Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/312

290 not without exception, been of the two classes described in the last lecture, pronominal and verbal; and that, in the earliest stages of growth, forms have been produced especially by the combination of roots of the two classes, the verbal root furnishing the central and substantial idea, the pronominal indicating its modifications and relations.

Linguistic families, now, as at present constituted, are made up of those languages which have traceably had at least a part of their historical development in common; which have grown together out of the original radical or monosyllabic stage; which exhibit in their grammatical structure signs, still discoverable by linguistic analysis, of having descended, by the ordinary course of linguistic tradition, from a common ancestor. We shall see hereafter (in the tenth lecture  ), indeed, that the science of language does not and cannot deny the possible correspondence of some or all of the families in their ultimate elements, a correspondence anterior to all grammatical development; but neither does she at present assert that correspondence. She has carried her classification no farther than her collected material, and her methods of sober and cautious induction from its study, have justified her in doing; she has stopped grouping where her facts have failed her, where evidences of common descent have become too slight and vague to be longer depended upon: and the limit of her power is now, and is likely ever to be, determined by coincidences of grammatical structure. The boundaries of every great family, again, are likely to be somewhat dubious; there can hardly fail to be branches which either parted so early from the general stock, or have, owing to peculiar circumstances in their history, varied so rapidly and fundamentally since they left it, that the tokens of their origin have become effaced almost or quite beyond recognition. There was a time when the Celtic languages were thus regarded as of doubtful affinity, until a more penetrating study of their material and structure brought to light abundant and unequivocal evidence of their Indo-European descent. The Albanian, the modern representative of the ancient Illyrian, spoken by the fierce and lawless race which inhabits the mountains of