The Phoenician model had, if only for patriotic reasons, maintained a certain prestige in antiquarian circles.. The anti-Phoenician Ledwich was universally execrated by all antiquarians and the Oriental model was endorsed by well-regarded scholars like O’Conor, Walker and Lanigan, even though Vallancey had done much to discredit it by his increasingly eccentric flights of fancy. Anyway, in a country positioned like Ireland, on the westernmost fringes of the Old World, where could antiquarians look for their origins except in a generally easterly direction? It accorded with geography and with the ingrained biblical model; and, ironically enough, it also accorded with the information that was beginning to come in respected Oriental languages like Iranian and Sanskrit. Sir William Jones had, in the preceding decades, made the supremely important observation that Sanskrit showed many similarities with Greek and other European languages [...]. the building blocks of the Indo-European model were being added to scholars' linguistic knowledge.

Among antiquarians, however, the radically novel nature of this material was not obvious. Links with the east were nothing new to those who derived all humanity from Noah and who traced all the world’ languages from Hebrew. Ironically, the scholarly and philological testimony coming in from the Far East, which in the long run was to clinch the argument for an Indo-European language family, tended in the short run to bolster the Phoenician model against the Nordic-Scythic one. Bryant’s mythological system of 1775, with its theory of a pagan Cushite civilization spanning most of the ancient Orient, was republished in 1907 and continued to influence later scholars even as its implicit presuppositions were being eroded by the advent of the new Comparative Linguistics.

The true importance of the work of men like Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp was that they systematized the methods of etymological analysis, and that they began to emphasize, in linguistic comparison, the importance of grammatical and structural [89] analogues over verbal similarities. This could provide, in the words of a later scholar, “safeguards against illegitimate ingenuity and eccentric conjecture, against all those unsatisfactory uncertainties, which have brought discredit on the study of most languages, and on that of the Keltic most especially”. It was only on the basis of Grimm’ and Bopp’ groundwork in the methodology of linguistic comparison that scholars could arrive at confident assessments of the relative relations between languages, and struct these into a genealogical family tree. This led to a general acceptance, by the early 1820s, of a complex of Indo-Germanic or Indo-European languages, which included the Germanic and Romance languages as well as Greek and Sanskrit, but excluded Hebrew and its cognates.

Unfortunately, the similarities between the Indo-European languages and the Celtic ones were so un-obvious that for a while it was a moot point whether Irish resembled Hebrew or German most. As long as doubts remained on that score, the Phoenician model remained viable. The first of the new comparative scientists who attempted to establish the link between Celtic and Indo-European was the great Welsh ethnographer, Samuel Evans Pritchard, who, in a supplementary study to his earlier Physical History of Man (1813), discussed the point at great length in his Eastern Origin of the Celtic Languages of 1831. Pritchard dew mainly on Welsh data, but it was obvious hat a proven Indo-European appurtenance [sic] of Welsh would also clinch the argument on Gaelic. It was only in 1837 that the matter was settled with any degree of authority: in that year, Pictet published his essay De l’affinité; des language celtique avec le Sanskrit, which was taken up and elaborated further by Franz Bopp the following year in his lecture Über die celtischen sprachen. Pictet was obviously unaware of Pritchard’s work and was actuated by Schlegel’s doubts as to the relatedness of Celtic and Indo-European languages, but Bopp’s essay of 1838 did refer to Pritchard. Zeuss’s Grammatican Celtica of 1854 eventing gave the definitive summing-up of the case.

All this adds up to the fact that almost until 1840 there was abundant evidence for some vague Oriental background in the ancient past of the national language, but little reason for Irish antiquarians to realize the paradoxical notion that this Oriental background, given its Indo-European nature, excluded the possibility of Hebrew, Phoenician or Semitic origins. The linguistic debates on the Continent took place with little active involvement from Irish scholars - the one exception being Nicholas (later Cardinal) Wiseman, who began his distinguished career with public lectures delivered in Rome in 1835 on recent scholarly developments. Wiseman’s lectures on the Connexion Between Science and Revealed Religion opened with two surveys “On the Comparative Study of Languages”. in the course of these lectures, Wiseman criticized the way in which British scholars had continued to work in an outdated fashion and had fallen behind the insights of recent German scholars; he only made a favourable exception for Pritchard, who he credited with the important discovery that the Celtic languages belonged to the Indo-European family. To Pritchard, Wiseman opposed the useless lucubrations of old-fashioned scholars like Sir William Betham, whose Phoenician speculations Wiseman demolishes. It was probably because of this [91] unflattering treatment of Betham that Betham’s adversary, George Petrie, took cognizance of Wiseman’s espousal of Indo-Europeanism and came to propound it himself. Petrie was later to quote Wiseman’s criticisms in a pamphlet against Betham published in 1840, and in early 1838 went on record as opposing the popular Druidic theories in favour of the scholarly investigation of “The history of the Indo-European Race”.

The Irish involvement in the unfolding of the Indo-European paradigm was limited to Wiseman and (marginally) Petrie. But Continental scholars for their part were by no means heedless of Irish learning. it is instructive to see what linguistic material was used by the Continental comparatists. Pictet used the eighteenth-century work of the poet and scholar Hugh MacCurtin, but relieved more heavily on O’Reilly’s dictionary and grammar, as well as on O’Brien’s grammar of 1809. Pictet wrote to O’Reilly in January 1835, requesting furtrher linguistic and philological information. Bopp, like Pictet, uses MacCurtin occasionally but relies most heavily on O’Reilly; and Zeuss, again, uses MacCurtin, O’Reilly and O’Brien, but was by 1854 in the more fortunate position of also having O’Donovan’s grammar of 1845 available. It is strikingly obvious that the speculative antiquarian tradition of Anglo-Irish savants contributed little or nothing to the scholarly advances in linguist insight, where the tenuous and struggling tradition of native scholarship proved to be of greatest value. Pictet, for one, specifically singled out “le bel ouvrage publié par le docteur O’Connor [sic], aux frais du duc de Buckingham, et intitulé: Rerum hibernicarum scriptores veteres', praising O’Conor of Stowe for having been “le premier qui ait porte, dan les etudes de l'ancienne irlande, un esprit de critique sage et éclairée.” (IX)

But all this was largely a one-way interest; with the exception of more or less isolated figures such as Pritchard, Wiseman and Petrie, British and Irish scholarship took little notice of the Celtological advances in Continental philology. In Ireland, this backwardness would lead eventually to the explosive clash of the Round Tower controversy [...]; in Britain, another and no less explosive development took place as that country, adopted in the Victorian period, an ethnological sense of cultural identity which relied on a partial knowledge of comparative philology, emphasizing the alleged German racial origins of the English nation to the exclusion of possible Celtic elements. Scholarly backwardness in Ireland led to a tenacious persistence of Phoenicianism; in England it led to Teutomania, The one cannot be understood except in relation to the other. (End sect.; p.91.)