Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/13

 endowments of exceeding richness, and, with the capability , the methods, also, of a system of unlimited composition and agglutination. Possessing much, they were able to bear the loss of much, and yet to retain their local life; and by multiplied losses, alterations, suppressions of sounds, conversions and displacements, the members of the common family are become scarcely recognisable to each other. It is at least a fact, that the relation of the Greek to the Latin, the most obvious and palpable, though never quite overlooked, has been, down to our time, grossly misunderstood; and that the Roman tongue, which, in a grammatical point of view, is associated with nothing but itself, or with what is of its own family, is even now usually regarded as a mixed language, because, in fact, it contains much which sounds heterogeneous to the Greek, although the elements from which these forms arose are not foreign to the Greek and other sister languages, as I have endeavoured partly to demonstrate in my “System of Conjugation.”

The close relationship between the Classical and Germanic languages has, with the exception of mere comparative lists of words, copious indeed, but destitute of principle and eritical judgment, remained, down to the period of the appearance of the Asiatic intermediary, almost entirely unobserved, although the acquaintance of philologists with the Gothic dates now from a century and a half; and that language is so perfect in its Grammar and so clear in its affinities, that had it been earlier submitted to a rigorous and systematic process of comparison and anatomical investigation, the pervading relation