Baron Humboldt's Essay on the Oriental Lariguages. 217 



matter of great doubt; and if their grammars have, like tliose of the 

 Basque and the Latin, an essentially different character, these two languages 

 certainly do not belong to the same family. The words of the one have 

 been merely transplanted into the other, which has nevertheless retained its 

 primitive forms. 



If I assert that, in order to prove the affinity of languages, we should 

 pay attention to the employment of grammatical forms and to their sounds 

 taken together, it is because I would affirm that they must be considered not 

 only in the abstract but in the concrete. Some examples will render this clearer. 



Several American languages have two plural forms in the first person, an 

 exclusive and an inclusive form, according as we would include or exclude 

 the person addressed. It has been thought that this peculiarity belonged 

 exclusively to the American languages ; but it is also found in the Mantchu, 

 the Tamul, and in all the dialects of the South Sea Islands. All these 

 languages have indeed this grammatical form in common ; but it is only in 

 the abstract. Each of them expresses it by a different sound : the identity 

 of this form, therefore, does not furnish any proof of the affinity of these 

 languages. 



On the other hand, the Sanscrit infinitive, or rather the affixes rt and 3 , 



as in 3TrT^rFr " desirous of vanquishing," correspond as grammatical 

 forms with the Latin supines, and there is at the same time a perfect identity 

 of sound in these forms in the two languages, as the Latin supiiKS terminate 

 invariably in turn and tu. The striking conformity of the Sanscrit auxiliary 

 verb to that of the Greek and Lithuanian languages, has been ingeniously 

 developed by Professor Bopp. The Sanscrit h S3> the Greek ollcc, and the 

 Gothic vait, are evidently of the same origin. In all these three words there 

 is a conformity both of sound and signification : but further ; all the three 

 verbal forms have these two peculiarities in common, that though preterites, 

 they are used in a present sense, and that in all three the short radical 

 vowel, which is retained in the plural, is changed to a long vowel in the 

 singular. The Lithuanian weizdmi, I know, and the Sanscrit ^f?]'> shew 

 clearly at first view that this word is not only the same in the two 

 languages (as bos and beef in Latin and English), but that the two lan- 

 guages have, in the termination mi, modelled these words on the same 

 grammatical form ; for they not only mark the persons of the verb by 

 Vol. II. 2 F 



