Page:Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Curtin).djvu/36

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Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland.

partly blurred, and partly lost; but we may come to see in various degrees, from absolute accuracy to different kinds of approximation, what the lost and blurred beginnings were, and we shall continue to find this aid till we have parted company with the last of the non-Aryan myths.

Gaelic mythology contains many myth facts which have perished elsewhere. The Gaelic language shows that the Kelts left the home of the Aryan race at a period far anterior to any of the other migrations.

The present of the verb "to be" and the pronouns would suffice to prove this without reference to the body of the language, which even in present use preserves through its whole structure remarkable traces of antiquity in that freedom of arranging word-elements which is common to all languages at an early period of growth, but which in the other forms of Aryan speech has disappeared, though still common in so many non-Aryan languages. There is not in the oldest books of Persia and India, nor in any Aryan language, dead or alive, except Gaelic, a single instance of the substantive verb with the predicate between that part which is called the root and the pronominal particle.

The Gaelic speaker of to-day, if he wishes to say