nguage is continuous, for where this
continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed
or had died, the Tasmanian language _ipso facto_ ceased; and even if any
literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be
reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may
have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have
changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it
remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German
the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a
Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically,
we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us assume that Sanskrit,
Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least
fifteen hundred years before our chronology--what an age had elapsed before
these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged
so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals
are the same in these three languages, and yet _katvaras_ sounds quite
differently from {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} and _quatuor_ and our four. The words for eight,
_octo_ in Latin, {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH OXIA~} in Greek, and _ashtau_ in Sanskrit, are nearly
identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the
pronunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now
let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the
elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 ({~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}),
Sanskrit _satam_, _centum_. There is the formation and fixing of names for
these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary,
because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of
those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these
words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so
weather-beaten, that in most