HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE.
THE most careless observer of modern science is probably aware " of the great advance that has been made of late years in what we may call the science of conjectural philology. Patriotism per- haps blinds us, but we are inclined to assign the merit of founding it to Dean Swift, who, in a short but memorable treatise, interpreted all the names of classical antiquity by English, and proved that Homer was an O'Meara, and that Alexander the Great derived his name from epicurean tastes, which obliged his household to put "all eggs under the grate" for him. Swift's beginnings were ingeniously followed up in a more arduous field by Bishop Warburton, who devotes part of the Divine Legation to what we may call a pictorial explanation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, in which he proves that the Pharaohs and their literati covered pyramids and obelisks with pan- tomimic representations of moral apophthegms. The science thus founded soon became cosmopolitan in its range, and a host of learned Germans have developed it so happily in the last half-century that even undergraduates are now acquainted with the fundamental canon of neo-philology, by which "vowels go for nothing and consonants don't count." Generally it may be said that the results of the science are greatest where the material is least, and just as Professor Owen gets more credit for restoring a lost species from a fragment of a femur than for describing a host of common " passeres" or "psittaci," so the critic who can deduce a language from a few lines, or even from a few conso- nants, is naturally to be preferred to his rival who works with a vo- cabulary at hand. We are therefore bound, modestly but positively, to declare our preference for cuneiform and Sinaitic inscriptions to the best possible interpretations of Eugubine and Bantine tables; and the scholar, whose successes are confined to rendering " fos," bonus, " paker," propitius, " petiropert," quadrifariam, or " hipid," habeat, has, in our opinion, not got beyond the A B C of his profes- sion. Our daughters, twenty years hence, will be capable of this. Meantime, as all things are relative, we have great pleasure in noticing a very brilliant production of this second class which has lately been printed for private circulation among the learned. Report ascribes it to one whom we only venture to indicate in the new philological fashion of Georgian courtesy as a C-b-n-t M-n-st-r, and we must leave it to our readers to guess whether Lord P-lin-rst-n's late seclusio which the papers ascribed to gout, may not have had some pr founder and more learned motive. Trifles like the Trent affair ca never fill the hearts or engross the minds of men who have studied the principles of a Bopp and the results of an Aufrecht.
Nothing can be more satisfactory than the account which the little pamphlet before us gives of its origin. The author, in the true spirit of his work, has assumed the name of John Brown, a mythical eponymic of English veracity and common sense, rather than a pseudonym. Travelling with two companions, Mr. Jones, of Jesus, Oxford, and Mr. Robinson, of Trinity, Cambridge, both of whom, we believe, will be found inscribed on the books of their respective colleges, he bad the good fortune to meet one whom he designates as Baron Munchausen, again, no doubt, symbolically expressing that class of intelligent discoverers to which George Psalmanazar and Dr. Simo- aides belong. The great traveller presented the three Englishmen with an inscription, which he had himself found among the fragments of a Cyclopean wall near Cosenza, in Calabria. The precious docu- ment was fortunately uninjured, and Mr. Brown was entrusted by his companions with the charge of deciphering it. He seems hitherto to have been ignorant of the old Italian languages, but a child may fol- low where Mommsen and Aufrecht have gone before, and Mr. Brown's success, therefore, though highly creditable to him, is scarcely won- derful. The inscription reads thus :
HEYDEDDLEDIDDLE TICEO&TANDTREFIDDLE TRECOUTITXPEDOVERTHEMOON THELITTLEDOGLACIGHED TOSEESUCHFINESPORT ANDTHEDISRRANACIATIIITHTHESPOON.
In old writing of this sort, where there is no distinction of words, the first point naturally is to ascertain if any particular combination of letters occurs more than once, as the chances that it is a distinct word will of course _be very great. Here the letters TICE occurring some seven times, gave the desired key to the whole. No one could doubt that they represented a common, and yet an important word; they are not likely to be a proper name; and any one remembering the mingled Greek and Latin elements in Calabria, the old Brut- tium, would feel instinctively that they probably indicated the crude form of TEE-OS, Deus, God. The frequent use of the word seems to imply that the inscription belonged to an altar, or a temple, so that its general character may be pretty well guessed. Take now the different lines in order. A proper name may always be looked for in the first line, and HET at once recals the TEEMS of Cicero's Verrine Orations, who, as a native of Messina, might naturally have founded a temple or a shrine in the locality. Sceptics, too, will do well to observe that there is no guessing in all this, as the twofold recur- rence of the word DIDDLE forbids any confusion of its letters with those that go before. It can scarcely even be considered a conjec- ture, so irresistible is the inference from the facts, when Mr. Brown goes on to observe that "the family of the Heji had no doubt been derived from Bmttium, and was of noble ancestry, rich and emi- nently devout ia paying service to the gods." Neither will any scholar hesitate to derive the reduplicated form DIDDLE as a sort of aorist from the root D—, implying a gift, of which the Latin "do" is an obvious instance, perhaps compounded in this case with 8eXovrfor, willingly, though we confess we should ourselves prefer to regard the ix as a crude pronominal suffix. Still Mr. Brown is, no doubt, right in maintaining the possibility of a composite form from Greek and Latin, on the authority of Huschke and Aufrecht. Our newspapers teem with examples of this sort of combination every day, when they advertise the Eureka-shirt and seltzo-genes, or talk of arch-humbugs or ante-rooms. Passing on to FIDDLE, the same process as in the case of DIDDLE brings us to its root-form F-V, of which faveo fautum is the Latin instance. Comm, in the third line, is a word of the same class as bivium and triviutn, and of course means a place where several roads meet. Here our dictionaries will be the richer by an indispensable word, which has dropped in some wonderful manner out of our extant classical authors ; a proof among others that they cannot be blindly trusted to. In PEDOVER Mr. Brown at once recognizes the Doric ffEaa for Aera, and the common Latin ova (eggs) with the Umbrian termination R. NOON is, of course, mundus, the kosmos, or universal Pan, whom a linger- ing Pelasgic superstition retained in the memories of men. Where results are so obvious, we need hardly detain our readers with any further explanation of the process by which they are arrived at. Mr. Brown renders the whole inscription thus : " Hejus dediflibenter, dedit libenter. Deus propitius (est). Deus donatori libenter favit. Deus in viarum junctura °Parana dape (colitur), deus mundi. Deus in litatione voluit benigno ammo hredum taurum intra fines (loci sacri) portandos. Deus bis lustratus beat fossam iserre libationis." " Hejus gave freely, gave freely. God is propitious. God hatli freely favoured the giver. God, the God of the world, is honoured with a feast of eggs at the meeting of the paths. God hath pro- pitiously been minded in the sacrifice (or being sacrificed to) that a goat, or bull, should be brought within the limits of the sacred place. Pod, the lustrations twice performed, blesses the trench of the sacred libation." Those who like to look up the translations of Umbrian and Etruscan remains, or even of Welsh poems, like the " Gododin," will find that for simplicity, sense, and probability, Mr. Brown's version has little to fear from competition. He may well dismiss critics like Mr. Forster, who doubt the possibility of reconstructing a language from forty or fifty consonants, with a kindly contemptuous admonition "to purge himself of his heretical pravity." Given a few root-forms, the philologist can afford to dispense with grammars, dictionaries, literature, and vowels.
• No doubt critics will attempt to disparage Mr. Brown's labours. Some will, perhaps, attack the authenticity of the inscription, and others will try to prove that it can be read into other languages, per- haps even into English. And what then ? Even babes in Bopp know that bilingual inscriptions, in which every word has a double mean:- ing, are by no means unprecedented. There is a monument in Brittany the epigraph of which is both Breton and Welsh. There is an old proverb of Queen Elizabeth's time which tells its own tale :
"Bread, butter, and green cheese,' Is good English and good Friese."
Swift, whom we are again compelled to refer to as the parent of mo- dern philology, composed a letter which was at once English and Latin. It was a Newtonian anticipation of the law of linguistic affinities. We need scarcely allude to the Punic fragment in Plautus, which Valiancy proved to be good Irish, and Gesenius to be very like Hebrew. Mr. Brown has attempted no startling tour de force. His argument is independent of grammatical niceties, and rests on the un- changeable foundation of root-etymons. We anticipate that this little treatise will make an epoch in the history of English philology; and we observe with great satisfaction that the University of Oxford has chosen the present moment for conferring an honorary degree on Mr. Brown's distinguished master, Dr. Aufrecht.
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