Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/201

former lacks), and in sense (the French meaning 'wait!'); and, in all these respects save the last, both differ from the Latin attendite; yet of this both are alike the hereditary representatives: no Roman ever said either attend or attendez. But this same reasoning we apply also in other cases, where direct historical evidence is wanting, arriving without hesitation or uncertainty at like conclusions. If we say true, while the German says treu, the Dane tro, the Netherlander trouw, and so on, we do not once think of doubting that it is because we have all gotten nearly the same word, in nearly the same sense, by uninterrupted tradition from some primitive community in which a like word had a like sense; and we set ourselves to discover what this word was, and what and why have been the changes which have brought it into its present varying forms. The discordance between our father, the Anglo-Saxon fæder, the Icelandic fadir, the Dutch vader, and the German vater, does not, any more than that between verity and its analogues, compel us to assume a time when these words existed as primitive dialectic varieties in the same community: we regard them as the later effects of the separation of one community into several. And when we compare them all with the Latin pater, the Greek patēr, the Persian peder, the Sanskrit pitar—all which are but palpable forms of the same original from which the rest have come—our inference is still the same. Or, to recur once more to an example which we have already had occasion to adduce, our word is is the English correspondent of the German ist, the Latin est, the Greek esti, the Lithuanian esti, the Slavonian yestⁱ, the Persian est, the Sanskrit asti. To the apprehension of the historical student of language, all these are nothing more than slightly varying forms of the same vocable: their difference is one of the innumerable differences of detail which distinguish from one another the languages we have named. We cannot, to be sure, go back under the sure guidance of contemporary records to the people among whom, and the time at which, the word originated: but we are just as far in this case as in those referred to above from being driven to the conclusion that all its present representatives are equally primitive, that they consti-