Page:An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language.djvu/15

Rh ). Of inanimate nature also the primitive people had only a limited perception; few names for the periods of the day and the year were coined, and, as might have been expected, the circle of their religious ideas was narrow. Only the German words, , and have corresponding terms in several allied tongues; the two old Aryan gods of light, Diêus and Ausôs, have left their final traces in Alemannic  and in German.

There is a further rich supply of isolated words in our mother-tongue inherited from the primitive stock. They relate chiefly to the most simple and natural expressions, needs, and activities of life;, , , , , , , , , , , , &c., are derived from the primitive speech. In moral conceptions our mother-tongue inherited the stems of and,  and ,  and  from the old vocabulary.

With the division of the primitive Aryan people into tribes, which may have been caused by religious and political dissensions, or perhaps only by the constant increase in number, and with the migration of these tribes from their primitive home, the Teutonic language may be said to begin. The old materials partly sufficed for the constant growth of perceptions and ideas. Old words received a new shade of meaning; the root (Sans. mŗ) for ‘to die’ acquired the signification of ‘murder’; ‘the dear, the cherished one‘ became 'the freeman’; ‘to follow’ came to mean ‘to see’ ; ‘to split’ was extended into ‘to bite’, and 'to persist,’ ‘to stride,’ were developed into ‘to live’ and ‘to mount’. Derivatives from existing stems assumed characteristic significations; in this way, , , , and originated. On the other hand, we note the loss of old roots, which in other Aryan groups developed numerous cognates; the roots pô, ‘to drink,’ and dô, ‘to give,’ which we recognise in Lat. potare and Gr. πέπωκα, and in Lat. dare and Gr. δίδωμι, have completely disappeared in Teutonic. Of other primitive roots we find in Teutonic only a few slight relics nearly disappearing, some of which will in course of time vanish altogether. The root ag, ‘to drive’ (in Lat. ago, see ), the root an, ‘to breathe’ (in Lat. animus and Gr. ανεμος), the root gĭw, ‘to live’ (in Lat. vivere, see ), have never had in Teutonic, during the period of its independent development, such a wide evolution as in Latin and Greek. In the case of such words, when the idea is a living one, the term that supplants them already exists before they die out; in fact, it is the cause of their disappearance. Occasionally, however, we find in the Teutonic group characteristic word stems, which we look for in vain in the sphere of the allied languages, although they must once have existed there too in a living form. Such primitive stems as Teutonic alone has preserved may be at the base of, , , , , , &c. Other roots peculiar to the Teutonic languages may owe their existence to onomatopoetic creation during the independent development of Teutonic; such are perhaps and.

Only such a pliancy of the primitive speech could keep pace with the higher intellectual development which we must assume for the progress of the Teutonic group after the first division of dialects. The capacity of our race for development is sufficient, even without the assumption of foreign influences, to account for the refinement and development of the conditions of life among the Teutons during the second period of the primitive history of our language. The growing susceptibility to the external world resulted in the extension of the sphere of the gods, the contact with foreign nations led to a refinement of social life, and with both these the