Aryan

or INDO-EUROPEAN, LANGUAGES form aoe) the largest and most highly developed of the inflecting order of speech, of which other chief divisions are the Semitic and the Hamitic. that spoken gines, by natives descend from recovery, which eight of such each past guistic Hellenic, Teutonic are other demonstrated, the mediate Each which whole which Groups. Invic 2. 8. HELLENIC 4. 5. 6. 7 cL Aryan Language. Their range is far more extensive than of the Aryan peoples themselves, for they are by many millions of the American aboriby all the African negroes in the New World many Ru ified Ugrian Finns, and by the in various parts of the British colonies. Al] directly, but in various divergent lines, a primitive Aryan tongue long extinct past and all attempts at the restoration of have proved abortive. The divergent lines, in number, represent each a separate branch the primitive stock, and the divergence began at a remote epoch that the mother tongues of of these branches have also been long extinct recovery. Thus we have eight distinct lin groups (Jzdic and Iranic in Asia, Thraco- Italic Keltic, Slavonic, Lithuanic, and in Europe), the earliest forms of which already so profoundly differentiated from each that their common relationship alone can be the order of their divergence from parent stem, or from some now lost inter stems, remaining more or le conjectural. group comprises two or more subdivisions, again throw off numerous branches, the forming an extremely complex system, will be best understood by the subjoined TABLE OF THE ARYAN LINGUISTIC FAMILY. Kashmir i, Panjabi. Vedic (Earl oe The Gujarati,: Banscrit) Prakrita Neo- } Marathi, | “y ater (Vulgar Sanscrit’) Hindi. Sanscrit Sanscrit) Bengal A anii. Branch eee tes sac i oe estern ersian, Pahlay eo - Persia IRANIC 4 Branch} Kurdish’ Baluchi. ” ” ee Lola and Modern Armenian, O etian. Thracian Tilyrian r (extinct), (extinct), Albanian. aa THRACO- Cc. { Pelasgic ) seat a Ionian Byzantine. pSeeneo ) Dorian pee oe reck), Osean Italian. Sabine Parstint | Langu d'Oc(South French). Itatic 4 Umbrian Langue @’Oil(North French Latin, Vulgar Latin, { Spanish. Neo-Latin Portuguese. Rumanian, Romansch. r¢ Gaedhelic: Irish, Gelic, Manx, KELTIC age lens Kymraeg (Welsh), Cornish (extinct), ret on. LitHvanic: Lithuanian, Lettic, Pruczi (Pru ian, extinct). Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Great and ae } Little Ru ian, Servo - Croatian, Stavic Sloven i an. Western ) Bohemian, Slovak, Polish, Polabish Branch (Czekh), Lusatian. (extinct) Gothic, Frisic, | Continent a) Low German 4 Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, English, pe vorse | ta vorse, rela Icelandic, di a Danis h, es | oN UE ia ew: Wet High German ’ Pars ow German, Rhenish, Thu ring i an Branch Swi , Suabian, ” 237 ( 215) Arzama . ae The profound disintegration which is shown in this table, and which is far greater than in the Semitic family, is mainly due to the spread of Aryan speech amongst non-Aryan peoples, by whom its phonetic system and grammatical structure were diversely modified. Apart from these tent outward influences, all the Aryan tongues ave throughout their historic life betrayed an inner tendency to break up the highly developed inflectional forms of the early languages, such as Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, and Latin, and thus continue their natural evolution in the direction from synthesis towards analysis. Thus the Romance or Neo-Latin gradually rejected all case-endings and pa ive verbal forms, and the Latin amabor, for instance, is expre ed by three words in Italian and French: to sard amato; je serai aimé. It would require four in English (J shall be lored), and in this respect English is the most highly developed —that is, the most analytical of all Aryan languages, having retained scarcely a dozen of the many hundred inflections characteristic of primitive Aryan speech. At the opposite pole stands the Lithuanian, which is the most synthetic—that is, retains more of the original inflectional system than any other living Aryan language. On this fact was built Latham’s theory that the primeval home of the Aryan peoples may have been situated somewhere about the 8.E. shores of the Baltic Sea.