Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/262

240 than in the style and method of its etymologies: upon these, indeed, is its superiority directly founded.

The grand means, now, of modern etymological research is the extensive comparison of kindred forms. How this should be so appears clearly enough from what has been already taught respecting the growth of dialects and the genetical connections of languages. If spoken tongues stood apart from one another, each a separate and isolated entity, they would afford no scope for the comparative method. As such entities the ancient philology regarded them; or, if their relationship was in some cases recognized, it was wrongly apprehended and perversely applied—as when, for instance, the Latin was looked upon as derived from the Greek, and its words were sought to be etymologized out of the Greek lexicon, as corrupted forms of Greek vocables. In the view of the present science, while each existing dialect is the descendant of an older tongue, so other existing dialects are equally descendants of the same tongue. All have kept a part, and lost a part, of the material of their common inheritance; all have preserved portions of it in a comparatively unchanged form, while they have altered other portions perhaps past recognition. But, while thus agreed in the general fact and the general methods of change, they differ indefinitely from one another in the details of the changes effected. Each has saved something which others have lost, or kept in pristine purity what they have obscured or overlaid: or else, from their variously modified forms can be deduced with confidence the original whence these severally diverged. Every word, then, in whose examination the linguistic scholar engages, is to be first set alongside its correspondents or analogues in other related languages, that its history may be read aright. Thus the deficiencies of the evidence which each member of a connected group of dialects contains respecting its own genesis and growth are made up, in greater or less degree, by the rest, and historical results are reached having a greatly increased fulness and certainty. The establishment of a grand family of related languages, like the Indo-European, makes each member