{ { { Slovene.
{ {
{ { 2. West { Polish.
{ { Slavic. { Czech or Bohemian.
{ { { Sorb.
3. Albanian.
242 : 16. Cf. S. Feist, 2, p. 250. On the archaic character of Lithuanian, see Taylor, 1, p. 15, and the authorities he quotes. Also Schrader, Jevons translation.
242 : 20–243 : 4. Deniker, 2, p. 320, sums up Hirt’s position on this question in the footnote: “According to Hirt the home of dispersion of the primitive Aryan language would be found to the north of the Carpathians, in the Letto-Lithuanian region. From this point two linguistic streams would start flowing around the mountains to the west and east; the western stream, after spreading over Germany (Teutonic languages), left behind the Celtic languages in the upper valley of the Danube, and filtered through on the one side into Italy (Latin languages), on the other side into Illyria, Albania, and Greece (Helleno-Illyrian languages). The eastern stream formed the Slav languages in the plains traversed by the Dnieper, then spread by way of the Caucasus into Asia (Iranian languages and Sanscrit). In this way we can account, on the one hand, for the less and less marked relationship between the Aryan languages of the present day and the common primitive dialect, and on the other hand, for the diversity between the two groups of Aryan languages, western and eastern.”
If this were so, Sanskrit should more closely resemble the Slavic than the western languages. As it is, the old Vedic speech, the earliest form of Sanskrit, is said to show more affiliations with Greek than with any other of the Aryan tongues (see Taylor, 1, p. 21, and authorities quoted), a fact which merely adds another proof to our hypothesis that sometime between 2000 and 1500 B. C. the Nordics filtered down the Balkan peninsula in their earliest wave and about the same time other branches found their way into northwestern India. The Sanskrit alphabet is more closely related to the Phœnician than to any other. At the time of the first Nordic expansion their language was not reduced to writing. The alphabet used for early Sanskrit, was, according to Professor Bühler, probably introduced into India by traders from Mesopotamia about 800 B. C. Another authority on the relations of Greek and Sanskrit is Johannes Schmidt, Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der Indo-germanischen Sprachen, Weimar, 1872.
243 : 4. Prof. J. D. Prince, correspondence, in discussing the kinship of prehistoric Ugrian to Aryan says that, although it is a temptation to believe in it, there is insufficient data for proving it. As careful a scholar as Szinnyei, in his Vergleichende Grammatik der Ugrischen Sprache, is careful not to commit himself. But see Zaborowski, 3; also the notes to p. 236 : 26; and Deniker, 2, pp. 349–351.