tute together the state of indefinite dialectic variety in which the expression of the third person singular of the verb to be began, and that the nations, modern or ancient, in whose languages we find them are the lineal descendants of those groups in a former community who finally made up their minds to prefer the one or the other of them. On the contrary, we derive, with all the confidence belonging to a strictly logical process of reasoning, the conclusion that the words we are considering are later variations of a single original, namely asti, and that they would have no existence if a certain inferrible community, at an unknown period in the past, had not put together the verbal root as, signifying 'existence,' and the pronoun ti, meaning 'that,' to form that original.
The same reasoning is applicable to every other individual instance of dialectic difference. And it is so applied, in each individual instance, even by those who maintain the priority of dialects: such comparison and inference as we have been illustrating constitute the method of linguistic research of the comparative philologists, among whom they too desire to count themselves. Only they fail to note that the whole sum of dialectic difference is made up of instances like these, and that, if the latter point back, in detail, to an original unity, the former must, in its entirety, do the same. "As there were families, clans, confederacies, and tribes," we are told,[1] "before there was a nation, so there were dialects before there was a language." The fallacy involved in this comparison, as in all the reasoning by which is supported the view we are combating, is that it does not go back far enough; it begins in the middle of historic development, instead of at its commencement. If families, clans, and tribes were ultimate elements in the history of humanity, if they sprang up independently, each out of the soil on which it stands, then the indefinite diversity of human language in its early stages—a diversity, however, fundamental, and not dialectic—might follow, not only as an analogical, but as a direct historical consequence. But, if a population of scattered communities implies dispersion from a single point,
- ↑ Max Müller, l.c.
