Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/232

210 even tolerable degree of confidence—but more probably in Asia, and certainly not less than three thousand years before Christ—and in a condition of civilization respecting which the evidence of language furnished us valuable hints, some single community had spoken a single tongue, from which all these others were descended, in accordance with the universal laws of linguistic tradition, by processes which are still active in every part of human speech. And now, waiving for a while the question whether it may not be possible to regard the great Indo-European family itself as only a member of a yet vaster family, including all or nearly all the languages of the human race, we have, in the present lecture, to review more in detail its constitution, to note the period and locality of its constituent members, to glance at the special historical importance attaching to them and to the peoples who speak them, to set forth their value as the fundamental material of linguistic science, and to examine anew and more systematically the general method of linguistic research, as established upon their study.

We may best commence our survey of the varieties of Indo-European speech with our own branch, the Germanic. Its existing dialects, as has been already pointed out, are divided into three groups or sub-branches: 1, the Low-German, occupying northern Germany and the Netherlands, with their colony Britain, and with the numerous and widely-scattered modern colonies of Britain; 2, the High-German, in central and southern Germany; 3, the Scandinavian, in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland. Of the Low-German group, the English is by far the most important member; its eventful history, illustrated at every step by valuable literary documents, we trace back, through Middle English (A.D. 1350-1550), Old English (A.D. 1250-1350), and Semi-Saxon (A.D. 1150-1250), to the Anglo-Saxon, which reaches into the seventh century of our era, possessing an antiquity exceeded by only one other Germanic dialect. Its earliest monuments, in their style and metre, and at least one of them, the Beowulf, in subject and substance also, carry us back to the pre-Christian period of Germanic history. We cannot delay here to enter into any detailed examination