explanation is, that the Lithuanian lika answers to the Teutonic tihan, ten; the ka at the end of the former word changes to fa; just as the Sanscrit katvar changes to the Gothic fidvor (our four), and the Latin cado to our fall. If lifan then take the place of the common Teutonic tihan, ân-lifan and twâ-lifan (eleven and twelve) are easily framed. These Eastern kinsmen of ours had also, like ourselves and unlike the rest of the Aryan stock, both a Definite and an Indefinite form of the Adjective.
But the time came when our fathers left off hunting the auroch in the forests to the East of the Vistula, bade farewell to their Lithuanian cousins (one of the most interesting of all the branches of the Aryan tree), and marched Westward, as the Celts had done long before. Up to this time, we may fairly guess, we had kept our verbs in mi. It cannot be known when the great Teutonic race was split up into High Germans, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. Hard is it to explain why each of them stuck to peculiar old forms; why the High Germans should have kept the Present Plural of their Verb (a point in which Old English fails woefully), almost as it is in Sanscrit and Latin; why the Low Germans (this term includes the Goths and English) should in general have clung closer to the old inflections than their brethren did, and have refused to corrupt the letter t into s;[1] why the Scandinavians should have retained to this day a Passive Voice. I can here do
- ↑ Compare the Sanscrit swêda, English sweat, High German schweiss. English is at once seen to be far more primitive than German.
