and it would be a grammatical miracle if crippled forms, such as sem, etz, and son, had been changed [pg 172] back again into the more healthy, more primitive, more Latin, sommes, êtes, sont; sumus, estis, sunt.
Let us apply the same test to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin; and we shall see how their mutual genealogical position is equally determined by a comparison of their grammatical forms. It is as impossible to derive Latin from Greek, or Greek from Sanskrit, as it is to treat French as a modification of Provençal. Keeping to the auxiliary verb to be, we find that I am is in
| Sanskrit | Greek | Lithuanian |
| asmi | esmi | esmi. |
The root is as, the termination mi.
Now, the termination of the second person is si, which, together with as, or es, would make,
| as-si | es-si | es-si. |
But here Sanskrit, as far back as its history can be traced, has reduced assi to asi; and it would be impossible to suppose that the perfect, or, as they are sometimes called, organic, forms in Greek and Lithuanian, es-si, could first have passed through the mutilated state of the Sanskrit asi.
The third person is the same in Sanskrit, Greek, and Lithuanian, as-ti or es-ti; and, with the loss of the final i, we recognize the Latin est, Gothic ist, and Russian est'.
The same auxiliary verb can be made to furnish sufficient proof that Latin never could have passed through the Greek, or what used to be called the Pelasgic stage, but that both are independent modifications of the same original language. In the singular, Latin is less primitive than Greek; for sum stands for es-um, es for es-is, est for es-ti. In the first [pg 173] person plural, too, sumus stands for es-umus, the Greek es-mes, the Sanskrit 'smas. The second person es-tis, is equal to Greek es-te, and more primitive than Sanskrit stha. But in the third person plural Latin is more primitive than Greek. The regular form would be as-anti; this, in Sanskrit, is changed into santi. In Greek, the initial s is dropped, and the Æolic enti, is finally reduced to eisi. The Latin, on the contrary, has kept the radical s, and it would be perfectly impossible to derive the Latin sunt from the Greek eisi.
I need hardly say that the modern English, I am, thou art, he is, are only secondary modifications of the same primitive verb. We find in Gothic—