These people have left in the west, not only considerable vestiges of
their blood, but no small amount of their language, or to state the
matter more accurately the language of these people has left a marked
effect upon the tongues which succeeded it in the west. More than
twenty years ago Mr., now Sir John Morris Jones[61] pointed out that
“the syntax of Welsh and Irish differs in some important respects from
that of the languages belonging to the other branches of the Aryan
family,” and suggested that these points, in which too the neo-celtic
tongues differed from ancient Gaulish, were due to the influence of a
language which had been spoken in these lands before the introduction
of the Celtic tongue. He pointed out that many of these peculiarities,
which occur also sometimes when the English tongue is spoken by
Irishmen, were similar to the syntactical arrangements in force in the
language of ancient Egypt and among the Berber dialects spoken by the
natives of Algeria, the Kabyles, Shawiya and Tuaregs.
Now the Egyptians and other peoples of North Africa are considered
by all anthropologists as typical members of the Mediterranean race,
though the inhabitants of the western part seem, as we have seen, to
have incorporated no small amount of Grimaldi blood; it would seem then
that we may accept the suggestion of Sir John Morris Jones that the
syntax of Welsh and Irish is a legacy from the language spoken by these
Mediterranean invaders, who reached Spain about 7000 /B.C./ and formed
the bulk of the population of the British Isles about 5000 /B.C./
So far we have been dealing with the early inhabitants of the Celtic
lands of the west, but a word must be said of some fresh arrivals into
the Celtic cradle in Central Europe. It was during the Azilian period,
about 6000 /B.C./, that a new race appeared in Central Europe, coming
from the east. Of their earlier abode we know nothing positively,
but there are reasons for inferring that their line of approach was
by the Kopet Dagh and the Armenian highlands, and that they came
ultimately from the slopes of the Hindu Kush and the western side of
the Himalayan _massif_. This race, which is called the race of Ofnet,
from the skulls found in the caves of Ofnet, in Bavaria, had a broad
head, the outline of which as viewed from above consisted of two
segments of circles, the one forming the back of the head, the other
the front. The brow-ridges are slight, the nose short and straight,
the eye-sockets low and almost rectangular, the cheek-bones not very
prominent and the chin weak and undeveloped.[62] This race seems to
have met and mated with the remnants of the Combe Capelle race in the
Upper Danube basin, and the progeny of this union seems to have been a
type with a pear-shaped head as seen from above, with a rounded back,
indistinguishable from the type found later in the Swiss lake-dwellings
and in the mountains of Central Europe at the present day, and which is
known as the Alpine race.[63]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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