88 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



which the Gothic has in many respects a considerable resemblance, 

 employs the word thura for door, and both the Persian, which in 

 many respects resembles the Teutonic, and the Chaldsean use thro 

 for door. The modern German (directly contrary to the mod- 

 ern English) uses thiir for our door and durch for thorough ; and it 

 is remarkable that this same difference between the German and the 

 English prevails in almost all cases where the two languages employ 

 a word of the same origin having either of these initials." He in- 

 stances distel and thistle, dorn and thorn, theur and dear, thaler and 

 dollar, theil and deal. Attention to the sound rather than the spell- 

 ing of these German words might have led to a tenable theory of 

 consonant-shifting. But everything cannot be expected from Home 

 Tooke, and to show the progress made by modern etymologists we 

 must quote from him again {loc. cit.) : — " Do (the auxiliary verb, as 

 it has been called) is derived from the same root, and is indeed the 

 same word, as to [of the infinitive.] The difference between a t and 

 a ^ is so very small, that an etymologist knows by the practice of lan- 

 guages, and an anatomist by the reason of that practice, that in the 

 derivation of words it is scarce worth regarding." 



When the Sanskrit came to be studied in Europe, a comparison 

 of its forms with those of Persian, Greek, Latin, Gothic, English, 

 German, Celtic, etc., showed beyond all doubt 



(i) That these languages were all connected both in vocabulary 



and in grammatical forms ; 

 (2) That no one of them could be said to be the parent of the 



others, but that all alike must be referred to a common 



source. 

 Rasmus Christian Rask (1787-1832), a Danish scholar who, at 

 thirty-five years of age, " was master of twenty-five languages and 

 dialects, and is stated to have studied twice as many,"'"' extended in 

 his essay on the origin of Icelandic (18 18) thehst of correspondences 

 of letters in the Classical and Germanic languages previously estab- 

 lished by a Swede named Ihre. Four years later Jacob Grimm 

 ( 1 785-1863) published in the second edition of his "German Gram- 

 mar " a law of shifting of mutes not only as between the Germanic 

 and Classical languages, but also as between the High German, 

 especially in its older forms, and the remaining Germanic dialects.'-' 



(i) Encycl. Brit. Vol. XX., p. 286. 



(2) On the extent of Grimm's debt to Rask see Sweet's article in the Encycl. Brit., Vol. 



XL, pp. 200-2Q1. 



