Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/211

V.] separation of this community, in the progress of time, into detached and somewhat isolated portions, with the consequent breaking up into diverging lines and currents of the common stream of their linguistic tradition. It is even clear that, so far as concerns the surviving dialects, the divergence was primarily into three main branches, now represented by the three groups of languages which have been defined above.

How it happens that our vocabulary also contains so large a store of words that are foreign to all the other Germanic dialects, but are shared with us by the nations of southern Europe, was fully set forth in the last lecture. We saw that the Normans—who, though a people of Germanic blood, had lived long enough in France to substitute the idiom of that country for their own forgotten tongue—imported into England a new current of linguistic tradition, which, after a time, mingled peacefully in the same bed with the former one. The languages with which ours is thus brought into a kind of relationship by marriage were seen to be the French, the Spanish and Portuguese, the Italian, the Rhæto-Romanic, and the Wallachian, each including a host of minor dialects. The descent of these tongues, constituting together the Romanic group or family, from a common mother, the Latin, is written down in full upon the pages of history, and has been by us already briefly reviewed.

That these two important families of human language, the Germanic and the Romanic, are also in remoter degree related to one another and to other ancient and modern families, as joint branches of a yet more extensive family, is a truth equally undeniable, although not equally obvious. That it might be so is evident enough, according to the principles which we have already established respecting the life of language. There is no limit assignable to the extent to which the descendants of a common linguistic stock may diverge and become separated from one another. The question is one of fact, of evidence. Only a careful and thorough sifting of their linguistic material can determine how far the ramifications of genetical relationship may bind together languages apparently diverse. If two kindred tongues can, by divergent growth, come to differ from each other as much