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Updated: June 22, 2025
Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe' amounts to.
The wheeling improves in the afternoon, and alongside my road runs a bit of civilization in the shape of the splendid iron poles of the Indo-European Telegraph Company.
What then was this race? Are these monuments witnesses of the great Aryan immigration which was for so long supposed to have spread from India over the continents of Asia and Europe, and of which the Indo-European languages were said to preserve the memory? Or is it really the fact that a relationship of language does not imply a relationship of race?
The Greeks have the tale, the people of Madagascar have it, the Lowland Scotch, the Celts, the Russians, the Italians, the Algonquins, the Finns, and the Samoans have it. Now if the story were confined to the Aryan race, we might account for its diffusion, by supposing it to be the common heritage of the Indo-European peoples, carried everywhere with them in their wanderings.
The Semitic languages differ widely from the Indo-European in reference to their grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. On account of the great preponderance of the pictorial element in them, they may be called the metaphorical languages, while the Indo-European, from the prevailing style of their higher literature, may be called the philosophical languages.
But this interpretation will not get us far. It must be ruled entirely out of court, for instance, in two of the three European examples I have instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic "yeri" are demonstrably of secondary origin in Indo-European.
That large division of the Indo-European group which had already overspread many portions of Asia Minor, Greece, Germany, the British Islands, France, and Spain, had been long settled in Belgic Gaul, and constituted the bulk of its population.
The Indo-European family nearly coincides in geographical limits with those which have been assigned to that variety of mankind which generally shews a fair complexion, called the Caucasian variety. It may be said to commence in India, and thence to stretch through Persia into Europe, the whole of which it occupies, excepting Hungary, the Basque provinces of Spain, and Finland.
Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man, than the affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another.
All three belong to a well-marked division of the Indo-European speech, to which the name of Italic is given. Its nearest congener is the Hellenic, the next most distant being the Celtic. The Hellenic and Italic may thus be called sister languages, the Celtic standing in the position of cousin to both, though, on the whole, more akin to the Italic.
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