Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/46

24 to search for it in all the branches of the Indo-Germanic family before giving it up. This undertaking lies beyond the scope of the present work, but the modern Aryan languages will not have been completely investigated till some one works out this portion of the inquiry. Such a word, though not used in Indian literature, may have been in use in the mouths of the people, and may be current under some slight disguise in the mouths of Lithuanian peasants even yet. To refer once more to Latin, it is well known that most of the words forming the present Romance languages are derived from what is called "low Latin," which is merely the speech of the vulgar as distinguished from that of the higher classes and from the literary style. Thus, to take one instance out of many, the word for "horse," cheval, cavallo, caballo, is from the Latin caballus, a word used by the peasantry, and only occasionally admitted into the higher style. The classical equivalent equus has left no direct descendant, though in modern times the words "equipage," "equitation," and so forth, have been coined from it. We are not so much concerned with the general fact as with the reasons of it, and these are so important to our subject that they must be noticed in full. The first reason is this. It is well known that the modern French, Spanish, etc., were originally mere colloquial languages, and took their rise from the corruptions introduced into the Latin spoken by the lower classes in Italy by the barbarous Teutonic tribes, who invaded and overran the countries which owned the Roman sway. The inability of Lombards, Burgundians, Goths, and Franks, to accustom themselves to the correct use of the inflectional terminations of the Latin arose, not, as some have thoughtlessly said, from their newness to the system of synthetical construction in the abstract, because we know that the inflections of the early Teutonic languages were in some respects even more complicated than those of the Latin, but from their rudeness and the as yet undeveloped state of their mental powers. They were