EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND 



147 



The resemblances among languages are of two kinds — 

 identity of words, and identity of grammatical forms ; the 

 latter being now generally considered as the most impor- 

 tant towards the argument. When we inquire into the 

 first kind of affinity among the languages of the Indo- 

 European family, we are surprised at the great number 

 of common terms which exist among them, and these re- 

 ferring to such primary ideas as to leave no doubt of 

 their having all been derived from a common source. 

 Colonel Vans Kennedy presents nine hundred words 

 common to the Sanscrit and other languages of the same 

 family. In the Sanscrit and Persian, we find several 

 which require no sort of translation to an English reader ; 

 ^s,pader, mader, sunu, dokhter, brader, mand, vidhava ; 

 likewise asthi, a bone, (Greek, ostoun ;) denta, a tooth, 

 (Latin, dens, dentis ;) eyeumen, the eye ; brouwa, the 

 eye-brow, (German, braue ;) nasa, the nose ; karu, the 

 hand, (Gr. cheir ;) genu, the knee, (Lat. genu ;) ped, the 

 foot, (Lat. pes, pedis ;) hrti, the heart, jecur, the liver, 

 (Lat. jecur ;) star a, a star ; gela, cold, (Lat. gelu, ice ;) 

 aghni, fire, (Lat. ignis ;) dhara, the earth, (Lat. terra, 

 Gaelic, tir ;) arrivi, a river ; nan, a ship, (Gr. naus, 

 Lat. navis ;) ghau, a cow ; sarpam, a serpent. 



The inferences from these verbal coincidences were 

 confirmed in a striking manner, when Bopp and others 

 investigated the grammatical structure of this family of 

 languages. Dr. Wiseman pronounces that the great phi- 

 lologist just named, " by a minute and sagacious analysis 

 of the Sanscrit verb, compared with the conjugational 

 system of the other members of this family, left no doubt 

 of their intimate and positive affinity " It was now dis- 

 covered that the peculiar terminations or inflections by 

 which persons are expressed throughout the verbs of 

 nearly the whole of these languages, have their founda- 

 tions in pronouns ; the pronoun was simply placed at 

 the end, and thus became an inflection " By an analysis 

 of the Sanscrit pronouns, the elements of those existing 

 in all the other languages were cleared of their anoma 

 lies ; the verb substantive, which in Latin is composed 

 of fragments, referable to two distinct roots, here found 

 both existing in regular form; the Greek conjugations, 

 with all their complicated machinery of middle voice, 

 augments, and reduplications were here found anc illus- 

 trated in a variety of ways, which a few years agc/> would 



