e battle of
Luncarty long preceded the appearance of Normans in Scotland, but the
legend nevertheless persists.

Though the earliest European treatise on philological questions which
is now extant--the "Cratylus" of Plato,--as might be expected from its
authorship, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd guesses, yet
the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of language, and it
has been doubted whether Plato was more than half serious in some of
the suggestions which he puts forward. (For an account of the "Cratylus"
with references to other literature see Sandys' "History of Classical
Scholarship", I. page 92 ff., Cambridge, 1903.) In the hands of the
Romans things were worse even than they had been in the hands of Plato
and his Greek successors. The lack of success on the part of Varro and
later Roman writers may have been partly due to the fact that, from the
etymological point of view, Latin is a much more difficult language than
Greek; it is by no means so closely connected with Greek as the ancients
imagined, and they had no knowledge of the Celtic languages from which,
on some sides at least, much greater light on the history of the
Latin language might have been obtained. Roman civilisation was a late
development compared with Greek, and its records dating earlier than
300 B.C.--a period when the best of Greek literature was already in
existence--are very few and scanty. Varro it is true was much more of
an antiquary than Plato, but his extant works seem to show that he was
rather a "dungeon of learning" than an original thinker.

A scientific knowledge of language can be obtained only by comparison
of different languages of the same family and the contrasting of their
characteristics with those of another family or other families. It never
occurred to the Greeks that any foreign language was worthy of serious
study. Herodotus and other travellers and antiquaries indeed picked up
individual words from various languages, either as being necessary
in communication with the inhabitants of the countries where they
sojourned, or because of some point which interested them personally.
Plato and others noticed the similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek,
but no systematic comparison seems ever to have been instituted.

In the Middle Ages the treatment of language was in a sense more
historical. The Middle Ages started with the hypothesis, derived
from the book of Genesis, that in the early world all me