Biographical Sketch of Dr Frichard, 2il 



the subject, in the second edition of the work, was greatly 

 enriched by a survey of the different relations of languages to 

 each other ; by the announcement of his discovery of the affi- 

 nity of the Celtic languages with Sanskrit and other members 

 of the Indo-European family ; and by a tabular view of the 

 known families of man, with their localities and languages, 

 arranged according to their geographical distribution. 



The affinities of the Celtic languages formed the subject of 

 a separate volume, which Dr Prichard published in 1831. 



To facilitate the appreciation of the value and importance, 

 as well as of the difficulty of the discovery which it was the 

 object of this work to exhibit, I may perhaps be allowed to 

 offer a few brief remarks on the affinities of languages. 



The degrees of affinity which may exist between languages 

 are so very various, that it is absolutely necessary to define 

 the meaning which it is intended to attach to the term affinity, 

 as applied to languages. For want of a right understanding 

 of this term, I have heard men, learned in many languages, 

 seriously disagree as to the admission of such affinity. There 

 are differences so slight as merely to affect the modification 

 of words evidently the same. They scarcely affect the mutual 

 intelligibility of the parties who use them. There is no dis- 

 pute as to the identity of their language, and the differences 

 are regarded as dialectic ; but let parties meet each other with 

 a somewhat greater difference of language, which prevents 

 their interchange of ideas, and they will probably separate, 

 each saying that the other speaks a different language. Such 

 for example, might be the case were a Frenchman to meet 

 with a Spaniard or an Italian, provided both parties were 

 uneducated men. Yet the philologian, whether he regard the 

 grammatical structure, or the derivation of the most ordinary 

 words, would not hesitate to pronounce that the two languages 

 are very closely related ; and most readily to admit that they, 

 and a few other European languages, such as the Portuguese 

 and the Provem/al, are twigs of the same bough. If one of the 

 parties had happened to be a German or an Englishmen, there 

 would have been the same mutual difficulty of comprehension ; 

 but tlie philologian would pronounce tliat the difference was 

 more considerable ; that instead of being twigs of the same 



