OUR ARYAN FOREFATHERS 



it became known that this newly found language 

 contained an enormous mass of literature alleged 

 to be the oldest in the world. All things thus 

 combined to stimulate speculation as to the true 

 character of the relationship between Sanskrit 

 and the languages of Greece and Rome. This re- 

 lationship was not one of parentage. It has been 

 a common popular error to suppose that Latin 

 and Greek are derived from Sanskrit ; but from 

 the first no such view was countenanced by com- 

 petent scholars. About 1790, Sir William Jones 

 declared his opinion that the three languages 

 were sprung from " some common source, which 

 perhaps no longer exists." Persian also he was 

 inclined to attribute to the same source, and he 

 hinted at the possibility that Gothic and Keltic 

 might be included in the group. This was 

 coming very near to the conception of an Indo- 

 European family of languages. But that concep- 

 tion was not clearly formed until nearly twenty 

 years later, and then it was reached not by a 

 great philological scholar, but by a poet and 

 literary critic. In 1 808, Friedrich Schlegel main- 

 tained that the languages of India, Persia, Greece, 

 Italy, and Germany were connected by common 

 descent from an extinct language, just as the 

 modern Romanic languages are connected by 

 common descent from Latin ; and for the whole 

 family he proposed the name Indo-Germanic. 

 The correctness of this view was demonstrated 

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