Tavus, 'shining,' from 'tava'--in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian, 'to
burn' or 'shine,'--is Divus, dies, Zeus, e??, Deva, and I know not
how much more; and Taviti, the bright and burnt, fire, the place of
fire, the hearth, the centre of the family, becomes the family
itself, just as our word family, the Latin familia, is from thymele,
the sacred centre of fire. The hearth comes to mean home. Then from
home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe
the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word
appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in
Scythian; the Theuthisks, Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one
theuth, nation, or people; and of this our name Germans itself is,
perhaps, only the Roman translation, meaning the men of one germ or
stock. The Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the Celtic
teuta, people; taviti, fire, appearing here in its secondary and
derived sense of PEOPLE, just as it does in its own Scythian language
in Targitavus's second name, Tavit-varus, Teutaros, the protector of
the people. Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of Lucan, finds his
brother in the Gaisos, the sword, symbolising the god of battles of
the Teutonic Scythians. {66} And after philology has thus related to
each other the Celt and the Teuton, she takes another branch of the
Indo-European family, the Sclaves, and shows us them as having the
same name with the German Suevi, the SOLAR people; the common ground
here, too, being that grand point of union, the sun, fire. So, also,
we find Mr. Meyer, whose Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping
again and again on the connection even in Europe, if you go back far
enough, between Celt and German. So, after all we have heard, and
truly heard, of the diversity between all things Semitic and all
things Indo-European, there is now an Italian philologist at work
upon the relationship between Sanscrit and Hebrew.