of language, and to consider the relation in which they stand to the Indo-European, we have to pause long enough to look at the main facts in the history of growth of the latter—of our own form of speech, using the word "our" in the widest sense to which we have as yet extended it. This we do, partly on account of the intrinsic interest of the subject, and partly because the results thus won will be found valuable, and even almost indispensable, in the course of our farther inquiries.
The history of Indo-European language has been more carefully read, and is now more thoroughly understood, than that of any other of the grand divisions of human speech. Not that our knowledge of it is by any means complete, or is not marked even by great and numerous deficiencies and obscurities: owing in no small part to the obliteration of needed evidence, and hence irreparable; but in part also to incomplete comparison and analysis of the material yet preserved, and therefore still admitting and sure ere long to receive amendment. Such deficiencies, however, are more concerned with matters of minor detail, and less with facts and principles of fundamental consequence, here than elsewhere. Hence the mode of development of language in general, even from its first commencement, can in no other way be so well exemplified as by tracing its special history in this single family.
Our first inquiry concerns the primitive stage of Indo-European language, its historical beginnings.
The general processes of linguistic growth and change, as they have for long ages past been going on in all the dialects of our kindred, were set forth and illustrated with some detail in the early part of our discussions respecting language (in the second and third lectures). We there saw that, in order to provide new thought and knowledge with its appropriate signs, and to repair the waste occasioned by the loss of words from use and memory, and the constant wearing out of forms, new combinations were made out of old materials, words of independent significance reduced to the position and value of modifying appendages to other words, and meanings variously altered and transferred. These
