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THE study of Indo-European philology and mythology has proved during the past half-century to be one of absorbing interest. People who profess no scientific or working knowledge of the languages of Asia or Europe have taken up the works written by our ablest philologists and mythologists almost with the relish and avidity with which many take up the light literature of the day; and an illustration of any given subject drawn from the mythic lore of our forefathers is always received with evident delight. In Professor Max Müller, it may safely be said, we have an advocate of these subjects who stands without a rival for felicity of language, fecundity of illustration and profundity of knowledge; and to him, more than to any other living writer, is due the wide-spread interest already referred to. As Clodd has remarked, the Professor "has the rare gift of putting into the sweetest words things that to the common eye look the driest." This fact, together with the general ignorance which prevails still in England relative to the Chinese and Turanian language and the forbidding appearance of the characters in which they are written which demand long years of patient study to make them intelligible, sufficiently accounts for the want of interest generally manifested in studies other than Aryan. But if we can succeed in placing before the student and the general reader in a popular form some of the interesting and attractive results of modern research into some of the languages of the East, we may hope that the time will not be far distant when people will ask as eagerly for, and devour as readily, facts which come to light respecting other Oriental peoples and tongues, as they have hitherto done in reference to those whose character is purely Aryan. It cannot be supposed that the people who formed the early stock of the Aryan family, before the Greek was Greek, or the Hindû Hindû, monopolized the entire privilege of handing down to after ages the most beautiful of ideas, myths and folktales; or that their language alone is full of expressive roots, which when dug out from the bed into which they have so deeply struck, will burn with brightest glow, and illuminate whole pages of dark and mysterious figures.

In England we are, or rather have been till recently, far behind France and Germany in these matters. To take an illustration from the European study of Chinese, for example, we find Professor Max Müller in his Inaugural Lecture ("Chips from a German workshop," iv. 2), only a dozen years ago, making the following statement:-"There are few of the great universities of Európe without a chair for that

language which, from the very beginning of history, as far as it is known to us, seems always to have been spoken by the largest number of human beings, I mean Chinese. In Paris we find not one, but two Chairs for Chinese, one for the ancient, another for the modern language of that wonderful empire; and if we consider the light which a study of that curious form of human speech is intended to throw on the nature and growth of language, if we measure the importance of its enormous literature by the materials which it supplies to the student of ancient religions, and likewise to the historian who wishes to observe the earliest rise of the principal sciences and arts in countries beyond the influence of Aryan and Semitic civilization; if lastly, we take into account the important evidence which the Chinese language, reflecting, like a never-fading photograph, the earliest workings of the human mind, is able to supply to the student of psychology, and to the careful analyser of the elements and laws of thought, we should feel less inclined to ignore or ridicule the claims of such a language to a Chair in our ancient university." In a humiliating foot-note he adds, “An offer to found a professorship of Chinese, to be held by an Englishman whom even Stanilas Julien recognised as the best Chinese scholar of the day, has lately been received very coldly by the Hebdomadal Council of the University." Since these words were written we are glad to say the shame has been wiped away. A Chair for Chinese is now to be found in Oxford, and as a proof of the kind of work which is turned out there being in no way inferior to that which issues from other Chairs, I will refer the reader to Dr. Legge's Religions of China. Whilst our present study will be independent, we may fairly preface our article with a kind of guarantee-passage from the work first quoted. By this it will be seen that Chinese word-lore is as valuable and interesting as that of Sanskrit, and may be made to yield similar results. Primitive for Heaven or Sky.

"Our first example shall be the character t'ien, the symbol for heaven. Its application must have been first to the visible sky, but, all along the course of history, it has also been used as we use Heaven, when we intend the ruling Power, whose providence embraces all. The character is made up of two other primitives [or roots as they might be called]—yî, the symbol of unity, placed over tâ, the symbol of great [(t'ien)=(yî=one) over ★ (tâ=great); compare Max Müller's, Introduction to the Science of Religions, p. 195; and BaringGould's Origin of Religious Belief; where the Chinese character and analysis as given by Dr. Legge, may be seen], and thus awakens the idea of the sky, which is above and over all, and to whose magnitude See Max Müller's Selected Essays, I. 110. The learned author there omits this footnote, and remarks that a Chair of Chinese has since been founded.

we can assign no limit. Professor Max Müller says: In Chinese, tien denotes sky or day, and the same word like the Aryan dyu, is recognized as the name of God' (Science of Language, 11. 480.)... Primitive for the name God.

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"That name was Ti. The character is more complex in form than tien [it is given on p. 61.]....There is no doubt, however, as to the idea which it was made to symbolize,-that, namely, of 'lordship and government'. . . . Thus the two characters shew us the religion of the ancient Chinese as a monotheism. How it was with them more

than 5,000 years ago, we have no means of knowing; but to find this among them at that remote and early period was worth some toilsome digging among the roots or primitive written characters." The reader will find other illustrations of the subject in the sections which follow those here quoted. It is remarkable that the study of the Egyptian hieroglyphs has brought to light a similar fact in reference to the early religion of that country;* and in the Babylonian religion a similar fundamental idea of a divine unity has been found to have existed. Here let us revert for a moment to the word for Hearen and God of which we spoke above. We saw that in Chinese it was composed of two roots meaning great and one, and that it was pronounced t'ien. Compare with this what we know about other names as they occur in the East. In Assyrian "the supreme God,‡ the first unique principle from which all the other gods took their origin, was Ilu whose name signifies the god' preeminently. He was the One, and the Good, whom the Neo-platonician philosophers announced as the common source of everything in Chaldean theology, and indeed the first principle is mentioned as 'the god One' in documents of the later epoch." Now in the numerical philosophy of China t'ien is represented by the number one, earth by two. Further, Ilu was called in Accadian Dingira, and Lenormant has shewn that Accadian is closely allied with the dialects of north-eastern Asia,-the Albaic, Tataric, Mongolic, &c. In these dialects Heaven is called Tengri or Tingri, "possibly [almost certainly] derived from the same source as Tien, signifying 1. heaven, 2. the God of heaven, 3. God in general, or good and evil spirits."|| Tien means not only Heaven but day; and this leads us to ask another question. Dr. Hunter§ has given us an interesting treatise on the Santal word din 'day,' which he supposes to be connected with the Sanskrit dyu given above, or a kindred root,

Lenormant Chaldean Magic and Sorcery, 79–80; Academy, March 12, 1881, p. 181. + Lenormant, p. 111-2. Ibid, p. 113.

Max Müller Science of Language, II. 480-1, and the many references there; Tiele Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, p. 74, and reff.

§ Annals of Rural Bengal, 173, cp. the same author's Dictionary of Non-Aryan Languages of India.

which has given rise to such forms as Sanskrit dina, and various forms still in use in Nepaul, Java, Bengal as din, dini, tini, jina, &c. In China the word for dawn is composed of the symbol for sun above

a stroke-representing the earth, thus . This word is connected with tien and is itself pronounced tân, reminding us of the Accadian tam'day,' and the dàng and tàn of Turkey. But without dwelling further on this question, which many will regard merely as a striking coincidence, let us turn to the study of

The word for Father.

Our English word Father and its cognate forms in the Aryan languages 'is derived from a root Pa, which means not to beget, but to protect, to support, to nourish.' The languages of Europe speak to the ear, that of China to the eye. When you first see a Chinese character it conveys to you no idea of the way in which it is to be pronounced, for there is no alphabet by means of which you may be able to spell out its sound. But after a very short period of study it will be found that the characters resolve themselves into pictures, with which the eye is educated; and by means of which you are able to gather, even better than you can from Aryan roots-which can only be understood by means of their out-growths, the ideas which were in the minds of the first scribes who undertook to write down the words employed. Your first glance at the hieroglyph or picture representing Father may result in the remark being expressed that you see in it nothing expressive of the idea you generally attach to that word. But look at it a little more closely, trace back the corrupted modern form through its various historical stages, and what do you find? The word which is now pronounced Fû is found to be the picture of a right hand holding a rod, which had the sound På or Pů attached thereto! Look at this more closely, and you will find how striking is the similarity between the modern and ancient word for Father as found in China and as found in the Aryan languages. I will not dwell on the similarity in sound; but you observe that the Chinese father was not pictured as the progenitor; he was, in the words above quoted from the lips of Prof. Max Müller, he who protects, supports, nourishes. In those early times people did not live as we do in cities and towns surrounded by strong defences or guarded by soldiers. Their huts were of the simplest kind, and might easily be entered by the wild beast of the forest or the equally wild foe of a neighbouring clan. Authority must be rested in some one, and who had so much right to carry the rod as the father, or so much power to wield it aright? Now trace the wanderings of this rod down through the historic ages, and what do you find? In the

first place you find that the father becomes the pastor (note the root På still), who carries the rod into the flock. The idea is common to China and Europe. Then the pastor becomes the spiritual protector of the people, and the Bishop still carries the staff in England, as the priest does in India and China. The father as the ruler of the family was the patriarch, and the patriarch became king. Hence the father's staff became the kingly sceptre. The people of China still speak of the Emperor as the father of the people, and call themselves his children, a survival of primitive times when the authority was literally rested in the father. A racy writer sometime since called attention to the Ju-i of the Chinese, a sort of sceptre which is often given by one friend to another, in the following words :-"This last object (the you-i or ju-i), which is the emblem of friendship, is a sort of sceptre, about a foot long. The you-i represents in reality a lotus leaf, whose stem is covered with allegorical figures or characters. One may reasonably suppose that it is not only the emblem of friendship, but also a symbol of authority. In all family pictures, the person who exercises power [which is rested on the death of the father in the first-born son, who carries the staff to the grave on the day of the funeral] holds in his hand this species of sceptre. It is perhaps a souvenir of the pastoral staff of the first rulers of peoples," or rather goes back even further than this, and finds its true explanation in the fact that the Father was he who carried the rod in his right hand. Yet one other observation. We have in this fact a commentary not only on the patria potestas in general, but especially on that passage "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." The Heavenly Father is supposed, like the earthly parent, to use the rod, but still it is the Father's hand which grasps it, and he will know when and how to chastize his children. If the father possesses great power a study of the word for

Son or descendant

will shew us that he cannnot be done without. If the Jew craved for male offspring, the Hindû, the Celestial, the Corean is not a whit behind in his anxiety to be thus blest. A striking fact recently came to light in connexion with the Miao-tsi, an aboriginal tribe still existing in some parts of China. To be polite amongst that peculiar race of people you add the name of the son to that of the father when speaking of the latter. Thus the name of the father may be Yol, and Heo that of his eldest son. You must therefore enquire for Heo-yoh. Whilst I was puzzling over the meaning of this, light came to my mind from the reference recently made in the papers to an Arab custom. A chief calls himself the father of his child; i.e. he asserts that he has now wiped out the disgrace which

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