OLD ARYAN WORDS 



extinct, and we were required to reproduce as 

 much as possible of it from an elaborate com- 

 parison of the vocabularies and grammatical 

 forms of French, Spanish, Italian, and their 

 allied modern dialects. Such a task would no 

 doubt be delicate and difficult ; but there is also 

 no doubt that a great deal of good Latin could 

 be reconstructed in this way. The restoration 

 of the Aryan mother tongue seems at first sight 

 a still more formidable task ; but it is a task for 

 which we have also more abundant materials 

 in the wider variation among Aryan words as 

 compared with Romanic words. Thus by a com- 

 parison of French mois with Span, mes and Ital. 

 mese, knowing besides the general habits of the 

 Romanic languages, we might probably infer 

 the Lat. mensis as the common original of the 

 three ; but on looking over the whole Aryan 

 field, and comparing Lat. mensis with English 

 month, Gr. IJLTJV, Lith. menesis, O. H. G. manot, 

 and Skr. masa, we arrive with even stronger 

 probability at the Old Aryan mansa as the only 

 form which could have given rise to all these. 



During the last twenty years it may almost 

 be said that the great work of Aryan philology 

 has been the reconstruction of the Old Aryan 

 mother tongue. At least the comparative re- 

 searches that have been made have owed their 

 chief interest to their bearing on this problem. 

 In philology, as in zoology and botany, ques- 

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