The Passing of the Great Race
By Madison Grant
Part II - European Races In History
Chapter
13
THE ORIGIN OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES
BY the process of elimination set forth in
the preceding chapter we are compelled to consider that the strongest
claimant for the honor of being the race of the original Aryans, is the tall,
blond Nordic. A study of the various languages of the Aryan group reveals an
extreme diversity which can be best explained by the hypothesis that the
existing languages are now spoken by people upon whom Aryan speech has been
forced from without. This theory corresponds exactly with the known historic
fact that the Aryan languages, during the last three or four thousand years
at least, have, again and again, been imposed by Nordics upon populations of
Alpine and Mediterranean blood. Within the present distributional area of
the Nordic race, and in the very middle of a typical area of isolation, is
the most generalized member of the Aryan group, namely, Lettish, or old
Lithuanian, situated on the Gulf of Riga, and almost Proto-Aryan in
character. Close at hand was the closely related Old Prussian or Borussian,
very recently extinct. These archaic languages are relatively close to
Sanskrit, and are located in actual contact with the non-Aryan speech of the
Esths and Finns. The non-Aryan languages in eastern Russia
are Ugrian, a form of speech which extends far into Asia, and which alone of
all agglutinative tongues, contains elements which unite it with synthetic
speech, and which is consequently dimly transitory in character. In other
words, in the opinion of many philologists, a primitive form of Ugrian might
have given birth to the Proto-Aryan ancestor of existing synthetic languages.
This hypothesis, if sustained by further
study, will provide additional evidence that the site of the development of
the Aryan languages, and of the Nordic species, was in eastern Europe, and in
a region which is close to the place of contact between the most archaic
synthetic languages and the most nearly related non-Aryan tongue, the
agglutinative Ugrian. The Aryan tongue was introduced into Greece
by the Achaeans about 1400 B.C., and later, about 1100 B.C., by the true
Hellenes, who brought in the classic dialects of Dorian, Ionian, and Aeolian.
These Aryan languages superseded their
non-Aryan predecessor, the Pelasgian. From the language of these early
invaders came the Illyrian, Thracian, Albanian, classic Greek, and the
debased modern Romaic, a descendant of the Ionian dialect. Aryan speech was introduced among the
non-Aryan Etruscans of the Italian Peninsula by the Umbrians and Oscans about
1100 B.C. These languages were ultimately succeeded by Latin, an offshoot of
these early Aryan tongues of northern Italy which later spread to the
uttermost confines of the Roman Empire. Its descendants to-day are the
Romance tongues spoken within the ancient imperial boundaries, the Portuguese
on the west, Castilian, Catalan, Provencal, French, the langue d'oil of the
Walloons, Ligurian, Romansch, Ladin, Friulian, Tuscan, Calabrian, and
Rumanian. The problem of the existence of a language,
the Rumanian, in the eastern Carpathians, cut off by Slavic and Magyar
tongues from the nearest Romance languages, but nevertheless clearly
descended from Latin, presents great difficulties. The Rumanians themselves
make two claims; the first, which can be safely disregarded, is an unbroken
linguistic descent from a group of Aryan languages which occupied this whole
section of Europe, from which Latin was derived, and of which Albanian is
also a remnant. The more serious claim, however, made by
the Rumanians, is to linguistic and racial descent from the military
colonists planted by the Emperor Trajan in the great Dacian plain. This may
be possible, so far as the language is concerned, but there are some weighty
objections to it. We have no evidence for, and much against,
the existence of Rumanian speech north of the Danube for nearly a thousand
years after Rome abandoned this outlying region. Dacia was one of the last
provinces to be occupied by Rome, and was the first from which the legions
were withdrawn upon the dissolution of the empire. The northern Carpathians,
furthermore, where the Rumanians claim to have taken refuge during the
barbarian invasions, form part of the Slavic homeland, and it was in these
same mountains, and in the Ruthenian districts of eastern Galicia, that the
Slavic languages were developed, probably by the Sarmatians and Venethi, and
from which they spread in all directions in the centuries that immediately
follow the fall of Rome. So it is almost impossible to credit the survival of
a frontier community of Romanized natives situated not only in the path of
the great invasions of Europe-from the east, but also in the very spot where
Slavic languages were at the time evolving. Rumanian speech occupies a large area
outside of the present kingdom of Rumania, in Russian Bessarabia, Austrian
Bukowina, and above all in Hungarian Transylvania, all of which were parts of
ancient Dacia, and which are now to be "redeemed " by the
Rumanians. This linguistic problem is further
complicated by the existence in the Pindus Mountains of Thessaly of another
large community of Vlachs of Rumanian speech. How this later community also
could have survived from Roman times until to-day, untouched either by the
Greek language of the Byzantine Empire or by the Turkish conquest, is another
difficult problem. The solution of these questions receives no assistance
from anthropology, as these Rumanian-speaking populations, both on the Danube
and in the Pindus Mountains, in no way differ physically from their neighbors
on all sides. Through whatever channel they acquired their Latin speech, the
Rumanians to-day can lay no valid claim to blood descent, even in a very
remote degree, from the true Romans. The first Aryan languages known in western
Europe were the Celtic group which first appears west of the Rhine about 1OOO
B.C. There have been found only a few dim traces
of Pre-Aryan speech in the British Isles, these chiefly in place names. In
Britain Celtic speech was introduced in two successive waves, first by the
Goidels, or "Q Celts," who apparently appeared about 800 B.C., and
this form exists to this day as Erse in western Ireland, as Manx of the Isle
of Man, and as Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands. The Goidels were of bronze culture. When
they reached Britain they must have found there a population preponderantly
of Mediterranean type with numerous remains of still earlier races of Paleolithic
times, and also some round skull Alpines of the Round Barrows, who have since
faded from the living population. When the next invasion, the Cymric,
occurred, the Goidels had been very largely absorbed by these underlying
Mediterranean aborigines who had accepted the Goidelic form of Celtic speech,
just as on the continent the Gauls had mixed with Alpine and Mediterranean
natives though imposing upon the conquered their own tongue. In fact, in
Britain, Gaul, and Spain the Goidels and Gauls were chiefly a ruling,
military class, while the great bulk of the population remained unchanged,
although Aryanized in speech. The Brythonic or Cymric tribes, or "P
Celts," followed about five hundred years later, driving the Goidels
westward through Germany, Gaul, and Britain, as is proved by the distribution
of place names, and this movement of population was still going on when
Csesar crossed the Channel. The Brythonic group gave rise to the modern
Cornish, extinct within a century, the Cymric of Wales, and the Armorican of
Brittany. In central Europe we find traces of these
same two forms of Celtic speech, with the Goidelic everywhere the older and
the Cymric the more recent arrival. When the two Celtic-speaking races came
into conflict in Britain their original relationship had been greatly
obscured by the crossing of the Goidels with the underlying dark
Mediterranean race of Neolithic culture, and by the mixture of the Belgae
with Teutons. The result of all this was that the Brythons did not
distinguish between the blond Goidels and the brunet, but Celticized
Mediterraneans, as they all spoke Goidelic dialects. In the same way when the Teutonic tribes
entered Britain they found there peoples all speaking Celtic of some form,
either Goidelic or Cymric, and promptly called them all Welsh (foreigners).
These Welsh were preponderantly of Mediterranean type with some mixture of a
blond Goidel strain and a much stronger blond strain of Cymric origin, and
these same elements exist to-day in England. The Mediterranean race is easily
distinguished, but the physical types derived from Goidel and Brython alike
are merged and lost in the later floods of pure Nordic blood, Angle, Saxon,
Dane, Norse, and Norman. In this primitive, dark population, with successive
layers of blond Nordics imposed upon it, each one more purely Nordic, lies
the secret and the solution of the anthropology of the British Isles. This
Iberian substratum was able to absorb, to a large extent, the earlier
Celtic-speaking invaders, both Goidels and Brythons, but it is only just
beginning to seriously threaten the Teutonic Nordics, and to reassert its
ancient brunet characters after three thousand years of submergence. In northwest Scotland there is a
Gaelic-speaking area where the place names are all Scandinavian and the
physical types purely Nordic. This is the only spot in the British Isles
where Celtic speech has reconquered a district from the Teutonic languages,
and it was the site of one of the earliest conquests of the Norse Vikings,
probably in the early centuries of our era. In Caithness in north Scotland,
as well as in some isolated spots on the Irish coasts, the language of these
same Norse pirates persisted until within a century. In the fifth century of
our era and after the breakup of Roman domination in Britain there was much
racial unrest, and a back wave of Goidels crossed from Ireland and either
introduced or reinforced the Gaelic speech in the highlands. Later, Goidelic
speech was gradually driven north and west by the intrusive English of the
lowlands, and was ultimately forced over this originally Norse-speaking area.
We have elsewhere in Europe evidence of a
similar shiftings of speech without corresponding changes in the blood of the
population. Except in the British Isles and in
Brittany, Celtic languages have left no modern descendants, but have
everywhere been replaced by languages of Neo-Latin or Teutonic origin.
Outside of Brittany one of the last, if not quite the last, references to
Celtic speech in Gaul is the historic statement that "Celtic"
tribes, as well as "Armoricans," took part at Chalons in the great
victory in 451 A.D. over Attila, the Hun, and his confederacy of subject
nations. On the continent the only existing
populations of Celtic speech are the primitive inhabitants of central
Brittany, a population noted for their religious fanaticism and for other
characteristics of a backward people. This Celtic speech is said to have been
introduced in the early century of our era by Britons fleeing from the
Saxons. These refugees, if there were such, must have been dolichocephs of
either Mediterranean or Nordic race, or both. We are asked by this tradition
to believe that the skull shape of these Britons was lost, but that their
language was adopted by the Alpine population of Armorica. It is much more
probable that the Cymric-speaking Alpines of Brittany have merely retained in
this isolated corner of France a form of Celtic speech which was prevalent throughout
northern Gaul and Britain before these provinces were conquered by Rome and
Latinized. Caesar remarked that there was little difference between the
speech of the Belgae in northern Gaul and in Britain. In both cases the
speech was Cymric. Long after the conquest of Gaul by the
Goths and Franks, Teutonic speech was predominant among the ruling classes,
and by the time it succumbed to the Latin tongue of the Romanized natives,
the old Celtic languages had been entirely forgotten outside of Brittany. An example of similar changes of language
is to be found in Normandy where the country was originally inhabited by the
Nordic Belgae, who spoke a Cymric language before that tongue was replaced by
Latin. This coast was ravaged about 300 or 400 A.D. by Saxons who formed
settlements along both sides of the Channel and the coasts of Brittany, which
were later known as the Litus Saxonicum ["Saxon shore" -- Ed.].
Their progress can best be traced by place names, as our historic record of
these raids is scanty. The Normans landed in Normandy in the year
911 A.D. They were heathen Danish barbarians, speaking a Teutonic language.
The religion, culture, and language of the old Romanized populations worked a
miracle in the transformation of everything except blood in one short
century. So quick was the change that 155 years later the descendants of the
same Normans landed in England as Christian Frenchmen, armed with all the
culture of their period. The change was startling, but the blood of the
Norman breed remained unchanged and entered England as a purely Nordic type. |
Continue on to Part 2, Chapter 14 - THE ARYAN-LANGUAGE IN ASIA