Whitley Stokes, one of the
very ablest scholars formed in Zeuss's school, a born philologist,--
he now occupies, alas! a post under the Government of India, instead
of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think mournfully of
Montesquieu's saying, that had he been an Englishman he should never
have produced his great work, but have caught the contagion of
practical life, and devoted himself to what is called 'rising in the
world,' when Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his edition of Cormac's Glossary,
holds up the Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark that,
though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and those of corresponding
Indian and Zend divinities, point to the meaning sea, yet it is only
Irish which actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that
brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert! What a wholesome
buffet it gives to Lord Lyndhurst's alienation doctrines!
To go a little further. Of the two great Celtic divisions of
language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, the Gaelic, say the
philologists, is more related to the younger, more synthetic, group
of languages, Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic; the Cymric
to the older, more analytic Turanian group. Of the more synthetic
Aryan group, again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser and
more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more in sympathy with the
Turanian group and with Celtic.
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