the family, since it is used by them, and them alone, in designating themselves; and a few still employ the term "Indo-Germanic," which seems to savour of national prepossession, since no good reason can be given why, among the western branches, the Germanic should be singled out for representation in the general title of the family.
The languages of this whole family sustain to one another a relation which is the same in kind with that subsisting between the various Germanic dialects, and differs from it only in degree. That the signs of their relationship escape the notice of a superficial observer—that the school-boy, or even the college-student, when toiling over his Greek and Latin tasks, does not suspect, and might be hard to persuade, that the classical languages and his mother-tongue are but modified forms of the same original, is evidently no ground for discrediting the fact. The uninstructed English speaker, as we have seen, finds even the nearly kindred German as strange and unintelligible as the Turkish: both are to him in equal degree, as he says, "all Dutch," or "all Greek;" and yet, a little learning enables him to find half his native vocabulary, in a somewhat changed but still plainly recognizable form, in the German dictionary. A higher degree of instruction is required, in order to the discovery and appreciation of that evidence which proves the remoter relationship of the Indo-European tongues; a wider comparison, a more skilled and penetrating analysis, must be applied; but, by its application, the conclusion is reached just as directly and surely in the one case as in the other. The inquirer fully convinces himself that the correspondences in their material and structure are too numerous, and of too intimate a character, to be explained with any plausibility by the supposition of accidental coincidence, or of mutual borrowing or imitation; that they can only be the consequence of a common linguistic tradition.
Any complete or detailed exhibition of the evidence which shows the original unity of the languages claimed to constitute the Indo-European family is, of course, utterly impossible within the necessary limits of these lectures; but it is altogether desirable that we should direct our attention to
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