Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples: A Manual of Comparative Philology and the Earliest Culture (Classic Reprint)

When the publishers of this work communicated to me their proposal to render my work, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, more accessible to the English public by means of a translation, I felt it alike a pleasure and an honour the more so as it seemed to warrant the belief that the First Edition had already made some valued friends in England. The Science of Language, on which the following investigations are based, may properly be termed a daughter of the A nglo-G ermfin world, and if we pay honour to Franz Bopp as the founder of our science, we are not in danger of forgetting that it was from English hands that he received the key to its comprehension knowledge of Sanskrit. But out of the purely grammatical treatment which language received at Bopp shands, and side by side with it, in the course of time and again with the active co-operation of English scholars the idea was more and more definitely developed that perhaps by the aid of the same Comparative Philology, to which such startling results were due in the domain of words and their forms, it might also be possible to penetrate somewhat more deeply into the history of the things denoted by those words. As the archaeologist, armed with pick and shovel, descends into the depths of the earth, in order to trace the footsteps of the past in bone and stone-remains, so the student of language might endeavour to employ the flotsam and jetsam of language washed on the shore of history from ages immeasiirably remote to reconstruct the picture of the primeval age. The presentiment to which Leibnitz gave utterance in the sentence :N ihil majorem ad antiquas populorum origines indagandas lucem prsebere quam collationem linguarum, was fulfilled. In a word. Linguistic Palteology
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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