ABSTRACT
1. (1) No language is better suited than English to the purposes of the student who wishes, by means of historical investigation, to form an independent opinion on the life and development of language in general. In English we have an almost uninterrupted series of written and printed works, extending over a period of more than a thousand years; and, if we are not contented with the results to be obtained from these sources, comparative philology comes in, drawing its conclusions from all the cognate tongues, and showing us, with no little degree of certainty, the nature of the language spoken by the old Germans at the time when the differentiation of the several tribes had as yet scarcely begun. The scientific investigations of our century go still further back: they have brought together Greek and Latin, German, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Celtic, Indian and Persian, as one indissoluble unity; through a long succession of parallelisms they have pointed out what is common to all these languages, and have made it possible to some extent to reconstruct the unwritten language used in intercourse by the ancestral people several centuries before the era of any languages historically accessible to us. If we do not know where the original Arian (or, as it is often termed, Indo-European or Indo-Germanic) people lived, we know much about the structure of their speech.
