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138
THE SPEECH OF THE GODS
mankind, and especially to the Aryan nations, to trace exactly the source from which our ancestor-the Aryan, not the ape-derived his few hundred primitive roots, for in their source and character we have a measure of his mind, a finger-post pointing either heavenwards to man's divine progenitors, or apewards to the prognathons and hairy chimpanzee.
On the one hand we shall except to dicover a spiritual relation between sounds and the various powers, forms and colors and the universe, the value of which was intuitionally perceived by the earliest Aryans; on the other, we shall look to find the echoes of the grunts and squeals of our poor relation perched on a treebranch mumbling his acorns.
Roots, say the theorists, were at first either a matter of convention, or were formed by imitating the sounds of nature, and by exclamations and interjections. The chief objection to the first theory [which indeed was never very seriously defended] is that, contrary to hypothesis the Aryan roots, as a whole, do not express the wants and notions of such a primitive people as we were led to postulate. We find for example comparatively few words, such as bow, arrow, and tent, while there are a great many expressing abstract or reflective ideas, like shine, to fly, to know, to burn. The second also is all very well as a theory, but at the first rude contact with fact it collapses. We find very few words which could possibly be formed according to
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