yan language, as it has been
reconstructed from the ruins scattered about in India, Greece, Italy,
and Germany, is clearly the result of a long, long process of thought.
One shrinks from chronological limitations when looking into such
distant periods of life. But if we find Sanskrit as a perfect literary
language, totally different from Greek and Latin, 1500 B.C., where can
those streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we trace them
back to their common source? And then, when we have followed these
mighty national streams back to their common meeting-point, even then
that common language looks like a rock washed down and smoothed for
ages by the ebb and flow of thought. We find in that language such a
compound, for instance, as _asmi_, I am, Greek [Greek: esmi].
What would other languages give for such a pure concept as _I am_?
They may say, _I stand_, or _I live_, or _I grow_, or _I turn_, but it
is given to few languages only to be able to say _I am_. To us nothing
seems more natural than the auxiliary verb _I am_; but, in reality, no
work of art has required greater efforts than this little word _I am_.
And all those efforts lie beneath the level of the common Proto-Aryan
speech. Many different ways were open, were tried, too, in order to
arrive at such a compound as _asmi_, and such a concept as _I am_. But
all were given up, and this one alone remained, and was preserved
forever in all the languages and all the dialects of the Aryan family.
In _as-mi_, _as_ is the root, and in the compound _as-mi_, the
predicative root _as_, to be, is predicated of _mi_, I. But no
language could ever produce at once so empty, or, if you like, so
general a root as _as_, to be. _As_ meant originally _to breathe_, and
from it we have _asu_, breath, spirit, life, also _as_ the mouth,
Latin _os_, _oris_. By constant wear and tear this root _as_, to
breathe, had first to lose all signs of its original material
character, before it could convey that purely abstract meaning of
existence, without any qualification, which has rendered to the higher
operations of thought the same service which the nought, likewise the
invention of Indian genius, has to render in arithmetic. Who will say
how long the friction lasted which changed _as_, to breathe, into
_as_, to be? And even a root _as_, to breathe, was an Aryan root, not
Semitic, not Turanian. It possessed an historical individuality--it
was the work of our forefathers, and represents a