The labors of the skilful philologue of Beziers, M. B o u d a r d , have
put the finishing stroke in bringing this fact to light.
The Celts, or Kelts, encountered before them, therefore, the Iberes;
whom they pushed onward into the south of Gaul, where we find
them established in the time of Csesar. They amalgamated with
them, as the name of Celt-Iberia teaches; and very certainly in Languedoc
also, no less than in Aquitania. These Iberians—a nation
lively and impressionable, vain and stirring—may well have infused
into the Keltic blood that element of restlessness and levity which
one perceives in the Gauls, but which is alien, on the contrary, to
the true Kelt, — at once so attached to his traditions, and ever so
headstrong in his ideas.
The Basque tongue, otherwise called Iberian, resembles in nothing
the Indo-European idioms. If is “par excellence” a polysynthetical
language, -t— a tongue that, in its organism, reminds one, in a sufficiently
striking manner, of the languages of America. It composes “ de
toutes pieces” the idea-ivord; suppresses often entire syllables; and, in
this work of composition, preserving sometimes but a single letter of
the primitive word, it presents those adjunctive particles that by philologists
are termed postpositions—as opposed to prepositions—wbich
serve to distinguish eases. In this manner is it that the Basque
constructs its declension. This new characteristic re-appears in
another great family of languages which we shall discuss anon, viz :
the Tartar tongues belonging to central Asia.
The Basque, consequently, denotes a very primitive intellectual
state of the people who occupied western Europe previously to the
arrival of the Indo-Europeans; and, were it allowable to draw an
induction from an isolate characteristic, one might suppose that the
Iberes were, as a race, allied to the Tartar.
But this hypothesis, daring as it is, receives a new degree of
probability from the study of the second group of European languages,
foreign to the Indo-Germanie source, viz: the Finnish group.
This group is not restricted to a few idioms on the north-east of
Europe. It extends itself over all the territory of northern Russia
even to the extremity of Kamtschatka. Comparison of the numerous
idioms spoken by tribes spread over Siberia has revealed a common
bond between them, as well of grammar as of vocabulary. These
tongues, which might be comprehended under the general appellation
of Finno- Japonic (from the name of those occupying upon the map the
two extremes of their chain), offer this same characteristic of agglutination
that has just been signalized in the Basque; but in a much less
degree. They make use of that curious system of postpositions
which appertains also to the ancient idiom of the Iberes. Those terminations
destined to represent cases are replaced by prepositions
distinct from the word,—which, in our languages, precede, on the
contrary, the words of which they modify the case. It must be
noted that the apparition of these postpositions invariably antecedes,
in the gradual formation of tongues,1 the employment of cases;
whereas, prepositions replace these when the tongue becomes altered
and simplified. Cases are nothing, indeed, but the result of the
coupling of the postposition to words. The organic march of the
declension presents itself,, therefore, throughout the evolution of languages,
in the following manner, viz: at first the root (or radical),
ordinarily monosyllabic; next, the radical followed by postpositions,
—corresponding to the period of agglutination; again, the radical
submitted to the flexion,—corresponding to the ancient period of our
Indo-European tongues; and, finally, the preposition followed by the
radical,—corresponsive to the modern period of these same lan-
guages.. It is to be noted th a t, the postposition (in relative age)
never returns subsequently to the preposition,—any more than can
the milk-teeth grow again in an old man after the loss of his molars.
Thus, then, the age of the Finnish tongues and of the Basque is
fixed. They were idioms of analogous organization, and of 'which
the arrest of development announces a sufficiently feeble degree of
intellectual power.18 The brethren of the Aryas and Iranians, upon
penetrating into Europe, had only, therefore, to combat populations
living in a state analogous to that in which we find the hordes of
Siberia,—species of Ostiaks or of Vogouls, of Tcheremiss or of Mord-
vines. With their intellectual superiority, the people coming from
occidental Asia had no need of being very numerous to vanquish
such barbarous tribes; with whom, doubtless, they frequently amalgamated,
but of whom they ever constituted the aristocracy. This
warrior and haughty spirit of those Asiatic conquerors preserved
itself above all among the Germans, and it is to be perceived also
amid the Latins and the Greeks.
Let it not, however, be imagined that, beneath the influence of the
•neighborhood which new migrations created for them, such tribes
of Finnish stock thrown off to the north-east of Europe, and those
16 The study of the vocabulary of the Finnish tongues, and even that of the Tartarian,
proves to us that those populations were wanting in a quantity of knowledge that we find!
trom the very beginning, amidst the Indo-European populations, and which the former were
afterwards forced to borrow from the latter. For example, the name of salt, in all the
idioms of that family as well as in Hungarian, expressed by a derivative of the Sanscrit,
ureek, or Latin name. Indeed, it is certain that the use of salt remained for a long time
unknown to the inhabitants of Northern Europe; and that Christian II, king of Denmark,
ad gamed^ver the Swedish peasants by bringing to them this precious condiment.