the Continent, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek,
Latin with its modern offshoots, such as French and Italian, Persian,
and Sanskrit, are so many varieties of one common type of speech: that
Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Veda, is no more distinct from
the Greek of Homer, or from the Gothic of Ulfilas, or from the
Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, than French is from Italian. All these
languages together form one family, one whole, in which every member
shares certain features in common with all the rest, and is at the
same time distinguished from the rest by certain features peculiarly
its own. The the world on which what we call the history of man has
been acted, have been grouped together into three great divisions, the
Aryan or Indo-European Family, the Semitic Family, and the Turanian
Class. According to that division you are aware that English together
with all the Teutonic languages of the Continent, Celtic, Slavonic,
Greek, Latin with its modern offshoots, such as French and Italian,
Persian, and Sanskrit, are so many varieties of one common type of
speech: that Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Veda, is no more
distinct from the Greek of Homer, or from the Gothic of Ulfilas, or
from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, than French is from Italian. All these
languages together form one family, one whole, in which every member
shares certain features in common with all the rest, and is at the
same time distinguished from the rest by certain features peculiarly
its own. The same applies to the Semitic Family, which comprises, as
its most important members, the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the
Arabic of the Koran, and the ancient languages on the monuments of
Phenicia and Carthage, of Babylon and Assyria. These languages, again,
form a compact family, and differ entirely from the other family,
which we called Aryan or Indo-European. The third group of languages,
for we can hardly call it a family, comprises most of the remaining
languages of Asia, and counts among its principal members the
Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Finnic, together with the
languages of Siam, the Malay islands, Tibet, and Southern India.
Lastly, the Chinese language stands by itself, as monosyllabic, the
only remnant of the earliest formation of human speech.

Now I believe that the same division which has introduced a new and
natural order into the history of languages, and has enabled us to
understand the growth of human speech in a manner never dr