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256 whose history is obscure, and cannot be read far back toward its beginning—is found to contain a monosyllabic root as its central significant portion, along with certain other accessory portions, syllables or remnants of syllables, whose office it is to define and direct the radical idea. The roots are never found in practical use in their naked form; they are (or, as has been repeatedly explained, have once been) always clothed with suffixes, or with suffixes and prefixes; yet they are no mere abstractions, dissected out by the grammarian's knife from the midst of organisms of which they were ultimate and integral portions; they are rather the nuclei of gradual accretions, parts about which other parts gathered to compose orderly and membered wholes; germs, we may call them, out of which has developed the intricate structure of later speech. And the recognition of them in this character is an acknowledgment that Indo-European language, with all its fulness and inflective suppleness, is descended from an original monosyllabic tongue; that our ancestors talked with one another in single syllables, indicative of the ideas of prime importance, but wanting all designation of their relations; and that out of these, by processes not differing in their nature from those which are still in operation in our own tongue, was elaborated the marvellous and varied structure of all the Indo-European dialects.

Such is, in fact, the belief which the students of language have reached, and now hold with full confidence. New and strange but a few years ago, it commands at present the assent of nearly all comparative philologists, and is fast becoming a matter of universal opinion. Since, however, it is still doubted and opposed by a few even among linguistic scholars, and is doubtless more or less unfamiliar and startling to a considerable part of any educated community, it will be proper that we combine with our examination of it some notice and refutation of the arguments by which it is assailed.

It is surely unnecessary, in the first place, to protest against any one's taking umbrage at this theory of a primitive monosyllabic stage of Indo-European language out of regard