It is now recognized that inflection did not exist in the primitive Aryac dialects, but was gradually developed by means of such suffixes added to the stem, by different processes in the different dialects, many of which are in activity to-day.[96] These inflective processes bear closer resemblance to the Libyan, which has suffixes, and the old Egyptian, than to pure Semitic tongues, which leads to the suggestion, again, that the separation of the race was in the west rather than the east.
_Proto-Aryac Migrations._--Leaving these speculations as to the origin of the Aryac stock, let us sketch its probable migrations, as indicated by linguistic research. It appears to have divided early into two main streams, the one occupying central and southern Europe, the other moving eastward on a northerly route, the two meeting as they neared the Bosphorus.
The central stream was of Celtic affinities. Its tribes having possessed themselves of the coast line from Cape Finisterre to the mouth of the Rhine and the islands of Great Britain, passed up the valleys of the Rhine and its affluents into southern Germany, the valleys of Switzerland and the Tyrol, quite to the Danube. Its easternmost tribes were probably the Dacians.
The Aryac Italic peoples, the Umbrians, the Oscans, the Latins, were the first offshoot of this southern migration; not that they were directly descended from the Celts, but that they sprang from the same division of the primitive Aryac stock. This is still so clear that I remember Matthew Arnold in his lectures on poetry quotes sentences from ancient Irish which are also intelligible Latin.
A second offshoot was the Illyrians, who peopled the northern and eastern shores of the Adriatic, the ancestors of the modern Albanians.
A third was the Hellenic people, organized later than the Latins, and imbued with elements quite foreign to these.
The northern stream was the Letto-Slavic, whose primitive home was on the shores of the German Ocean north of the mouth of the Rhine, and in the region which extends thence to the Gulf of Finland. Its members presented the physical traits of the Libyo-Teutonic type, contrasting in this to the traits of the central and southern stream, who were of the dark type of the race. The Cymric type seems to have been a mingling of the two, and was found at or near the boundaries between them.