xiv PREFACE.
monitory voices of the Asiatic as well as the European sisterhood. It was necessary, also, to set aside many false appearances of affinity; as, for example, to deprive the i in the Lithuanian geri of its supposed connection with the i of Gothic, Greek, and Latin forms, such as gôdai, ἀγαθοι, boni (see p. 251, Note †, and compare Grimm I. 827. 11); and to disconnect the Latin is of lupis (lupibus) from the Greek ις of λύκοις (λύκοι-σι). As concerns the method followed in treating the subject of Germanic grammar, it is that of deducing all from the Gothic as the guiding star of the German, and explaining the latter simultaneously with the older languages and the Lithuanian. At the close of each lecture on the cases, a tabular view is given of the results obtained, in which every thing naturally depends on the most accurate distinction of the terminations from the base, which ought not, as usually happens, to be put forward capriciously, so that a portion of the base is drawn into the inflection, by which the division becomes not merely useless, but injurious, as productive of positive error. Where there is no real termination none should be appended for appearance sake: thus, for example, we give, §. 148, p. 164, the nominatives χώρα, terra, giba, &c., as without inflection cf. §. 137. The division gib-a would lead us to adopt the erroneous notion that a is the termination, whereas it is only the abbreviation of the ô (from the old â, §. 69.) of the theme.[1] In certain instances it is
- ↑ The simple maxim laid down elsewhere by me, and deducible only from the Sanskrit, that the Gothic ô is the long of a, and thereby when shortened nothing but a, as the latter lengthened can only become ô, extends its influence over the whole grammar and construction of words, and explains, for example, how from dags, “day” (theme DAGA), may be derived, without change of vowel, dôgs (DŌGA), “daily”; for this derivation is absolutely the same as when in Sanskrit râjata, “argenteus,” comes from răjata, “argentum,” on which more hereafter. Generally speaking, and with few exceptions, the Indian system of vowels, pure from consonantal and other altering influences, is of extraordinary importance for the elucidation of the German grammar: on it principally rests my own theory of vowel change, which differs materially from that of Grimm, and which I explain by mechanical Laws, with some modifications of my earlier
