Page:An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language.djvu/14

viii discovery that the Teutons, several millenniums before our era, spoke one and the same language with the ancestors of the Hindus and Persians, the Greeks and Albanians, the Italics and Kelts, the Slavs and Armenians, a fact which clearly proved that they were descended from the same tribe. The primitive seat of those tribes, which, in conformity with the utmost limits of the settlements of their descendants, have been designated Indo-Teutons, Indo-Kelts, and also Indo-Europeans, was the South of Europe, or more probably Asia. Scientific investigation, which has been endeavouring for more than half a century to unlock the common source of their language from the later records of the various Aryan tribes, bestows on it the highest praise for its wealth of forms, the development of which has been traced by German grammarians in our mother-tongue down to the present day. The vocabulary of this primitive speech is proved by some of its offshoots to have been exceedingly rich, and at the same time capable of extension; but its fundamental perceptions and ideas were limited. The fact that it expressed the most necessary relations and wants of life has made it the treasury from which the various Aryan languages have drawn their supply of words. Of this old hoard German too has preserved no small a portion, even down to the present time. Compare our terms for expressing degrees of relationship with those of the allied languages, and these words, with slight divergences in sound, or with unchanged significations, will be found in the whole of the Aryan group. Of course the stock of such terms was far greater than we might suspect from the few which have remained to us. At one time we had, e.g., various designations for ‘mother's brother’ and ‘father's brother’ ( and  with  avunculus and patruus), for ‘father's sister’ and ‘mother's sister’ (  faðu and môdrie with  amita and matertera). This implied wealth of pre-historic terms for degrees of kinship can be only understood by us as existing at a time when our ancestors lived together in clans as shepherds and nomads. When with the changing years the more fully developed relations of kinship lost the old inherited terms, how seldom have alien designations attempted to oust the native words, and how seldom with success! Compare and  with  and,  and ,  and ,  and ,  and ,  and ,  and. The terms for expressing kinship, whose unimpaired vigour we see in German, are, in combination with the numerals up to a hundred, an infallible indication of the Aryan origin of a language. Thus German testifies also by its old inherited numerals its close relation to the allied languages. Moreover, the designations of parts of the body are specially characteristic of all Aryan tongues. If German in its later development has lost many of them (, e.g., gëbal, ‘skull,’  to  κεφαλή, under ), yet it preserves in most cases the old inherited words;, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  recur sometimes in one, sometimes in several of the allied languages. The knowledge too of natural history was displayed in the primitive speech by some essential words. Of the mammals, apart from the domesticated animals (see, , , , , and ), only a few destructive quadrupeds, such as  and ,  and  (see also ), have been transmitted to German from that primitive linguistic period. The names for birds and trees are, however, but rarely common to several languages of the Aryan group (see, , , , , and