both of the common element & of the large & free variation that we actually find in the vocabulary of the Aryan languages.

I have said enough to show the character of the inquiry which I propose to pursue in the present work. This character arises necessarily from the very nature of the problem we have before us, the processes by which language took birth and formation. In the physical sciences we have a simple and homogeneous material of study; for, however complex may be the forces or constituents at work, they are all of one nature and obey one class of laws; all the constituents are forms developed by the vibration of material ether, all the forces are energies of this ethereal vibration which have either knotted themselves into these formal constituents of objects and are at work in them or else still work freely upon them from outside. But in the mental sciences we are confronted with heterogeneous material and heterogeneous forces and action of forces; we have to deal first with a physical material and medium, the nature & action of which by itself would be easy enough to study and regular enough in its action, but for the second element, the mental agency working in & upon its physical medium and material. We see a cricket ball flying through the air, we know the elements of action & status that work in and upon its flight and we can

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tell easily enough either by calculation or judgment not only in what direction it will pursue its flight, but where it will fall. We see a bird flying through the air,—a physical object like the cricket ball flying through the same physical medium; but we know neither in what direction it will fly, nor where it will alight. The material is the same, a physical body, the medium is the same, the physical atmosphere; to a certain extent even the energy is the same, the physical pranic energy, as it is called in our philosophy, inherent in matter. But another force not physical has seized on this physical force, is acting in it and on it and so far as the physical medium will allow, fulfilling itself through it. This force is mental energy, & its presence suffices to change the pure or molecular pranic energy we find in the cricket ball into the mixed or nervous pranic energy we find in the bird. But if we could so develop our mental perceptions as to be able to estimate by judgment or measure by calculation the force of nervous energy animating the bird at the moment of its flight, even then we could not determine its direction or goal. The reason is that there is not only a difference in the energy, but a difference in the agency. The agency is the mental power dwelling in the merely physical object, the power of a mental will which is not only indwelling but to a certain extent free. There is an intention in the bird’s flight; if we can perceive that intention, we can then judge whither it will fly, where it will alight, provided always that it does not change its intention. The cricket ball is also thrown by a mental agent with an intention, but that agent being external and not indwelling, the ball cannot, once it is propelled in a certain direction, with a certain force, change that direction or exceed that force unless turned or driven forward by a new object it meets in its flight. In itself it is not free. The bird is also propelled by a mental agent with an intention, in a certain direction, with a certain force of nervous energy in its flight. Let nothing change in the mental will working it, & its flight may possibly be estimated & fixed like the cricket ball’s. It also may be turned by an object meeting it, a tree or a danger in the way, an attractive object out of the way, but the mental power dwells within and is, as we should say, free to

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choose whether it shall be turned aside or not, whether it shall continue its way or not. But also it is free entirely to change its original intention without any external reason, to increase or diminish its output of nervous energy in the act, to employ it in a direction and towards a goal which are quite foreign to the original object of the flight. We can study & estimate the physical & nervous forces it uses, but we cannot make a science of the bird’s flight unless we go behind matter & material force and study the nature of this conscious agent and the laws, if any, which determine, annul or restrict its apparent freedom.

Philology is the attempt to form such a mental science,— for language has this twofold aspect; its material is physical, the sounds formed by the human tongue working on the air vibrations; the energy using it is nervous, the molecular pranic activities of the brain using the vocal agents and itself used & modified by a mental energy, the nervous impulse to express, to bring out of the crude material of sensation the clearness & preciseness of the idea; the agent using it is a mental will, free so far as we can see, but free within the limits of its physical material to vary & determine its use for that purpose of the range of vocal sound. In order to arrive at the laws which have governed the formation of any given human tongue,—and my purpose now is not [to] study the origins of human speech generally, but the origins of Aryan speech,—we must examine, first, the way in which the instrument of vocal sound has been determined and used by the agent, secondly, the way in which the relation of the particular ideas to be expressed to the particular sound or sounds which express it, have been determined. There must always be these two elements, the structure of the language, its seeds, roots, formation & growth, and the psychology of the use of the structure.

Alone of the Aryan tongues, the present structure of the Sanscrit language still preserves the original type of the Aryan structure. In this ancient tongue alone, we see not entirely in all the original forms, but in the original essential parts & rules of formation, the skeleton, the members, the entrails of this organism. It is through the study, then, of Sanscrit especially,

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aided by whatever light we can get from the more regular & richly-structured among the other Aryan languages, that we must seek for our origins. The structure we find is one of extraordinary initial simplicity and also of extraordinarily methodical & scientific regularity of formation. We have in Sanscrit four open sounds or pure vowels, a, i, u, ṛ with their lengthened forms, ā, ī, ū and ṝ (we have to mention but may omit for practical purposes the rare vowel lṛ), supplemented by two other open sounds which the grammarians are probably right in regarding as impure vowels or modifications of i and u; they are the vowels e and o, each with its farther modification into ai and au. Then we have five symmetrical vargas or classes of closed sounds or consonants, the gutturals, k, kh, g, gh, ṅ , the palatals, c, ch, j, jh, ñ, the cerebrals, answering approximately to the English dentals, ṭ , ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, the pure dentals, answering to the Celtic and Continental dentals we find in Irish and in French, Spanish or Italian, t, th, d, dh, n & the labials, p, ph, b, bh, m . Each of these classes consists of a hard sound, k, c, ṭ, t, p with its aspirate, kh, ch, th, th, ph, a corresponding soft sound g, j, ḍ, d, b with its aspirate gh, jh, ḍh, dh, bh, and a class nasal, ṅ, ñ, ṇ, n, m . But of these nasals only the last three have any separate existence or importance; the others are modifications of the general nasal sound, m-n, which are found only in conjunction with the other consonants of their class and are brought into existence by that conjunction. The cerebral class is also a peculiar class; they have so close a kinship to the dental both in sound and in use that they may almost be regarded as modified dentals, rather than an original separate class. Finally, in addition to the ordinary vowels and consonants we have a class composed of the four liquids y, r, l, v, which were evidently treated as semivowels, y being the semivowel form of i, v of u, r of ṛ, l of lṛ, — this semivowel character of r and l is the reason why in Latin prosody they have not always the full value of the consonant, why for instance the u in volucris is optionally long or short; we have the triple sibilation ś, ṣ and s, ś palatal, ṣ cerebral, s dental; we have the pure aspirate, h. With the possible exception of the cerebral class & the variable nasal, it can hardly be doubted, I think, that

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the Sanscrit alphabet represents the original vocal instrument of Aryan speech. Its regular, symmetrical and methodical character is evident and might tempt us to see in it a creation of some scientific intellect, if we did not know that Nature in a certain portion of her pure physical action has precisely this regularity, symmetry & fixity and that the mind, at any rate in its earlier unintellectualised action, when man is more guided by sensation & impulse & hasty perception, tends to bring in the element of irregularity & caprice and not a greater method and symmetry. We may even say, not absolutely, but within the range of the linguistic facts & periods available to us, the greater the symmetry & unconscious scientific regularity, the more ancient the stage of the language. The advanced stages of language show an increasing detrition, deliquescence, capricious variation, the loss of useful sounds, the passage, sometimes transitory, sometimes permanent of slight & unnecessary variations of the same sound to the dignity of separate letters. Such a variation, unsuccessful in permanence, can be seen in the Vedic modification of the soft cerebral ḍ into a cerebral liquid, ḷ. This sound disappears in later Sanscrit, but has fixed itself in Tamil and Marathi. Such is the simple instrument out of which the majestic & expressive harmonies of the Sanscrit language have been formed.

The use of the instrument by the earlier Aryans for the formation of words seems to have been equally symmetrical, methodical & in close touch with the physical facts of vocal expression. These letters are used as so many seed sounds; out of them primitive root sounds are formed by the simple combination of the four vowels or less frequently the modified vowels with each of the consonants, the two dependent nasals ṅ and ñ and the cerebral nasal ṇ excepted. Thus with d as a base sound, the early Aryans were able to make for themselves root sounds which they used indifferently as nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs to express root ideas,— da, dā, di, dī, du, dū, dṛ, dṝ. All these roots did not endure as separate words, but those which died, left an often vigorous progeny behind them which preserve in themselves the evidence for the existence of their progenitor. Especially have the roots formed by the short

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a passed out of use without a single exception. In addition the Aryans could form if they chose the modified root sounds de, dai, do, dau. The vowel bases were also used, since the nature of speech permitted it, as root sounds & root words. But obviously this kernel of language, though it might suffice for primitive beings, is too limited in range to satisfy the self-extensive tendency of human speech. We see therefore a class of secondary root sounds and root words grow up from the primitive root by the farther addition to it of any of the consonant sounds with its necessary or natural modification of the already existing root idea. Thus on the basis of the now lost primitive root da, it was possible to have four guttural short secondary roots, dak, dakh, dag, dagh & four long, dāk, dākh, dāg, dāgh, which might be regarded either as separate words or long forms of the short root; so also eight palatal, eight cerebral, with the two nasal forms daṇ & dāṇ , making ten, ten dental, ten labial, eight liquid, six sibilant and two aspirate secondary roots. It was possible also to nasalise any of these forms, establishing for instance daṅk, daṅkh, daṅg & daṅgh. It seems not unnatural to suppose that all these roots existed in the earliest forms of the Aryan speech, but by the time of our first literary records, the greater number of them have disappeared, some leaving behind them a scanty or numerous progeny, others perishing with their frail descendants. If we take a single example, the primitive base root ma, we find ma itself dead, but existing in the noun forms ma, mā & mam, matiḥ , matam; mak existing only in the nasal form maṅk & in its own descendants, makara, makura, makula etc & in tertiary formations makk & makṣ; makh still existing as a root word in the forms makh and maṅkh; mag only in its descendants and in its nasal form maṅg, magh in its nasalised form maṅgh; mac still alive, but childless except in its nasal disguise mañc; mach dead with its posterity; maj alive in its descendants and its nasal form mañj, majh wholly obsolete. We find in the long forms mā and māṅkṣ as separate roots & words with māk, mākh, māgh & māc as their substantial parts, but more usually deriving it would seem from a lengthening of the short root than from the long form as a separate root. Finally, tertiary roots have been formed

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less regularly but still with some freedom by the addition of semivowels to the seed sound, in either primitive or secondary roots, thus giving us roots like dhyai, dhvan, sru, hlād, or of other consonants where the combination was possible, giving us roots like stu, ścyut, hruḍ etc, or else by the addition of another consonant to the final of the secondary root, giving us forms like vall, majj, etc. These are the pure root forms. But a sort of illegitimate tertiary root is formed by the vowel guna or modification, as, for example, of the vowel ṛ into ar & ṝ into ār, so that we have the alternative forms ṛc and arc or ark; the forms carṣ & car, replacing cṛṣ & cṛ which are now dead, the forms mṛj and marj etc. We find, too, certain early tendencies of consonantal modification, such as an initial tendency to get rid of the palatal c, ch and j, jh, replacing them by k and g, a tendency entirely fulfilled in Latin, but arrested in the course of half-fulfilment in Sanscrit. This principle of guna is of great importance in the study of the physical formation of the language & of its psychological development, especially as it introduces a first element of doubt and confusion into an otherwise crystal clearness of structure & perfect mechanic regularity of formation. The vowel guna or modification works by the substitution either of the modified vowel, e for i, o for u, so that we have from vi the case form ves (veḥ), from jānu the case form jānoḥ , or of the pure semivowel sound, y for i, v for u, r or, a little impurely, ra for ṛ , so that from vi we have the verbal form vyantaḥ, from śu the verbal form aśvat, from vṛ or vṛt the noun vrata, or else of the supported semivowel sound, ay for i, av for u, ar for ṛ , al for lṛ, so that we have from vi the noun vayas, from śru the noun śravas, from sṛ the noun saras, from klṛp the noun kalpa. These forms constitute the simple gunation of the short vowel sounds a, i, u, ṛ , lṛ; in addition we have the long modification or vriddhi, an extension of the principle of lengthening which gives us the long forms of the vowels; we have ai or āy from i, au or āv from u, ār from ṛ, āl from lṛ, while a has no vriddhi proper but only the lengthening ā The principal confusion that arises out of this primitive departure from simplicity of sound-development is the frequent

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uncertainty between a regular secondary root and the irregular gunated root. We have for instance the regular root ar deriving from the primitive root a and the illegitimate root ar deriving from the primitive root ṛ ; we have the forms kala and kāla, which, if judged only by their structure, may derive either from klṛ or from kal; we have ayas and āyus which, similarly judged, may derive either from the root forms a and ā or from the root forms i and ī . The main consonantal modifications in Sanscrit are structural & consist [of] the assimilation of like consonants, a hard sound becoming soft by association with a soft sound, a soft sound hard by association with a hard sound, aspirates being replaced in conjunction by the corresponding unaspirated sound and modifying their companion in return, eg lapsyate and labdhum from labh substituted for labh-syate and labh-tum, vyūḍha from vyūh replacing vyūh-ta. Beyond this tendency to obey certain subtle but easily recognisable tendencies of mutual modification, which in themselves suggest only certain minor and unimportant doubts, the one really corruptive tendency in Sanscrit is the arrested impulse towards disappearance of the palatal family. This has gone so far that such forms as ketu can be considered by Indian grammarians, quite erroneously, to proceed from the root cit and not from the root kit which is its natural parent. In reality, however, the only genuine palatal modifications are those in sandhi, which substitute k for c, g for j at the end of a word or in certain combinations, eg lagna for lajna, vaktṛ for vactṛ, vakva for vacva, the noun vākya from the root vac, the perfect cikāya & cikye from ci. Side by side with these modificatory combinations we have regular forms, such as yajña, vācya, cicāya, cicye. It is even open to question whether the forms cikāya, cikye are not rather from the root ki than actual descendants from the parent root ci in whose nest they have found a home.

These elements of variation noted, we are in a position to follow the second stage in the flowering of speech from the root state to the stage in which we pass on by a natural transition to the structural development of language. So far we have a language formed of the simplest and most regular elements; the

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seed sounds a, i, u, k, kh etc—eight vowels & their modifications, four in number; five classes of consonants & three nasals; one quaternary of liquids or semivowels; three sibilants; one aspirate; based on each of these, their first developments, the primitive and parent roots, as from the seed sound v, the primitive root group va, vā, vi, vī, vu, vū, vṛ, vṝ and possibly ve, vai, vo, vau; round each primitive root its family of secondary roots, round the primitive va its family, vak, vakh, vag, vagh, vac, vach, vaj, vajh, vaṭ, vaṭh, vaḍ, vaḍh, vaṇ, vat, vath, vad, vadh, van, vap, vaph, vab, vabh, vam, & possibly vay, var, val & vav, vaś, vaṣ, vas, vah;—the eight or more families of this group forming a root clan, with a certain variable number of tertiary descendants such as vañc, vañj, vand, vall, vaṁś, vaṁh, vraj, etc. Forty of these clans would constitute the whole range of primitive language. Each word would in the primitive nature of language, like each man in the primitive constitution of human society, fulfil at once several functions, noun, verb, adjective and adverb at once, the inflection of the voice, the use of gesture & the quickness of the instinct making up for the absence of delicacy & precision in the shades of speech. Such a language though of small compass would be one, it is clear, of great simplicity, of a mechanical regularity of formation, built up perfectly in its small range by the automatic methods of Nature, and sufficient to express the first physical & emotional needs of the human race. But the increasing demands of the intellect would in time compel a fresh growth of language and a more intricate flowering of forms. The first instrument in such a growth, the first in urgency, importance & time, would be the impulse towards distinguishing more formally between the action, the agent and the object, & therefore of establishing some sort of formal distinction, however vague at first, between the noun-idea and the verb-idea. The second impulse, possibly simultaneous, would be towards distinguishing structurally,— for it is possible that the various root forms of one family were already used for that object,—between the various times and shades of the action, of establishing in modern language tense forms, voices, moods. The third impulse would be towards the

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formal distinction of various attributes, such as number & gender, & various relations of the agent & object themselves to the action, of establishing case forms & forms of singularity, duality, plurality. The elaboration of special forms for adjective and adverb seems to have been a later, the latter in fact the latest of the operations of structural development, because in the early mentality the need of these distinctions was the least pressing.

When we examine how the old Aryan speakers managed the satisfaction of these needs & this new & richer efflorescence of the language plant, we find that Nature in them was perfectly faithful to the principle of her first operations and that the whole of the mighty structure of the Sanscrit language was built up by a very slight extension of her original movement. This extension was secured & made possible by the simple, necessary & inevitable device of using the vowels a, i, u & ṛ with their long forms and modifications as enclitic or support sounds subsequently prefixed sometimes to the root, but at first used to form appendage sounds only. The Aryans by the aid of this device proceeded, just as they had formed root words by adding the consonant sounds to the primitive root sounds, by adding for instance d or l to va had formed vad & val, so now to form structural sounds by adding to the developed root word any of the same consonant sounds, pure or conjunct with others, with an enclitic sound either as the connective support or the formatory support or both, or else by adding the enclitic sound alone as a substantial appendage. Thus, having the root vad, they could form from it at their will by the addition of the consonant t, vadat, vadit, vadut, vadṛt or vadata, vadita, vaduta, vadṛta, or vadati, vaditi, vaduti, vadṛti or vadatu, vaditu, vadutu, vadṛtu, or else vadatṛ, vaditṛ, vadutṛ, vadṛtṛ; or else they could use the enclitic only & form vada, vadi, vadu, vadṛ; or they could employ the conjunct sounds tr, ty, tv, tm, tn, and produce such forms as vadatra, vadatya, vadatva, vadatma, vadatna . As a matter of fact we do not find and would not expect to find all these possibilities actually used in the case of a single word. With the growth of intellectual richness & precision there would be a corresponding growth in the mental will-action & the supersession

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of the mechanical mind-processes by more clearly & consciously selective mind-processes. Nevertheless we do find practically all these forms distributed over the root clans & families of the Aryan word-nation. We find the simple nominal forms built by the addition of the sole enclitic richly & almost universally distributed.The richness of forms is much greater in earlier Aryan speech than in later literature. From the root san, for instance, we find in Vedic speech all the forms sana, sani, sanu(contracted into snu), but in later Sanscrit they have all disappeared.We find also in Veda variants like caratha & carātha, rati & rāti, but in later Sanscrit cātha has been rejected, rati & rāti preserved but rigidly distinguished in their significance. We find most roots in possession of the a noun form, many in possession of the i form, some in possession of the u form. We find a preference for the simple hard consonant over the aspirate and the soft; p is more frequent in structural nouns than ph or bh, but both ph & bh occur; p is more frequent than b, but b occurs. We find certain consonants preferred over others, especially k, t, n, s either in themselves or in their combinations; we find certain appendage forms like as, in, an, at, tṛ, vat, van, formalised into regular nominal and verbal terminations. We see double appendages; side by side with the simple jitvā, we may have jitvara, jitvan etc. Throughout we see or divine behind the present state of the Sanscrit language a wide & free natural labour of formation followed by a narrowing process of rejection & selection. But always the same original principle, either simply or complexly applied, with modification or without modification of the root vowels & consonants, is & remains the whole basis & means of noun structure.

In the variations of the verb, in the formation of case we find always the same principle. The root conjugates itself by the addition of appendages such as mi, si, ti etc, m, s, t, ta, va (all of them forms used also for nominal structures) either simply or with the support of the enclitic a, i or rarely u, short, lengthened or modified, giving us such forms as vacmi, vadāmi, vakṣi, vadasi or vadāsi, vadat, vadati, vadāti. In the verb forms other devices are used such as the insertion of an appendage like n, nā, nu or

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nī in preference to the simple vowel enclitic; the prefixing of the enclitic a to help out or augment the fixing of tense significance; the reduplication of the essential part of the root in various ways; etc. We notice the significant fact that even here Vedic Sanscrit is much richer & freer in its variations, Sanscrit itself more narrow, rigid & selective, the former using alternative forms like bhavati, bhavāti, bhavat, the latter rejecting all but the first. The case inflexions differ from the verb-forms only in the appendages preferred, not in their principle or even in themselves; as, am, es, os, ām are all verbal as well as nominal inflexions. Substantially the whole of the language with all its forms & inflexions is the inevitable result of the use by Nature in man of one single rich device, one single fixed principle of sound formation employed with surprisingly few variations, with an astonishingly fixed, imperative & almost tyrannous regularity but also a free & even superfluous original abundance in the formation. The inflexional character of Aryan speech is itself no accident but the inevitable result, almost physically inevitable, of the first seed-selection of sound process, that original apparently trifling selection of the law of the individual being which is at the basis of all Nature’s infinitely varied regularities. Fidelity to the principle already selected being once observed, the rest results from the very nature & necessities of the sound-instrument that is employed. Therefore, in the outward form of language, we see the operation of a regular natural law proceeding almost precisely as Nature proceeds in the physical world to form a vegetable or an animal genus & its species.

We have taken one step in the perception of the laws that govern the origin & growth of language; but this step is nothing or little unless we can find an equal regularity, an equal reign of fixed process on the psychological side, in the determining of the relation of particular sense to particular sound. No arbitrary or intellectual choice but a natural selection has determined the growth & arrangement of the sounds, simple or structural, in their groups & families. Is it an arbitrary or intellectual choice or a law of natural selection that has determined their significances? If the latter be true & it must be so if any Science of language

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be possible, then having this peculiar arrangement of significant sounds, certain truths follow inevitably. First, the seed sound v for example must have in it something inherent to it which connected it in man’s mind originally, in the first natural state of speech, with the actual senses borne by the primitive roots va, vā, vi, vī, vu, vū, vṛ, vṝ in the primitive language. Secondly, whatever variations there are in sense between these roots must be determined originally by some inherent tendency of significance in the variable or vowel element, a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ṛ, ṝ. Thirdly, the secondary roots depending on va, vac, vakh, vañj, vam, val, vap, vah, vaś, vas etc must have a common element in their significances and, so far as they varied originally, must have varied as a result of the element of difference, the consonantal termination c, kh, j, m, l, p, h, ś, s respectively. Finally, in the structural state of language, although as a result of the growing power of conscious selection other determining factors may have entered into the selection of particular significances for particular words, yet the original factor cannot have been entirely inoperative and such forms as vadana, vadatra, vāda etc must have been governed in the development of their sense dominantly by their substantial & common sound-element, to a certain extent by their variable & subordinate element. I shall attempt to show by an examination of the Sanscrit language that all these laws are actually true of Aryan speech, their truth being borne out or often established beyond any shadow of doubt by the facts of the language.

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