पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/१७

10 SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN greatest diversity of them is to be found, and this from the earliest recorded times. At an ancient period we find enormous stretches of Asia in the occupation of Indo-Iranian, a single member of the family, and as yet little differentiated ; in Europe on the other hand a concentration of many languages occupying comparatively restricted areas, and already markedly different from each other. It follows of necessity that the pres- ence of Indo-European in the Indo-Iranian area is the result of late colonial expansion on a vast scale, while in Europe the existence of such great diversity at the earliest recorded period indicates the presence there of Indo-European from remote antiquity. It is true that the discovery of the two Tocharian dialects in Chinese Turkestan has slightly modified this picture, and it has led some to think again of an Asiatic home* But the addition of one new branch only in Asia is obviously insufficient to turn the balance. Moreover the nature of Tocharian, which has under- gone profound and far-reaching phonetic changes strongly sug- gestive of alien influence, makes it clear that this language has travelled far from its original home. Somewhat similar changes have taken place in Hittite and the allied languages of Asia Minor, and this is held to have been due to the influence of the pre-Indo-European , languages which existed in that area (Proto-Hittite, Churrian, Urartean, etc.). So we may conclude that these languages also have been brought in by invaders, and since in ancient times the distribution of languages in this area was such that the non-Indo-European languages mentioned lay to the East and the Indo-European languages to the West, it becomes clear that the direction of the invasions must have been from the West, that is to say from Europe, across the Hellespont. Further it has been pointed out that the character- istics of this Asianic branch of Indo-European are such as can only be explained by the assumption that it was separated from the main branch of Indo-European at a period very much earlier than the movements which lead to the final break-up of IE linguistic unity. This means that the earliest of all the Indo-European migrations which can be deduced from our evidence, and one that must have antedated the migration of the Indo-Iranians by a very long period of time, already points to the existence in Europe of the Indo-European tongue. Within Europe it is possible to narrow down considerably the