In most of the examples of etymology given in this paper the likeness between the recent and the remote has been more or less apparent to eye or ear on slight examination. It must not however be supposed that the history of a word is limited by such palpable bounds. On the contrary etymology, which when trustworthy proceeds step by step accounting for, but accepting every clearly established change, leads the inquirer in numberless instances into regions at first far beyond his ken. One illustrative instance must suffice: The French word for water is O. It is spelled eau; but that is not to the purpose; a word is a sound, not the name of an assemblage of signs called letters. Now this sound O, or eau, comes directly from the Latin aqua, in which there is no trace of it; and in which, moreover, there are, as will be seen, sounds of a marked character which have been wholly swept away. The course of derivation or degradation was this: Aqua by the common change of u to v, became aqva, which passed by phonetic decay into ava, and this by a common vowel change become eve, which in turn, by a common diphthongal extension, broadened into eave, the v in which changing back again into u gave eaue, of which the body, au, came to represent the whole word, which at last reached the simple vowel sound o. In like manner the Greek pente, the French cinq, the English five, and the Sanskrit pancan may all be traced to the same root, pani, the hand, with its five fingers; the English tooth and the Latin dens are from the same root (indeed it has been extracted), and so are coucher and locus, and even galaxy and lettuce. That I may not seem to tantalize my reader I will give the easy explanation of the last paradox-like assertion. The bond between the two words is in the Latin word for milk, lac, and the kindred Greek word for the same fluid, gala; the old forms having been severally lact and galact. The galaxy is the milky-way, and lettuce is the juicy, milky plant; the Old French name of which (from which ours comes) was laictuce, which itself represented the Latin lactuca.
The reader having now seen some few characteristic illustrations of the methods, the course, and the revelations of philology in regard to the language of the Aryan peoples, we are ready to examine the history and the structure of English.
[A] Here and elsewhere I use italic letters to spell a Greek word; doing so because it is quite possible that many intelligent and inquiring readers who may look to me, as to a fellow-student, for a little help, may be unacquainted with the Greek alphabet, and the force of its various characters. We are obliged to use this letter in Russian and Sanskrit; why not in Greek? As to that however there is one notable and often recurring difficulty in the use of an alien alphabet: the short e is one letter, epsilon, and the long e another, eta (pronounced aytah). The sound and value of the latter is that of the French or Italian e; that is the name sound of English a, without the slight e sound, with which we close it. This sound—the long e (or a)—I have endeavored to indicate by using for it a Roman letter. Strictness would demand other like indications of sound which must be passed by with this allusion.
[B] And so I find it turning to a Latin grammar for schools published in 1871. I do not refer to grammars like Madvig’s.
[C] See Max Müller, “Science of Language,” vol. ii, pp. 468-472.
[D] Monier Williams’ Sanskrit Grammar, p. 70.