Unless we admit this, we must suppose that similar names for similar objects, and similar inflections for similar moods, tenses, and cases, have been developed independently of community of origin; a doctrine upheld by few, and one which would require the most transcendental philology to support it; a doctrine which, without condemning as unreasonable, we may fairly say has never much influenced the current doctrine of ethnologists.
Admitting it, however, we must recognise a long series of difficult problems; problems that have so rarely been dealt with as to be considered wholly new and foreign; problems that occur whenever two allied tongues are separated from each other by any form of speech other than intermediate. The languages thus related may be ever so like, or ever so unlike; but as long as they are liker to each other than those which intervene, the problem in question will recur, viz., the reconstruction of the state of things that existed before the original separation, and which is implied by the existing points of similarity.
It occurs in Great Britain. No matter how unlike the Scotch Gaelic and the Welsh may be, they are more like than the English that lies between them.
It occurs, as will soon be seen, in the ethnology of Greece.
It occurs in the question before us; leading to the inference that if both the Keltic of the Cisalpine Gauls, and the Etruscan of Circumpadane Etrurians were less unequivocally Indo-European than the Slavonic of the Norici and the Umbrian of the Umbri, the original occupants of the intervening area must have been neither Gauls nor Etrurians, but one of four things—
1. Members of the class to which the Umbrians belonged—
2. Members of the class to which the Norici belonged—
3. Partly Norici and partly Umbrians—
4. Transitional populations sufficiently different from each to constitute a third class, but sufficiently allied to each to be more Norican or more Umbrian than aught else.
Such is the way in which here, as elsewhere, we must attempt the reconstruction of what may be called areas of original connection.