The apparatus of noun and adjective derivation, in both primary and secondary suffixes, was already elaborated in its principal features; conspicuous examples are the endings of comparative and superlative, and of participles. - This primitive structure of Aryan language has been variously modified, reduced, arid added to, in the later history of the family; it was most fully and distinctly preserved in the Sanskrit, which on that account casts most light upon the common history of all; but there are points in which each branch leads the rest. On the whole, the tendency has been toward a reduction of earlier synthetic structure, and a prevalence of analytic methods of expression, by the substitution of prepositions for case-endings, and of auxiliaries for verb inflections, and by the multiplication of relational words. Of all the languages of the family, the English has gone furthest in this direction. Aryan language is called distinctively "inflective " (as is also Semitic, although its inflectiveness is of a very different character). By this is meant that it not merely forms combinations from elements originally independent, reducing one of them to a subordinate position, as "formative element," indicating a modification or relation of the other or radical element; but that it also peculiarly integrates or unifies the combined elements, losing sight of and disguising their separate individuality, and even allowing the radical part to become modified within itself by the addition of the other: thus, San-skrit vid, veda, vaidika; Greek

; Latin fid, fldo, fœdus; English (where the endings have disappeared) sing, sang, sung, song. It is matter of dispute among linguists whether such changes are by origin purely phonetic, or symbolically significant: the former appears to be the better opinion. - The unity of Aryan language necessarily implies the former existence of a unitary Aryan people; that is, at some time in the past there must have existed somewhere in the world a single limited community, in whose use the language above described grew up and took shape, and by whose extension and separation it became so widely spread and so diversified as we find it actually to be; but when and where, it is impossible to say with any definite-ness. The greatest antiquity we can attain in the history of the family is 3000-2000 B. 0., when the Indians and Persians formed together one people. The oldest parts of the Vedas may be as old as 2000 B. C.; of the Avesta, considerably less.

We have no trustworthy scale as yet with which to measure chronologically the changes of language; and our opinions of the time of Aryan unity must be governed greatly by our opinions as to the wider question of the antiquity of man; the former is variously estimated at from three up to five or ten thousand years before Christ. As to the place, current opinion is inclined to fix it on the highland of central Asia, near the head waters of the Oxus and Jaxartes; and this situation is claimed to be pointed out by the evidence of the language itself. That, however, is by no means the case; the mere fact that Indo-Persian language is less changed from original Aryan than is the speech of any other branch (which is all the linguistic evidence that can be alleged) does not at all prove that the Indo-Persian common abode is nearest to the original abode of the family; the changes of language are not dependent on and measured by emigration. It is in reality only the testi- mony of the Bible as to the place of origin of the whole human race, and the long-rooted opinions which have grown up partly under its influence, partly under that of the known growth and spread of civilization, that have led men to look to southwestern Asia as the cradle of the Aryan race and speech.

Some recent scholars, rebelling against these influences, have fixed it rather in Europe; but there is nothing of definite value to say for this view. With reference, however, to the degree of cultivation reached by the Aryan mother tribe before its separation, more definite and trustworthy information is obtainable: by inference, namely, from the words which, as occurring in all or nearly all the branches, must be supposed to have formed a part of the primitive vocabulary. The items of such information were first put together by A. Kuhn; Pictet later produced an elaborate but uncritical and untrustworthy work on the subject; the last attempt at reconstruction of the Aryan vocabulary is by Fick. The main facts established are that the tribe was already far past savagery, having all the principal domestic animals that we have, practising the arts of weaving and agriculture, being acquainted with one or two metals (whether iron is not certain), and pos-sessing some of the most important cereals; it was rather pastoral-agricultural than nomadic in its way of life. - It is, of course, vain to attempt tracing the history of dispersion and migration of the branches of the dismembered family into their present seats; but such dispersion must have taken place mainly by gradual spread and unconscious separation, not by a deliberate parting and marching off in different directions, as some seem to please themselves with fancying.

Even the grade of kinship between the branches is not made out beyond dispute. That the Sanskrit-speaking race of India parted from the Iranians, on Iranian territory, and entered India by the northwest, not very long before the Vedic period, is, indeed, universally acknowledged. And the closer relationship of Greek and Italic, on the one hand, and of Germanic and Letto-Slavic, on the other, is quite generally held; but which of these two pairs stands nearer to the Asiatic is a matter of less unanimity of opinion, though with a preponderance to the side of the classic tongues. The place of the Celtic, again, is still more disputed: some connect it closely with the Italic, others rather with the Germanic, etc.; while yet others regard it as quite separate from all. These are matters which will doubtless be determined by and by; and their determination may throw more light than we have at present upon the general course of the movements of the family. There may have been other branches, as independent as the seven mentioned, but driven out of existence in the course of the historical changes that time has brought: it is doubtful whether the Albanian, or Shkipetar, is not a relic of such a branch, the Illyrian; after long doubt, the best authorities at the present time appear to set it down as Aryan. What other races may have earlier occupied a part of the present seats of the Aryans is also mainly matter for conjecture; but that the latter have encroached upon the domain of Finno-Hun-garian ("Turanian ") tribes in northern, and of Iberians (Basques) in southwestern Europe, does not admit of question.

More or less of mixture with aboriginal races is a natural or unavoidable result of such wide extension; so that Aryan speech is likely to be everywhere purer than Aryan blood; and there may be nations or tribes in which, by successive intermixture, Aryan blood is in a minority, even a decided one; yet it is not at all to be questioned that, on the whole, the present geographical limits of the family have been reached by the growth and spread of the original Aryan community. No hypothesis of borrowing, or of the dominating influence of one tribe, propagating and imposing its own idiom through wide regions, can possibly explain the facts of the case; such influence is absolutely impossible without high culture, aided by literature and the art of writing, of which there are no traces in the pre-historic Aryan period. - One of the evidences that there is a unity of race as well as of language among the branches of the Arvan family, is the emi-nence, historical or literary, or both, which most of them have won among mankind. The family was far from being the first to rise to importance, but it has reached a higher place, and maintained itself there more persistently, than any other.

The Persian empire may be regarded as the earliest appearance of an Aryan people as a leading actor in the drama of history; then Greek and Roman supremacy followed one another; and in the modern era, it is the European nations of this kindred, with their colonies, that have been and are almost monopolizing the progressive force of humanity. India has lived a more isolated life, but a grand and notable one; and, through Buddhism, it has powerfully influenced a great part of Asia. This historical importance of the Aryans constitutes one great source of the importance and interest belonging to the study of their languages. Another is the high rank of those languages themselves, as being confessedly the most perfect instruments of human expression and aids to human thought. Moreover, the immense range and variety of Aryan dialects, taken in connection with their high development and with the legibility of their history, have made the study of this family the training ground and the basis of general linguistic science. - For more detailed discussion of the matters presented here, see the " Lectures on Language" of Professors Max Muller and W. D. Whitney; the second volume of Duncker's Geschichte des Alterthums; Pictet's Origines indo-europeennes; and Fick's Vergleichendes Worterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen. The last two, with Bopp's and Schleicher's comparative grammars, have been mentioned above.

The relations of Latin and Greek respectively to the family have been best set forth by Corssen, Lateinische Sprache, and G. Curtius, Griechische Etymologie.