132 Professor BtjHLer on the Sanskrit Linguals. 



ter-languages of Sanskrit and in their daughters laws which 

 cause the production of linguals become more and more 

 stringent. 



One objection I must confess, may be made to my theory, 

 namely, that I have not succeeded in accounting satis- 

 factorily for all the Sanskrit linguals. But it was not 

 my intention to examine all the Sanskrit words containing 

 these sounds, but only to explain by far the larger number 

 of vocables in which linguals occur, and especially the laws 

 which in actual Sanskrit regulate their production. More- 

 over there can be no doubt that the want of historical 

 documents, which could illustrate all the successive stages 

 of the development of the language, will for ever prevent 

 us from finding satisfactory etymologies for each of the 

 words in question. 



But as one of my principal objections against the loan- 

 theory arose from its not being tested by the application to 

 other cases, it would be unbecoming to conclude my paper 

 without at least attempting this. Besides the probability 

 of the theory advocated by me would be considerably 

 enhanced, if it could be shown that languages other than 

 the Sanskrit have independently developed sounds of the 

 lingual class. I think that analogous cases can be adduced 

 even from the limited range of Western Indo-European lan- 

 guages, with the pronunciation of whose sounds I am familiar. 



In the ancient Indo-European tongues, spoken in the 

 West, lingual nasals and mutes seem to have been unknown. 

 At least we have no direct evidence to the contrary. But 

 in modem times various Teutonic and Sclavonic dialects 

 have developed a good many. Richer in linguals than all 

 the other modern languages known to me, is the English, 

 which at present has completely lost its unaspirated dentals. 

 It is true, they still go in the grammars by this name, 

 which they have long ceased to merit, and many Englishmen, 



