Historic Periods, etc.
tongues, we come to our own language, which we find to be most closely related to the Frisian. In looking at the past through our own vocabulary, we catch glimpses of an early civilization that is of peculiar interest to the English-speaking peoples. By means of words still preserved to us, however altered in signification,—many of them coarse and brutal—we can recall remote perceptions; we are able to review acts of antiquity; and we can reawaken conceptions that were held by those who used our ancestral tongue to express their culture during its earliest known stage.
From that distant period came our first ten numerals, and such words as father, mother, daughter, sister, brother, son, widow, nephew (French from neve), foot, tooth, knee, etc.; together with the names of domesticated animals, such as hound, goat, goose, horse (eoh), sow, ewe, wether, cow, wool, ox, steer, free, herd, etc. It is natural that words of this kind should have been used by a nomadic people.
That these tribes had made considerable prog-
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