past. There is naturally no reason to believe that this earliest
"Indo-European" (or "Aryan") prototype which we can in part reconstruct,
in part but dimly guess at, is itself other than a single "dialect" of a
group that has either become largely extinct or is now further
represented by languages too divergent for us, with our limited means,
to recognize as clear kin.[126]

[Footnote 126: Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter
kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground,
however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.]

All languages that are known to be genetically related, i.e., to be
divergent forms of a single prototype, may be considered as constituting
a "linguistic stock." There is nothing final about a linguistic stock.
When we set it up, we merely say, in effect, that thus far we can go
and no farther. At any point in the progress of our researches an
unexpected ray of light may reveal the "stock" as but a "dialect" of a
larger group. The terms dialect, language, branch, stock--it goes
without saying--are purely relative terms. They are convertible as our
perspective widens or contracts.[127] It would be vain to speculate as
to whether or not we shall ever be able to demonstrate that all
languages stem from a common source. Of late years linguists have been
able to make larger historical syntheses than were at one time deemed
feasible, just as students of culture have been able to show historical
connections between culture areas or institutions that were at one time
believed to be totally isolated from each other. The human world is
contracting not only prospectively but to the backward-probing eye of
culture-history. Nevertheless we are as yet far from able to reduce the
riot of spoken languages to a small number of "stocks." We must still
operate with a quite considerable number of these stocks. Some of them,
like Indo-European or Indo-Chinese, are spoken over tremendous reaches;
others, like Basque,[128] have a curiously restricted range and are in
all likelihood but dwindling remnants of groups that were at one time
more widely distributed. As for the single or multiple origin of speech,
it is likely enough that language as a human institution (or, if one
prefers, as a human "faculty") developed but once in the history of the
race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural
event. Such a theory constructed "on general princi