"Indo-European" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is one of the most remarkable that has appeared in history. Whether it belongs to that extensive Indo-European family of nations, which, in ages before the dawn of history, took up a line of march in two columns from Lower India, and moving westward by both a northern and a southward route, finally diffused itself over Western Asia, Northern Africa, and the greater part of Europe; ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... vileness, which was imputed to them in some myths; but it is the irrationality and absurdity of mythology that seems, to the modern mind, to be its most uniform characteristic. So long as the only mythology that was studied was the mythology of Indo-European peoples, it was assumed, without question, that the myths could not really be, or originally have been, irrational and absurd: they must conceal, under their seeming absurdity and outwardly irrational appearance, some truth. They must have had, originally, some esoteric meaning. They ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... undervalue these accounts, or rather to decline generalising from them, as forming part of the traditions of a Semitic people. It is to be noted, however, that the legal testimony comes nearly exclusively from the institutions of societies belonging to the Indo-European stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and Sclavonians supplying the greater part of it; and indeed the difficulty, at the present stage of the inquiry, is to know where to stop, to say of what races of men it is NOT allowable to lay down that the society ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... of the figures would be the order of the signs, and the same order would pass into the spoken language. Hence LEIBNITZ says truly that "the writing of the Chinese might seem to have been invented by a deaf person." The oral language has not known the phases which have given to the Indo-European tongues their formation and grammatical parts. In the latter, signs were conquered by speech, while in the former, speech ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... patent. Under the equator is found the negro, in the temperate zones the Indo-European, and toward the pole the Lapp and Esquimaux. They are as different as the climates in which they dwell; nevertheless, history, philology, the common traditions of the race, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... strongly confirmed. The subject is one not unworthy of the talents of a Llwyd or a Prichard. It might, I think, be shown, by pursuing the inquiry, that the Cymric nation is not only, as Dr. Prichard has proved it to be, an early offshoot of the Indo-European family, and a people of unmixed descent, but that when driven out of their conquests by the later nations, the names and exploits of their heroes, and the compositions of their bards, spread far and wide ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... future; that is, to the men and races who made the books, as well as to the races and men the books made. The Bible will thus be studied in the Semitic family which gave it being, and also in the Indo-European families which gave to it the quality of the life to which they have attained. But Theology has to do with more than sacred literature; it has also to do with the thoughts and life its history occasioned. Therefore the Church has to be studied and presented as an institution which ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... home of the Aryan, or Indo-European race, was in Central Asia, whence many of its people migrated to the West, and became the founders of the Persian, Greek and Roman Nations, besides settling in Spain and England. Other offshoots of the original Aryans ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... are the Indo-European Telegraph Company, with two cables in the Crimea, of a total length of fourteen and a half miles; and the River Plate Telegraph Company, with one cable from Montevideo to Buenos Ayres, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... two only are in some degree known to us (chiefly from inscriptions) the Umbrian and the Oscan. These show a close affinity with one another, and a decided, though more distant, relationship with the Latin. All three belong to a well-marked division of the Indo-European speech, to which the name of Italic is given. Its nearest congener is the Hellenic, the next most distant being the Celtic. The Hellenic and Italic may thus be called sister languages, the Celtic standing in the position of cousin to ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... which the term 'Celtic' will be used in this work. It will be used in reference to those countries and districts which, in historic times, have been at one time or other mainly of Celtic speech. It does not follow that all the races which spoke a form of the Celtic tongue, a tongue of the Indo-European family, were all of the same stock. Indeed, ethnological and archaeological evidence tends to establish clearly that, in Gaul and Britain, for example, man had lived for ages before the introduction of any variety of Aryan or Indo-European speech, and this was probably the case throughout the whole ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... society. William van der Beck, whose fictional house of clay very obviously clothes the spiritual essence of the author, Mr. LUCIAN DE ZILWA, returns to his native Colombo with a liberal education, to find that the life and thought of the strange Indo-European bourgeoisie to which he belongs by birth present no alluring features. In point of fact the ambitions and hypocrisies, pretences and prejudices of the Cingalese "burgher" with the tell-tale finger-nails are merely those of Bristol or Amsterdam evolved under Colonial conditions. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... literature which the Caucasian mountaineers have inherited, and which they share with all the Semitic and Indo-European races, is not so deserving of notice as the literature which they have themselves invented—the stories, songs, anecdotes and burlesques which bear the peculiar impress of their own character. I shall endeavor, therefore, in giving specimens of Caucasian folk-lore, to confine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Sufficient data however are extant, and I trust that I have adduced evidence to render it extremely probable that a principle of analogy in structure prevails extensively among the native idioms of Africa. They are probably allied, not in the manner or degree in which Semitic or Indo-European idioms resemble each other, but by strong analogies in their general principles of structure, which may be compared to those discoverable between the individual members of two other great classes of languages, by no means connected among themselves by what is called family ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... division comprehends those various barbarous nations of unknown origin which occupied the territories surrounding the Indo-European race, and were for the most part subdued and expelled by the latter—to this fourth division ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the Indo-European world, we go this year to the extreme East. From the soft rain and green turf of Gaeldom, we seek the garish sun and arid soil of the Hindoo. In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... peculiar technical terminology; and the difficulty was considerably enhanced by the fact that the Syriac in many cases stood between the original Greek and the Arabic, and in the second place by the great dissimilarity between the Semitic language and its Indo-European original. This may have made the copies of Aristotle's text rare, and gradually led to their disuse. The great authority which names like Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes acquired still further served to stamp them as the approved expositors of ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... traditions hidden in the hills of Wales. But the word "Mappe" or "Malory" will always mean King Arthur; even though we find older and better origins than the Mabinogian; or write later and worse versions than the "Idylls of the King." The nursery fairy tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately extinct; they may have been invented by some fine French lady or gentleman like Perrault: they may possibly even be what they profess to be. But we shall always call the best selection ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... Aytareya-Brahmanam, that of the Brahmans, were written in one and the same Sanskrit language; (2) that all these three languages—Zend, Nepalese, and the modern Brahman Sanskrit—are more or less dialects of the first; (3) that old Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient Indo-European languages, as well as of the modern European tongues and dialects; (4) that the three chief religions of heathendom—Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Brahmanism—are mere heresies of the monotheistic teachings of the Vedas, which does not prevent ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to launch a new name for ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... I think we have a glimpse of the real character of the cups to which the legend I am discussing attaches. They were probably sacrificial vessels dedicated to the old pagan worship of the house-spirits, of which we find so many traces among the Indo-European peoples. These house-spirits had their chief seat on the family hearth; and their great festival was that of the New Year, celebrated at the winter solstice. The policy of the Church in early and mediaeval times was to baptize to ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... authors believe that the painted pottery came from the West where it occurs definitely earlier than in the Far East; some investigators went so far as to regard the Indo-Europeans as the parents of that civilization. As we find people who spoke an Indo-European language in the Far East in a later period, they tend to connect the spread of painted pottery with the spread of Indo-European-speaking groups. As most findings of painted pottery in the Far East do not stem from scientific excavations it is difficult to make any decision ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... to which English belongs.— Our English tongue belongs to the Aryan or Indo-European Family of languages. That is to say, the main part or substance of it can be traced back to the race which inhabited the high table-lands that lie to the back of the western end of the great range of the Himalaya, or "Abode of Snow." This Aryan race grew ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... who brought with them, from the country beyond the Indus, a distinctive religion, language, and political institutions. Their language was closely connected with the Aryan dialects of India, and the tongues of modern Europe. Hence the Persians were noble types of the great Indo-European family, whose civilization has spread throughout the world. Their religion was the least corrupted of the ancient races, and was marked by a keen desire to arrive at truth, and entered, in the time of the Gnostics, into the speculations of the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... persistency of type in all lines of descent, insomuch that a subordinate admixture of various type is usually obliterated in a few generations. Numerous as the varieties are, they have all been found classifiable under five leading ones:- 1. The Caucasian or Indo-European, which extends from India into Europe and Northern Africa; 2. The Mongolian, which occupies Northern and Eastern Asia; 3. The Malayan, which extends from the Ultra-Gangetic Peninsula into the numerous islands of the South Sea and Pacific; 4. The Negro, chiefly confined to Africa; 5. The aboriginal ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... in the multiplication of languages. Whether all languages have grown from one stock, or whether, as some philologists think, they have grown from two or more stocks, it is clear that since large groups of languages, as the Indo-European, are of one parentage, they have become distinct through a process of continuous divergence. The same diffusion over the Earth's surface which has led to differentiations of race, has simultaneously led to differentiations ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... great splendor, a state of things leading to a mixture of race. Thus Spanish blood has three distinct times been abundantly crossed with that of Africa. The warm climate of the peninsula must also largely contribute to render its inhabitants fit for life in the tropics. The pure Indo-European race has never succeeded in establishing itself on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, much less in the arid ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... which the human species has evolved from its earliest appearance on earth, gradually working up through the different evolutionary processes to what is to-day supposed to be the acme of perfection as seen in the Indo-European and Semitic races of man. Anatomy points to the rudiment—still lingering, now and then still appearing in some one man and without a trace in the next—of that climbing muscle which shows man in the past either ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... comfortable in the daytime, and with crisp, frosty weather at night. The first snow of the season commenced falling while a portion of the English colony were enjoying a characteristic Christmas dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, at the house of the superintendent of the Indo-European Telegraph Station, and during January and February, snow-storms, cold and drizzling rains alternated with brief periods of clearer weather. When the sun shines from a cloudless sky in Teheran, its rays are sometimes uncomfortably warm, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... from p by the presence of vibration of the vocal chords and from m because the nasal passage as well as the lips is closed. When an audible emission of breath attends its production the aspirate bh is formed. This sound was frequent in the pro-ethnic period of the Indo-European languages and survived into the Indo-Aryan languages. According to the system of phonetic changes generally known as "Grimm's law," an original b appears in English as p, an original bh as b. An original ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... description. It is an orthodox description attempting to fit simple Japanese sentences into the framework established for Latin by the great Spanish humanist Antonio Lebrija. Thus, as an application of pre-Cartecian grammatical theory to the structure of a non-Indo-European language, the Ars Grammaticae is an important document worthy of careful examination by those wishing insight into the origins of what three centuries later was to become the purview ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... the reader will pursue, with unflagging interest, in such works as the various writings of Mr. Max-Muller; the "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," by Mr. Cox; Mr. Ralston's "Russian Folk Tales;" Mr. Kelly's "Curiosities of Indo-European Folk Lore;" the Introduction to Mr. Campbell's "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," and other publications, both English and German, bearing upon the same subject. In the hope that his labour may serve this purpose, the author ventures to ask for an indulgent rather than a critical ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce |
