Page:The History of Ink.djvu/17

Rh tinte and tincta," forcibily reminding us of the Latin participle, from the verb , which is represented in English by , and other derivatives, such as "tincture," &c. We cannot refuse to recognise the Holland-Dutch "Inkt" as from the same root to which we have thus traced the corresponding word in a language which we may call its "cousin-German" and it is hard to exclude the Old French "Enque" and modern "Encre" from this circle of relationship.

Then, we are somewhat impressed by the discovery of the word Ingvas in the Illyrian, a language of the Slavonic (or more properly Slovenic) stock, like the Polish,—and, like that, enriched by words derived from the Latin. The Polish, however, presents as with the actual Graeco-Latin Encaustrum.

Still more remote from the English and Italian, we find among the Orientals of the Shemitish race, and  in the Arabic, and  in the Chaldee, with a manifest resemblance in sound, and with an actual possession of the same elements and radical letters, N. K. Yet we do not think of suggesting that these words had a common origin with the corresponding ones in European Languages,