Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/257

VI.] of every language is indicated in its own structure with sufficient clearness to be read by analytic study. Yet more is to be traced out by means of the comparison of kindred contemporaneous dialects; for, in their descent from their common ancestor, it can hardly be that each one will not have preserved some portion of the primitive material which the others have lost. Thus—to illustrate briefly by reference to one or two of our former examples—the identity of our suffix ly, in such words as godly and truly, with the adjective like might perhaps have been conjectured from the English alone; and it is made virtually certain by comparison with the modern German (göttlich, treulich) or Netherlandish (goddelijk, waarlijk); it does not absolutely need a reference to older dialects, like the Anglo-Saxon or Gothic, for its establishment. Again, not only the Sanskrit and other ancient languages exhibit the full form asmi, whence comes our I am, but the same is also to be found almost unaltered in the present Lithuanian esmi. But, even if philological skill and acumen had led the student of Germanic language to the conjecture that I loved is originally I love-did, it must ever have remained a conjecture only, a mere plausible hypothesis, but for the accident which caused the preservation to our day of the fragment of manuscript containing a part of Bishop Ulfilas's Gothic Bible. And a host of points in the structure of the tongues of our Germanic branch which still remain obscure would, as we know, be cleared up, had we in our possession relics of them at a yet earlier stage of their separate growth. The extent to which the history of a body of languages may be penetrated by the comparison of contemporary dialects alone will, of course, vary greatly in different cases; depending, in the first place, upon the number, variety, and degree of relation of the dialects, and, in the second place, upon their joint and several measure of conservation of ancient forms: but it is also evident that the results thus arrived at for modern tongues will be, upon the whole, both scanty and dubious, compared with those obtained by comparing them with ancient dialects of the same stock. Occasionally, within the narrow limits of a single branch or group, the student