Note 66 — THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE

See Les Scythes, les Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur à la faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg: Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are often, says Lord Strangford, ‘false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’ And Lord Strangford continues:—‘The Apian land certainly meant the watery land, Meer-Umschlungon, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from more, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages. But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for water, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujôs, and not a mere Latinised termination. Scythian is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas. It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to shoot, sceótan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-ti. Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong. Herodotus’s Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Dêvas, Deus, &c., but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl, topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tâb. Thymele refers to the hearth as the place of smoke (θύω, thus, fumus), but familia denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira. Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the spear, not the sword, Virgil’s gæsum, A. S. gár, our verb to gore, retained in its outer form in gar-fish. For Theuthisks lege Thiudisks, from thiuda, populus; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch. With our ancestors theód stood for nation generally and getheóde for any speech. Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers. The modern Celtic form is the Irish tuath, in ancient Celtic it must have been teuta, touta, of which we actually have the adjective toutius in the Gaulish inscription of Nismes. In Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its adjective being handed down in Livy’s meddix tuticus, the mayor or chief magistrate of the tuta. In the Umbrian inscriptions it is tota. In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en Prusiskan tautan, im Land zu Preussen.’