it should always be borne in mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several distinct national deposits.

We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld's Great Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic, form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.

And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian, - the languages of Portugal, of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,1 and

1 The people whom we call Wallachians, call themselves Románi, and their language Romania.

This Romance language is spoken in Wallachia and Moldavia, and in parts of Hungary, Transylvania, and Bessarabia. On the right bank of the Danube it occupies some parts of the old Thracia, Macedonia, and even Thessaly.

It is divided by the Danube into two branches: the Northern or Dacoromanic, and the Southern or Macedo-romanic. The former is less mixed, and has received a certain literary culture; the latter has borrowed a larger number of Albanian and Greek words, and has never been fixed grammatically.

The modern Wallachian is the daughter of the language spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.

The original inhabitants of Dacia were called Thracians, and their language Illyrian. We have hardly any remains of the ancient Illyrian language to enable us to form an opinion as to its relationship with Greek or any other family of speech.

219 B. C., the Romans conquered Illyria; 30 B. C., they took Moesia; and 107 A. D., the Emperor Trajan made Dacia a Roman province. At that time the Thracian population had been displaced by the advance of Sarmatian tribes, particularly the Yazyges. Roman colonists introduced the Latin language; and Dacia was maintained as a colony up to 272, when

of the Grisons of Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.1 The Provençal, which, in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere patois. The earliest Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d'Oil, or the ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen of the Langue d'Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan languages than a careful perusal of the "Comparative Grammar of the Six Romance Languages" by Professor Diez.

Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north, and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen,

the Emperor Aurelian had to cede it to the Goths. Part of the Roman inhabitants then emigrated and settled south of the Danube.

In 489 the Slavonic tribes began their advance into Mosia and Thracia. They were settled in Moesia by 678, and eighty years later a province was founded in Macedonia, under the name of Slavinia.

1 The entire Bible has been published by the Bible Society in Romanese, for the Grisons in Switzerland; and in Lower Romanese, or Enghadine, as spoken on the borders of the Tyrol.

had produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are still called vulgar or popular.1 A great deal, no doubt, of the corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a smaller extent, the same barbarizing has affected all other Roman dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local, provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by the Teutonic conquerors.

The next branch of the Indo-European family of

1 "Ed il primo, così Dante, che cominciò a dire come poeta volgare, si mosse, perocchè volle far intendere le sue parole a donna alla quale era malagevole ad intendere versi Latini."— Vita Nuova.

speech is the Hellenic. Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious refutation.

The fourth branch of our family is the Celtic. The Celts seem to have been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and Gadhelic. The Kymric comprises the Welsh; the Cornish, lately extinct; and the Armorican, of Brittany. The Gadhelic comprises the Irish; the Galic of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the Isle of Man. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated inroads into the regions of civilization,

familiarizing Latin and Greek writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh brennin. A Brennus conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls. Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed. A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin might, in their turn, be derived.

The fifth branch, which is commonly called Slavonic, I prefer to designate by the name of Windic, Winidae being one of the most ancient and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions, the Lettic and the Slavonic, and we shall have to subdivide the Slavonic again into a SouthEast Slavonic and a West Slavonic branch.

The Lettic division consists of languages hardly known to the student of literature, but of great importance to the student of language. Lettish is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. Lithuanian is the name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism of 1547.1 In this, and even in the language as

1 Schleicher, Beiträge, i. 19.