• sister projects:Wikipedia article,quotes,course,Wikidata item

It is customary to talk of the roots, stems and suffixes of wordsin the Indo-European languages. These languages are distinguishedfrom languages like Chinese by the fact that in the great majorityof words suffixes can be separated from roots. But the distinctionbetween them and the so-called agglutinative languages is one ofdegree rather than of kind. In the agglutinative languages, orat any rate in some of them, some of the post-fixed elements havestill an independent value. In the Indo-Germanic languages no onecan say what the meaning of the earliest suffixes was. Suffixeswhich have developed in individual languages or individual sectionsof this family of languages can often be traced,e.g. the often quoted -hoodin English words like “manhood,” or the English -ly in“manly,” which has gradually extended till it is actually attachedto its own parentlike in “likely.” But all recent investigation goesto show that before the Indo-European languages separated theypossessed words with all the characteristics which we recognize insubstantives like the Latindominus or verbs like the Greekδείκνυται.Or, to put the same fact in another way, by the comparative methodit is impossible to reach a period when the speakers of Indo-Europeanlanguages spoke in roots. A “root” is only a convenient philologicalabstraction; it is merely the remnant which is left when all theelements that can be analysed are taken away; it is therefore onlya kind of greatest common measure for a greater or smaller body ofwords expressing modifications of the same idea. Thus, though byno means the earliest form of the word, the Englishman might betaken as the “root” from which are derived by various suffixesmanhood,manly,mannish,manful,manned (past tense),manned(participle),unman,mannikin, &c. How far the suffixes whichcan be traced back to Indo-European times (i.e. to a time before theseparation of the languages) had existence as separate entities it isimpossible to say. From what we see of the later history of thelanguages it is much more probable that both forms and significationwere very largely the result of analogy. For in the making of newwords analogy plays a much larger part than any reference to generalprinciples of formation or composition. New words are to a largeextent, even in modern times, the invention of persons unskilled inthe history of language.

The first to point out that the term Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic)was not used uniformly in one sense was ProfessorKretschmer in hisEinleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache(Göttingen, 1896), pp. 9 ff. It is in fact used in three senses. (1)Indo-European is treated as preceding and different from all itsdescendants, a single uniform speech without dialects. But, strictly,no such language can exist, for even individual members of thesame family differ from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary,sentence formation, etc. Thus it appears impossible to ascertainwhat the Indo-European term for the numeral 1 was, since differentlanguages show at least four words for this, three of them presentingthe same root with different suffixes: (a) Sanskriteka (= *οι–qṷo–);(b) Zendaeva, Old Persianaiva, Greekοι–(ϝ)ο–ς (= *οι–ṷo–); (c)Greekοἰνή, “ace,” Latinunus (olderoenus), Old Irishoen, Gothicains, Lithuanianvénas (where the initialv has no more etymologicalsignification than thew which now begins the pronunciation of theEnglishone), Old Bulgarianinŭ; (d) Greekεἷς, ἔν (= *sem–s). Butthe Indo-European community must have had a word for thenumeral since the various languages agree in forms for the numerals2 to 10, and the original Indo-European people seem to have beenable to count at least as far as 100. On the other hand, if the Indo-Europeanlanguage must have had dialects, the line of differentiationbetween it and its descendants becomes obliterated. (2) But evenwhen a word is found very widely diffused over the area of the Indo-Europeanlanguages, it is not justifiable to conclude that thereforethe word must have belonged to the original language. The dispersionof the Indo-European people over the areas they nowinhabit, or inhabited in the earliest times known to history, musthave been gradual, and commerce or communication betweendifferent branches must have always existed to some extent; theword might thus have been transmitted from one community toanother. When a word is found in two branches which are geographicallyremote from one another and is not found in the intermediatearea, the probability that the word is original is somewhatstronger. But even in this case the originality of the word is by nomeans certain, for (a) the intervening branch or branches whichdo not possess the word may merely have dropped it and replacedit by another; (b) the geographical position which the branchesoccupy in historical times may not be their original position; thebranches which do not possess the word may have forced themselvesinto the area they now occupy after they had dropped the word;(c) if the linguistic communities which possess the word have aseaboard and the intervening communities have not, the possibilityof its transmission in connexion with early sea-borne commercemust be considered. At the dawn of European history the Phoeniciansand the Etruscans are great seafarers; at a later time theVarangians of the North penetrated to the Mediterranean and as faras Constantinople; in modern times sea-borne commerce broughtto Europe words from the Caribbean Indians likepotato andtobacco,and gave English a new word for man-eating savages—cannibal.Thus with Kretschmer we must distinguish between what is commonIndo-European and what is original Indo-European in language.(3) A word may exist in several of the languages, and may haveexisted in them for a very long time, and yet not be Indo-European.Hehn (Das Salz, ed. 2, 1901) rejectssalt as an Indo-European wordbecause it is not found in the Aryan group, though in this case heis probably wrong, (a) because, as has been shown by ProfessorJohannes Schmidt, its irregular declension (sal-d, genitivesal-nes)possesses characteristics of the oldest Indo-European words; (b)because the great plains of Iran are characterized by their greatsaltness, so that the Aryan branch did not pass through a countrywhere salt was unknown, although, according to Herodotus (i. 133),the Persian did not use salt to season his food. Since Kretschmerwrote, this argument has been used very extensively by ProfessorA. Meillet of Paris in hisDialectes indo-européens (Paris, 1908).In this treatise he brings forward arguments from a great varietyof facts to show that in the original Indo-European language therewere dialects, the Aryan, Armenian, Balto-Slavonic and Albanian,as we have seen, forming an oriental group with novel characteristicsdeveloped in common, although in various other characteristics theydo not agree. Similarly Italic, Celtic and Germanic form a Westerngroup, while Greek agrees now with the one group now with theother, at some points being more intimately connected with Italicthan with any other branch, at others inclining more towards theAryan. This grouping, however, is by no means exclusive, membersof either group having characteristics in common with individuals ofthe other group which they do not share with the other languages oftheir own group (Meillet, p. 131 ff.).

From all this it is clear that in many cases it must be extremelyuncertain what is original Indo-European and what is not. Somegeneral characteristics can, however, be predicated from what ishanded down to us in the earliest forms of all or nearly all the existinglanguages. (1) The noun had certainly a large number of distinctcases in the singular: nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative,locative, instrumental, dative.^[5] In the plural, however, there wasless variety, the forms for dative and ablative being from the earliesttimes identical. In the dual, the oblique cases cannot be restoredwith certainty, so little agreement is there between the languages.In the locative-singular the ending -i seems to have been of thenature of a post-position, because in various languages (notably inSanskrit) forms appear without any suffix. In the locative pluralalso the difference between the -su of Sanskrit and early Lithuanian(Slavonic -chu) on the one hand, and of -σι in Greek on the other, ​seems to be best explained by supposing that the –u and –i are postpositions,a conclusion which is strengthened by the Greek rulethat –σ– between vowels disappears. In the instrumental singularand plural it is noticeable that there are two suffixes—one, representedin Germanic and Balto-Slavonic only, beginning with thesound –m, the other, surviving in most of the other languages forthe plural, going back to an Indo-European form beginning with–bh. Professor Hirt of Leipzig has argued (Idg. Forschungen, v.pp. 251 ff.) that –bh– originally belonged to the instrumental plural(cf. the Lat.filiabus,omnibus, &c.), and the forms with –m– to thedative and ablative. But this is merely a conjecture, which has nolinguistic facts in its favour, for the –bi of the Latin dativetibi,which has parallel forms in many other languages, belongs to thepronouns, which show in their declension many differences from thedeclension of the noun (cf. also Brugmann,Grundriss (ed. 2), ii. 2,p. 120). (2) The adjective agrees with its noun in gender, numberand case, thus introducing a superfluous element of agreementwhich is not found,e.g. in most of the agglutinative languages.Thus in phrases like the Greekἡ καλὴ κόρη or the Latinillapulchra puella the feminine gender is expressed three times, with noadvantage, so far as can be detected, over the modern English,thatfair maid, where it is not obviously expressed at all. In this respectand also in the employment of the same case endings for the pluralas well as the singular, in the plural after a syllable expressingplurality, the agglutinative languages have a distinct superiorityover the Indo-European languages in their earliest forms. Somelanguages, like English and Modern Persian, have practically got ridof inflexion altogether and the present difficulty with it; others,like modern German, as the result of phonetic and analogical changeshave even intensified the difficulty. (3) In the personal pronouns,especially those of the first and second persons, there is widely spreadagreement, but more in the singular than in the plural. Formscorresponding to the EnglishI andthou, the Latinego andtu, arepractically universal. On the other hand the demonstrative pronounsvary very considerably. (4) The system of numerals (subject toslight discrepancies, as that regarding 1 mentioned above) is thesame, at least up to 100. (5) In the verb there were at first twovoices, the active and the middle, and three moods, the indicative,the subjunctive and the optative. It has been suggested by ProfessorsOertel and Morris inHarvard Studies, xvi. (p. 101, n. 3) that the similaritywhich exists between the earliest Greek and the earliest Aryanin the moods is the result of a longer common life between those twobranches. But of this there is no proof, and the great difference inthe treatment of the sounds by these two branches (see below)militates very strongly against the supposition. The tense formsindicated originally not relations in time but different kinds ofaction. The distinctive forms are the present, the perfect, and theaorist. The present indicated that an action was in progress orcontinuous, the aorist on the other hand regarded the action as awhole and, as it were, summed it up. The aorist has sometimesbeen said to express instantaneous action, and so it does. But thisis not the essence of the aorist; the aorist may be used also of along continued action when it is regarded as a whole. Greek showsthis very clearly. In Athenian official inscriptions it was usual tofix the date of the record by stating at the commencement who wasthe chief magistrate (archon) of the year. This was expressed bythe imperfect (ἠρχε). But when reference was made to a pastarchonship, that was expressed by the aorist (ἦρξε). The samecharacteristic is evident also in prohibitions; thus, in Plato’sApologyof Socrates,μὴ θορυβήσητε is “Do not begin to make a disturbance,”μὴ θορυβεῖτε is “Do not keep on making a disturbance.” Thesepoints are most easily illustrated from Greek, because Greek, betterthan the other languages, has kept the distinctive usages of bothmoods and tenses. The perfect as distinguished from the other formsexpresses either repetition of the action, emphasis, or the state whichresults from the action expressed by the verb. Different languagesregard this last in different ways. Sometimes the state resultingfrom the action is so characteristic that the perfect is almost anindependent verb. Thus in Greekκτάομαι is “I acquire,” butκέκτημαι (the perfect) is “I possess,” the result of the action ofacquiring. On the other hand the perfect may mean that the actionhas come to an end. This is specially common in Latin, as in Cicero’sfamous announcement of the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators,—Vixerunt(“They have lived” = “They are no more”).But it is by no means confined to Latin. The pluperfect, the pastof the perfect, is a late development and can hardly be reckonedIndo-European. In Greek the forms clearly arise from adding aoristendings to a perfect stem. The forms of Latin are not yet completelyexplained—but it is certain that the specially Latin meaningexpressing something that was past at a time already past (relativetime) is a late growth. When Homeric Greek wishes to express thismeaning it uses most frequently the aorist, but also the imperfectas well as the pluperfect, the notion of relative time being derivedfrom the context. In the earliest Latin the pluperfect is not uncommonlyused with the value of the aorist perfect. As regardsthe future it is difficult to say how far it was an original form.Some languages, like Germanic, preserve no original form for thefuture. When the present is found not to be distinctive enough,periphrastic forms come in. In other languages, like Latin andGreek, there is constant confusion between subjunctive and futureforms. It is impossible to distinguish by their form betweenδείξω(future) andδείξω (subjunctive), betweenregam (future) andregam(subjunctive). A special future with a suffix –sḭo– (syo) is found onlywith certainty in the Aryan group and the Baltic languages. Thefuture perfect is, strictly speaking, only a future made from a perfectstem; in the Latin sense it is certainly a late development, andeven in early Latin,videro has occasionally no different meaning fromvidebo. The imperative, which was originally an exclamatory formto the verb, of the same kind as the vocative was to the noun, andwhich consisted simply of the verb stem without further suffixes,developed, partly on the analogy of the present and partly with thehelp of adverbs, a complete paradigm. The infinitives of all thelanguages are noun cases, generally stereotyped in form and nolonger in touch with a noun system, though this,e.g. in early Sanskrit,is not always true. The participles differ only from other adjectivesin governing the same case as their verb; and this is not an earlydistinction, for in the earliest Sanskrit all verbal nouns may governthe same case as their verb.

The system here sketched in the barest outline tended steadilyto fall into decay. The case system was not extensive enough toexpress even the commonest relations. Thus there was no meansof distinguishing by the cases between starting from outside andstarting from inside, ideas which,e.g. Finnish regards as requiringseparate cases; without a preposition it was impossible to distinguishbetweenon andin, though to the person concerned there is muchdifference, for example between being on a river and in a river.There are other difficulties of the same kind. These had to be gotover by the use of adverbs. But no sooner had the adverbs becomewell established for the purpose of defining these local relations thanthe meaning was felt to exist more in the adverb than in the caseending. For this syntactical reason, as well as for mechanicalreasons arising fromaccent (q.v.), the case system in some languagesfell more and more into desuetude. In Sanskrit it has been keptentire, in Balto-Slavonic the only loss has been the disappearance ofthe original genitive and its replacement by the ablative. In Latinthe locative has been confused with the genitive and the ablative,and the instrumental with the ablative. The loss of the locative asan independent case had not long preceded historical times, becauseit survives in Oscan, the kindred dialect of the neighbouring Campania.Greek has confused ablative with genitive, except for onesmall relic recently discovered on an inscription at Delphi; in theconsonant stems it has replaced the dative by the locative form andconfused in it dative, locative and instrumental meanings. Insome other members of the family,e.g. Germanic, the confusion hasgone still farther.

The fate of the verb is similar, though the two paradigms do notnecessarily decay at the same rate. Thus Latin has modified itsverb system much more than its noun system, and Greek, whilereducing seriously its noun forms, shows a very elaborate verbsystem, which has no parallel except in the Aryan group. From thesyntactical point of view, however, the Greek system is muchsuperior to the Aryan, which has converted its perfect into a pasttense in classical Sanskrit, and to a large extent lost grip of themoods. The decay in Aryan may be largely attributed to the power,which this group developed beyond any other, of making compoundswhich in practice took the place of subordinate sentences to a largeextent. The causes for the modifications which the Latin verbsystem has undergone are more obscure, but they are shared notonly by its immediate neighbours the other Italic dialects, but alsoto a great degree by the more remote Celtic dialects.

Even before Latham a Belgian geologist, d’Omalius d’Halloy, in1848 had raised objections to the theory of the Asiatic origin of theIndo-Europeans, but his views remained unheeded. In 1864 hebrought three questions before theSociété d’anthropologie of Paris:(1) What are the proofs of the Asiatic origin of Europeans? (2) Havenot inflectional languages passed from Europe to Asia rather thanfrom Asia to Europe? (3) Are not the speakers of Celtic languagesthe descendants of the autochthonous peoples of Western Europe?(Reinach,op. cit. p. 38). Broca in replying to d’Omalius emphasizedthe fact which has been too often forgotten in this controversy,that race and language are not necessarily identical. In 1868Professor Benfey of Göttingen argued for the south-east of Europeas the original home, while Ludwig Geiger in 1871 placed it inGermany, a view which in later times has had not a few supporters.

Truth to tell, however, we are not yet ready to fix the site of theoriginal home. Before this can be done, many factors as yet imperfectlyknown must be more completely ascertained. The prehistoricconditions of Northern, Western, Central and South-easternEurope have been carefully investigated, but important new discoveriesare still continually being made. Investigation of otherparts of Europe is less complete, and prehistoric conditions inAsia are at present very imperfectly known. In WesternEurope two prehistoric races are known, the palaeolithic and theneolithic. The former, distinguished by their great skill in drawingfigures of animals, especially the horse, the reindeer, and the mammoth,preceded the period of the Great Ice Age which renderedNorthern Europe to the latitude of London and Berlin uninhabitablefor a period, the length of which, as of all geological ages, cannotdefinitely be ascertained. For the present purpose, however, this isof less importance, because it is not claimed that the Indo-Europeanstock is of so great antiquity. But when the ice again retreated itmust have been long before Northern Europe could have maintaineda population of human beings. The disappearance of the surfaceice must have been followed by a long period when ice still remainedunderground, and the surface was occupied by swamps and barrentundras, as Northern Siberia is now. When a human population oncemore occupied Northern Europe it is impossible to estimate in years.

The problem may be attacked from the opposite direction. Howlong would it have taken for the Indo-European stock to spread fromits original home to its modern areas of occupation? Some recentwriters say that it is unnecessary to carry the stock back fartherthan 2500 B.C.—a period when the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamiawere already ancient. Wherever the original home wassituated, this date is probably fixed too low. The discussion, moreover,is in danger not only of moving in one vicious circle but in two.(a) The term “Indo-European stock” necessarily implies race, butwhy might not the language have been from the earliest times atwhich we can trace it the language of a mixed race? (b) It is usualto assume that the Indo-European stock was tall and blond, infact much as the classical writers describe the early Germans. Butthe truth of this hypothesis is much more difficult to demonstrate.In most countries known to the ancients where blond hair prevailed,at the present day dark or brown hair is much more in evidence.Moreover the colour of fair hair often varies from childhood to middlelife, and the flaxen hair of youth is very frequently replaced by amuch darker shade in the adult. It has been often pointed out thatmany of Homer’s heroes arexanthoi, and it is frequently arguedthatξανθός means blond. This, however, is anything but certain,even when Vacher de Lapouge has collected all the passages inancient writers which bear upon the subject. When Diodorus(v. 32) wishes to describe the children of the Galatae, by whomapparently he means the Germans, he says that their hair as childrenis generallywhite, but as they grow up it is assimilated to the colourof their fathers. The ethnological argument as to long-headedand short-headed races (dolichocephalic and brachycephalic) seemsuntrustworthy, because in countries described as dolichocephalicshort skulls abound and vice versa. Moreover this classification, towhich much more attention has been devoted than its inventor Retziusever intended, is in itself unsatisfactory. The relation between thelength and breadth of the head without consideration of the totalsize is clearly an unsatisfactory criterion. It is true that to themathematician⁠3/4⁠ or⁠6/8⁠ or⁠9/12⁠ are of identical value, but, if it be alsogenerally true that mental and physical energy are dependent onthe size and weight of the brain, then the mere mathematical relationbetween length and breadth is of less importance than the size of thequantities. Anthropologists appear now to recognize this themselves.

The argument from physical geography seems more important.But here also no certain answer can be obtained till more is knownof the conditions, in early times, of the eastern part of the area.According to Ratzel^[7] the Caspian was once very much larger thanit is now, and to the north of it there extended a great area of swamp,which made it practically impossible for the Indo-European raceto have crossed north of the Caspian from either continent to theother. At an early period the Caspian and Black Sea were connected,and the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles were representedby a river which entered the Aegean at a point near theisland of Andros. While the northern Aegean was still land dividedonly by a river, it is clear that migration from south-eastern Europeto Asia Minor, or reversely, might have taken place with ease.Even in much later times the Dardanelles have formed no seriousbarrier to migration in either direction. At the dawn of history,Thracian tribes crossed it and founded, it seems, the Phrygian andArmenian stock in Asia Minor; the Gauls at a later time followedthe same road, as did Alexander the Great a generation earlier.At the end of the middle ages, Asia sent by way of the Dardanellesthe invading Turks into Europe. The Greeks, a nation of seafarers,on the other hand reached Asia directly across the Aegean,using the islands, as it were, as stepping-stones.

Though much more attention has been devoted to the subject byrecent writers than was earlier the practice, it is doubtful whethermigration by sea has even now been assigned its full importance.The most mysterious people of antiquity, the Pelasgians, do not seemto be in all cases the same stock, as their name appears merely tomean “the people of the sea,”Πελασγοἰ representing an earlierπελαγς-κοι, whereπελαγς is the weak form of the stem ofπέλαγος,“sea,” and -κοι the ending so frequent in the names of peoples.A parallel to the sound changes may be seen inμίσγω, for *μίγ-σκω,by the side ofμίγ-νυμι. As time goes on, evidence seems more andmore to tend to confirm the truth of the great migrations by sea,recorded by Herodotus, of Lydians to Etruria, of Eteocretans bothto east and west. An argument in favour of the original Indo-Europeansbeing seated in north-western Germany has been developedby G. Kossinna (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1902, pp. 161-222)from the forms and ornamentation of ancient pottery. It hascertainly not been generally received with favour, and as Kossinnahimself affirms that the classification of prehistoric pottery is stillan undeveloped science, his theory is clearly at present unequal tothe weight of such a superstructure as he would build upon it. Asthe allied sciences are not prepared with an answer, it is necessaryto fall back upon the Indo-European languages themselves. Theattempt has often been made to ascertain both the position of theoriginal home and the stage of civilization which the original communityhad reached from a consideration of the vocabulary forplants and animals common to the various languages of the Indo-Europeanfamily. But the experience of recent centuries warns usto be wary in the application of this argument. If we cut off allpast history and regard the language of the present day as we haveperforce to regard our earliest records, two of the words most widelydisseminated amongst the Indo-European people of Europe aretobacco andpotato. Without historical records it would be impossiblefor us to discover that these words in their earliest Europeanform had been borrowed from the Caribbean Indians. Most languagestend to adopt with an imported product the name given to it by itsproducers, though frequently misunderstanding arises, as in thecase of the two words mentioned, thepotato being properly the yam,andtobacco being properly the pipe, whilepetum orpetun (cp.petunia) was the plant.^[8]

The first treatise in which an attempt was made to work out theprimitive Indo-European civilisation in detail was Adolphe Pictet’sLes Origines indo-européennes ou les Aryas primitifs (1859–1863).The idyllic conditions in which, according to Pictet, early Indo-Europeanman subsisted were accepted and extended by manyenthusiastic successors. The father, the protector of the family(pater frompā, protect), and the mother (mater frommā, to produce)were surrounded by their children (Skt.putra), whose name impliedthat they kept everything clean and neat. The daughter was themilkmaid (Skt.duhitā fromduh, milk), while the brother (Skt.bhrātār), derived from the root offerre, “bear,” was the natural protectorof his sister, whose name, with some hesitation, is decided tomean “she who dwells with her brother,” the notion of brotherand sister marriage being, however, summarily rejected (ii. p. 365).The uncle and aunt are a second father and mother to the family,and for this reasonnepos, Skt.napāt, is both nephew and grandson.The life of such families was pastoral but not nomad; there was afarmstead where the women were busied with housewifery andbutter-making, while the men drove their flocks afield. The ox, thehorse, the sheep, the goat and the pig were domesticated as well asthe dog and the farmyard fowls, but it was in oxen that their chiefwealth consisted. Hence a cow was offered to an honoured guest,cows were the object of armed raids upon their neighbours, andwhen a member of the family died, a cow was killed to accompanyhim in the next world. Even the phenomena of nature to their ​naive imaginations could be represented by cows: the clouds ofheaven were cows whose milk nourished the earth, the stars were aherd with the sun as the bull amongst them, the earth was a cowyielding her increase. Before the original community, which extendedover a wide area with Bactria for its centre, had brokenup, agriculture had begun, and barley, if not other cereals, andvarious leguminous plants were cultivated. Oxen drew the ploughand the wagon. Industry also had developed with the introductionof agriculture; the carpenter with a variety of tools appears to constructfarm implements, buildings and furniture, and the smith isno less busy. Implements had begun with stone, but by this timewere made of bronze if not of iron, for the metals gold, silver, copper,tin were certainly known. Spinning and weaving had also begun;pottery was well developed. The flocks and herds and agriculturesupplied food with plenty of variety; fermented liquors, mead,probably wine and perhaps beer, were used, not always in moderation.A great variety of military weapons had been invented, but geographicalreasons prevented navigation from developing in Bactria.Towns existed and fortified places. The people were organized inclans, the clans in tribes. At the head of all, though not in the mostprimitive epoch, was the king, who reigned not by hereditary right,but by election. Though money had not yet been invented, exchangeand barter flourished; there were borrowers and lenders, and propertypassed from father to son. Though we have no definite informationas to their laws, justice was administered; murder, theft and fraudwere punished with death, imprisonment or fine (Résumé généralat end of vol. ii.).

Further investigation, however, did not confirm this ideally happyform of primitive civilization. Many of Pictet’s etymologies wereerroneous, many of his deductions based on very uncertain evidence.No recent writer adopts Pictet’s views of the Indo-European family.But his list of domesticated animals is approximately correct, ifdomestication is used loosely simply of animals that might be keptby the Indo-European man about his homestead. Even at thepresent day domestication means different things in the case ofdifferent animals. A pig is not domesticated as a dog is; in areaslike the Hebrides or western Ireland, where cattle and human beingsshare the two ends of the same building, domestication means somethingvery different from the treatment of large herds on a farmextending to many hundreds of acres. In other respects the heightof the civilization was vastly exaggerated. That the Indo-Europeanpeople were agricultural as well as pastoral seems highly probable.But as Heraclides says of the Athamanes (Fragmenta hist. Graec.ii. 219), the women were the agriculturists, while the men wereshepherds. Agriculture begins on a very small scale with the dibblingby means of a pointed stick of a few seeds of some plant which thewomen recognize as useful either for food or medicine, and is possibleonly when the people have ceased to be absolutely nomad and havefixed settlements for continuous periods of some length. Thepastoral habit is broken down in men only by starvation, if thepasture-lands become too cramped through an excessive increase ofpopulation or are seized by a conqueror. As has been well said,“of all the ordinary means of gaining a livelihood—with the exceptionperhaps of mining—agriculture is the most laborious, and isnever voluntarily adopted by men who have not been accustomedto it from their childhood” (Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, new ed.i. p. 266, in relating the conversion of the Bashkir Tatars to agriculture).Even the plough, in the primitive form of a tree stumpwith two branches, one forming the handle, the other the pole, wasdeveloped, and to this period may belong the representations in rockcarvings in Sweden and the Alps of a pair of oxen in the plough(S. Müller,Nordische Altertumskunde, i. 205; Dechelette,Manueld’archéologie, ii. pp. 492 ff.). The Indo-European civilization in itsbeginnings apparently belongs to the chalcolithic period (sometimesdescribed by the barbarous term of Italian origineneolithic) whencopper, if not bronze had come in, but the use of stone for manypurposes had not yet gone out. While primitive Indo-Europeanman apparently knew, as has been said, the horse, ox, sheep, goat,pig and dog, it is to be observed that in their wild state at leastthese animals do not all affect the same kind of area. The horseis an animal of the open plain; the foal always accompanies themother, for at first its neck is too short to allow it to graze, and themare, unlike the cow, has no large udder in which to carry a greatsupply of milk. The cow, on the other hand, hides her calf in a brakewhen she goes to graze, and is more a woodland animal. The pig’snatural habitat is the forest where beech mast, acorns, or chestnutsare plentiful. The goat is a climber and affects the heights, whilethe sheep also prefers short grass to the richer pastures suited tokine. To collect and tame all those animals implies control of anextensive and varied area.

What of the trees known to primitive Indo-European man? Onthis the greater part of the arguments regarding the original homehave turned. The name for thebeech extends through a considerablenumber of Indo-European languages, and it has generally beenassumed that the beech must have been known from the first andtherefore must have been a tree which flourished in the originalhome. Now the habitat of the beech is to the west of a line drawnfrom Königsberg to the Crimea. The argument assumes that itsdistribution was always the same. But nothing is more certainthan that in different ages different trees succeed one another onthe same soil. In the peat mosses of north-east Scotland are foundthe trunks of vast oaks which have no parallel among the treeswhich grow in the same district now, where the oak has a hardstruggle to live at all, and where experience teaches the planter thatconiferous trees will be more successful. On the coast of Denmarkin the same way the conifer has replaced the beech since the days ofthe “kitchen middens,” from which so much information as to theprimitive inhabitants of that area has been obtained. But withregard to the names of trees there are two serious pitfalls which it isdifficult to avoid. (a) It is common to give a tree the name ofanother which in habit it resembles. In England the oriental planedoes not grow freely north of the Trent; accordingly, farther norththe sycamore, which has a leaf that a casual observer might thinksimilar, has usurped the name of the plane. (b) In the case of thebeech (Lat.fagus), the corresponding Greek wordφηγός does notmeanbeech butoak, or possibly, if one may judge from the magnificenttrees of north-west Greece, the chestnut. It has been suggested thatthe word is connected with the verbφαγεῖν to eat, so that it wasoriginally the tree with edible fruit and could thus be specialized indifferent senses in different areas. If, however, Bartholomae’sconnexion of the Kurdbūz, “elm” (Idg. Forschungen, ix. 271) becorrect, there can be no relation betweenφαγεῖν andφηγός, but thelatter comes from a root *bhāuĝ, in which theg would becomezamong thesatem languages. The birch is a more widely spread treethan the beech, growing as luxuriantly in the Himalayas as inwestern Europe, but notwithstanding, the Latinfraxinus, which isalmost certainly of the same origin, means notbirch butash, whilethe word akin to ash (Gr.ὀξύη) appears in Latin without theksuffix asos- in Latinornus, “mountain ash,” for an earlier *osinos,cp. Old Bulgarianjasenŭ (thej has no etymological value), Welshand Cornishonnen, from an original Celtic *onna from *os-nā. Oneof the most widely spread tree names is the wordtree itself, whichappears in a variety of forms, Gr.δρῦς, Gothtriu; Skt.dāru,δόρυ,&c., which is sometimes as in Greek specially limited to the oak,while the Indiandeodar (deva-dāru) is a conifer. O. Schrader, whoin his remarkable book,Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte (1883,3rd ed., 1906–1907), locates the original home in southern Russia,would allow the original community (ii. p. 178) to be partly within,partly without the beech line. The only other tree the name ofwhich is widely spread is the willow: the Englishwith,withy, Lat.vitex, Gr.ἰτέα forϝιτέα, Lithuanianwýtis, Zendvaêti. Otherwisethe words for trees are limited to a small number of languages, andthe meaning in different languages is widely different, as Gr.ἐλάτη,“pine,” Old High Germanlinta, “linden,” with which go the Latinlinter, “boat,” and Lithuanianlentà, “board.” The lime tree andthe birch do not exist in Greece, and the Latinbetula is a borrowingfrom Gaulish (Irishbethe), the native wordfraxinus, as we haveseen, being used for theash. The equation of the Latintaxus, “yew,”with Gr.τόξον, “bow,” is no doubt correct; Schrader’s equationof Skt.dhanvan, “bow,” with the Germantanne, “fir,” must, ifcorrect, show at least a change of material, for no wood is less welladapted for a bow than fir. The only conclusion that can be drawnwith apparent certainty from the names of trees is that the originalsettlements were not in the southern peninsulas of Europe.

Some of the names for cultivated plants are widely spread, but likethe names of trees do not always indicate the same thing. This isnot surprising if we consider that the wordcorn, within the Teutoniclanguages alone, means wheat in England, oats in Scotland, rye inGermany, barley in Sweden, maize in the United States of America.Thus the Skt.yáva means corn or barley, in Zend corn (modernPersianjav, barley, but in the language of the Ossetesyeu,yau ismillet), the Gk.ζεά is spelt, the Lithuanianjawaḯ corn, the Irishéorna barley (Schrader,Sprachvergleichung³ ii. p. 188). The wordbere or barley itself is widely spread in Europe—Latinfar, spelt,Goth,barizeins, “of barley,” Old Norsebarr, Old Slav,bŭrŭ, a kindof millet (ibid.). But the original habitat of the cultivated grainplants has not yet been clearly established, and circumstances ofmany kinds may occasion a change in the kind of grain cultivated,provided another can be found suitable to the climate. In earlyEngland it is clear that the prevalent crop wasbarley, forbarn is thebere-ern or barley-house.

The earliest tree-fruits found in Europe are apparently thosediscovered by Edouard Piette as Mas d’Azil in a stratum which heplaces between palaeolithic and neolithic. They included nuts,plums, birdcherry, sloe, &c., and along with them was a little heapof grains of wheat. If Piette’s observations are correct, this findmust go back to a date long preceding the fruits found by Heer inthe pile-dwellings of Switzerland. Here also cherry-stones werefound, though the modern cherry is said to have been importedfirst by Lucullus in the first centuryB.C. from Cerasus in Pontus,whence its name. In the pile-dwellings a considerable number ofapples were found. They were generally cut up into two or threepieces, apparently to be dried for winter use. In all probabilitythey were wild apples of the varietyPirus silvatica, which is foundacross the whole of Central Europe from north to south (Buschan,Vorgeschichtliche Botanik, p. 166). The original habitat of theapple is uncertain, but it is supposed to be indigenous at any ratesouth of the Black Sea (Schrader,Reallexikon, s.v.Apfelbaum). Thehistory of the name is obscure; it is often connected with theCampanian town Abella, which Virgil (Aeneid, vii. 740) callsmalifera, ​“apple-bearing.” Here also the material for fixing the site of the originalhabitat is untrustworthy.

The attempt has been made to limit the possible area by a considerationof three animals which are said not to occur in certainparts of it—(a) the eel, which is said not to be found in the Black Sea;(b) the honey bee, which is not found in that part of Central Asiadrained by the Oxus and Jaxartes; (c) the tortoise, which is not foundin northern areas. From evidence collected by Schrader from aspecialist at Bucharest (Sprachvergleichung,³ ii. p. 147) eels are foundin the Black Sea. The argument, therefore, for excluding the areawhich drains into the Black Sea from the possible habitat of theprimitive Indo-European community falls to the ground. Honeywas certainly familiar at an early age, as is shown by the occurrenceof the word *medhu, Skt.mádhu, Gr.μέθυ (here the meaning hasshifted from mead to wine), Irishmid, Englishmead, Old Slav,medŭ,Lithuanianmedùs honey,midùs mead. Schrader, who is the firstto utilize the name of the tortoise in this argument, points out (op.cit. p. 148) that forms from the same root occur in both acentum andasatem language—Gr.χελύς, χελώνη, Old Slav.žĭly,želŭvĭ—butthat while it reaches far north in eastern Europe, it does not pass the46th parallel of latitude in western Europe. This argument wouldmake not only the German site for the original home which is supportedby Kossinna and Hirt impossible, but also that of Scandinaviacontended for by Penka.

From the foregoing it will be seen that the arguments for any givenarea are not conclusive. In the great plain which extends acrossEurope north of the Alps and Carpathians and across Asia north of theHindu Kush there are few geographical obstacles to prevent the rapidspread of peoples from any part of its area to any other, and, as wehave seen, the Celts and the Hungarians, &c., have, in the historicalperiod, demonstrated the rapidity with which such migrationscould be made. Such migration may possibly account for the appearanceof a people using acentum language so far east as Turkestan.But our information as to Tocharish is still too fragmentary to decidethe question. It is impossible here to discuss at any length therelations between the separate Indo-European languages, a subjectwhich has formed, from somewhat different points of view, thesubject of Kretschmer’sEinleitung in die Geschichte der griechischenSprache and Meillet’sLes Dialectes indo-européennes.

Bibliography.—Besides the articles on the separate languages inthis Encyclopaedia the following works are the most important forconsultation: K. Brugmann (phonology and morphology) and B.Delbrück (syntax),Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik derindogermanischen Sprachen (1886–1900), ed. 2, vol. i. (1897); ofvol. ii. two large parts, including the stem formation and inflexionof the noun, the pronoun and the numerals, have been publishedin 1906 and 1909. A shorter work by Brugmann,Kurzevergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, dealingmainly with Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Slavonic,appeared in three parts in 1902–1903. A good but less elaboratework is A. Meillet,Introduction à l’étude comparative des languesindo-européennes (1903, 2nd ed. 1908). For the ethnologicalargument: W. Z. Ripley,The Races of Europe (1900); G. Sergi,The Mediterranean Race (English edition, 1901). Other works,now largely superseded, which deal with this argument are K. Penka,Origines Ariacae (1883), andDie Herkunft der Arier (1886), and I.Taylor,The Origin of the Aryans,N.D. (1890). The ethnologists are nomore in agreement than the philologists. For the arguments mainlyfrom the linguistic side see especially O. Schrader,Sprachvergleichungund Urgeschichte (3rd ed., 2 vols., 1906–1907)—the second edition wastranslated into English by Dr F. B. Jevons under the titlePrehistoricAntiquities of the Aryan Peoples (1890);Reallexikon derindogermanischen Altertumskunde (1901); M. Much,Die Heimat derIndogermanen (1902, 2nd ed. 1904); E. de Michelis,L’Origine degliIndo-europei (1903); H. Hirt,Die Indogermanen (2 vols., 1905–1907);S. Feist,Europa im Lichte der Vorgeschichte und die Ergebnisseder vergleichenden indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft, 1910,in W. Sieglin’sQuellen und Forschungen zur alten Geschichte undGeographie. Important for special sections of this question are S.Müller,Nordische Altertumskunde (2 vols., 1897–1898), andUrgeschichteEuropas (1905); V. Hehn,Kulturpflanzen und Haustiere(1870), 7th ed. edited by O. Schrader, with contributions on botanyby A. Engler (1902); J. Hoops,Waldbäume und Kulturpflanzen imgermanischen Altertum (1905). Delbrück has devoted a specialmonograph to the I.-E. names of relationships, from which he showsthat the I.-E. family was patriarchal, not matriarchal (Die idg.Verwandtschaftsnamen, 1889). E. Meyer, from Tocharish being acentum language, has revived with reserve the hypothesis of theAsiatic origin (Geschichte des Altertums,² I. 2, p. 801). (P. Gi.) 

1. ↑E. Meyer,Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie (1908, pp. 14 ff.),and more fully inKuhn’s Zeitschrift (xlii. pp. 17 ff.); alsoGeschichtedes Altertums (i. 2, 2nd ed. pp. 807 ff.).
2. ↑Sieg und Siegling, “Tocharisch, die Sprache der Indoskythen”(Sitzb. d. Berl. Ak. 1908, pp. 915 ff.).
3. ↑No. xix. p. 255, “Another ancient and extensive class oflanguages, united by a greater number of resemblances than canwell be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-European,comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost allthe European languages.”
4. ↑Leo Meyer, “Über den Ursprung der Namen Indogermanen,Semiten und Ugrofinner,” in theGöttinger gelehrte Nachrichten, philologisch-historischeKlasse, 1901, pp. 454 ff.
5. ↑The vocative is not strictly speaking a case at all, for it standsoutside the syntax of the sentence. It was originally an exclamatoryform consisting of the bare stem without case suffix. In the pluralthe nominative is used to supply the lacking vocative form.
6. ↑For the history of the controversy see the excellent summary inSalomon Reinach’sL’Origine des Aryens: Historie d’une controverse(1892). Max Müller’s latest views are contained in hisBiographiesof Words and the Home of the Aryas (1888). See Schmidt’sDieUrheimat der Indogermanen und das europäische Zahlsystem (1890).
7. ↑“Geographische Prüfung der Tatsachen über den Ursprung derVölker Europas” (Berichte der k. sächsischen Ges. d. Wissenschaften,1900, pp. 34 ff.).
8. ↑See the essay on “Evolution and the Science of Language,” inDarwin and Modern Science (1909), p. 524 f.