They can only be found when beside the word which we wish to explain there exists some other word or words either in the same language or in another kindred language, with which the word can be compared. By comparing two or more kindred words we can generally find out something about the earlier form of each of them. When we compare Lat. gero, haurio with their participles gestus, haustus (and when we have learnt that in Latin -s- between vowels became -r-), we see that their earlier forms were *geso,[1] *hausio; so if we set temere ‘rashly’ beside Sanskrit tamas ‘darkness,’ when we have learnt that a in Sanskrit regularly corresponds to any one of the three vowels, a, e, or o, in Latin, we see that temere meant originally ‘in the dark.’
§ 3. By Kindred Languages we mean those which have descended from a common ancestor. Thus what are called Romance languages, Corsican, Sardinian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Roumanian, are kindred languages because they have all descended from Latin. But they did not all begin their separate crowth at the same date. The oldest are Corsican and Sardinian, which took their rise from the Latin of the Roman camps which were established in those islands between the First and Second Punic Wars in 231 B.C. Then comes Spanish: for Spain became a Roman Province at the end of the Second Punic
- ↑ Observe this convenient use of the asterisk. We attach * to forms which are not actually on record but whose former existence we can infer from other forms which do appear in literature or inscriptions.
