g6 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



ges of the Aryan family as Latin to the Romance languages, men 

 thought that they were coming near to a knowledge of the primitive 

 speech of man, and the simplicity assumed for it was supposed to 

 belong to the primitive Indogermanic as well. For example the 

 vowels e, o were assumed to have been developed at a time when 

 the community had become divided, and similarly only three series 

 of mutes (/, / and k sounds) were allowed to have been original. 

 Now Skt._/>z« corresponds to Gr. gignosco, L. (g)nosco, Goth, kunnan, 

 E. know • and Skt. cata to Gr. hekaton, L. centum^ Goth, hund, E 

 hmidred; but Skt.y/t' as evidently corresponds to Gr. bios, L. vivtis, 

 Goth, kwius, E. quick ; and Skt. catiir to Gr. tettares^ L. qiiatuor, 

 Goth, fidwor, E. four. Just as it has been found necessary to 

 assume that e and o existed in the parent language, so an under- 

 standing of these correspondences has been made possible by the 

 recognition of an original palatal series {k sounds) and velar series 

 {q sounds) in place of a single guttural series. 



5. We come now to a series of shiftings first explained by Karl 

 Verner, of Copenhagen; in 1875. I*^ ^^ comparisons given above 

 (page 90) no mention was made of the familiar words father., mother, 

 which at first seem to illustrate the law so well. In the Middle 

 English equivalents of these words a ^ is almost always found in place 

 oith. The following table will be found convenient : — 



A careful examination of such correspondences as these led Verner 

 to the following conclusions : — ist, that the position of the primitive 

 Indogermanic accent was not restricted as in classical Greek and 

 Latin, or modern English and German ; 2nd, that in the primitive 

 Germanic the accent was still free in position, but was marked not 

 only by a rising pitch of voice but also by stress secured by expul- 



(i) In this and the following table the th sound in thing is indicated by inverted t, and that 

 in this by inverted d. 



