Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/222

200 of material and of form, which have thus been brought forward, it is not necessary that we insist upon their competency, alone and unaided, to prove the Indo-European languages only later dialectic forms of a single original tongue. Their convincing force lies in the fact that they are selected instances, examples chosen from among a host of others, which abound in every part of the grammar and vocabulary of all the languages in question, now so plain as to strike the eye of even the hasty student, now so hidden under later peculiar growth as to be only with difficulty traceable by the acute and practised linguistic analyst. He who would know them better may find them in such works as the Comparative Grammars of Bopp and Schleicher and the Greek Etymologies of Curtius. An impartial examination of them must persuade even the most sceptical that these tongues exhibit resemblances which can be accounted for only on the supposition of a prevailing identity of linguistic tradition, such as belongs to the common descendants of one and the same mother-tongue. On the other hand, all their differences, great and widely sundering as these confessedly are, can be fully explained by the prolonged operation of the same causes which have broken up the Latin into the modern Romanic dialects, or the original Germanic tongue into its various existing forms, and which have converted the Anglo-Saxon of a thousand years ago into our present English. Besides its natural divergent growth, the original Indo-European tongue has doubtless been in some degree diversified by intermixture here and there with languages of other descent; but there is no reason for believing that this has been an element of any considerable importance in its history of development. At some period, then, in the past, and in some limited region of Europe or Asia, lived a tribe from whose imperfect dialect have descended all those rich and cultivated tongues now spoken and written by the teeming millions of Europe and of some of the fairest parts of Asia.

To know when and where this tribe lived and formed its language is unfortunately beyond our power. It is, indeed, often assumed and asserted that the original Indo-European home was in the north-eastern part of the Iranian plateau,