पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/१५

8 SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN which is extinct, and Insular Celtic which is divided into Irish (Gaelic) and Brittanic (Welsh, Cornish, Breton). Literary records of Celtic begin with the Old Irish glosses of the eighth century. VIII. Germanic, which may be divided into East Germanic or Gothic (extinct), Nordic or Scandinavian, and West Germanic, to which belong the English and German languages. The earliest literary monument of Germanic is the Gothic translation of the Bible by Uifila (a.d. fourth cent.). The two major members of the family which remain to be mentioned are known from discoveries made in the present century. They are : IX. The so-called ‘ Tocharian * preserved in Buddhist manu- scripts discovered in Chinese Turkestan, dating from the sixth to the tenth centuries a.d. It is divided into two dialects which are for convenience termed A and B. X. Hittite, which is preserved in cuneiform tablets recovered from Boghaz-koi in Anatolia, the site of the capital of the ancient Hittite kingdom. The time covered by these records is the period from c. 1700 to c. 1200 B.c;., the bulk of them being dated towards the end of this period. It is the oldest recorded IE language, and at the same time in many ways aberrant from the usual type. Its discovery has raised many new and interesting problems. In addition to the major languages listed above, there existed in antiquity a considerable number of other IE languages which have become extinct and are known only from scanty remains in the form of inscriptions, proper names and occasional glosses. To put the Indo-European family into proper perspec- tive the more important of these are enumerated below. In the first place there are certain ancient languages of Asia Minor which together with Hittite form a special group. The cuneiform texts from Boghaz-koi include texts in two such languages, -Luwian and Palaean, which show close relationship with Hittite. The so-called Hittite Hieroglyphic inscriptions which have now been partially deciphered, have revealed a language which is closely related to the Luwian of the cuneiform texts. Later the Lycian language, in which there are inscrip- tions in alphabetic script, has been shown to have relationship with Luwian. Most recently the Lydian language, knowm from inscriptions from Sardis, has been shown, to belong with the above languages in the Anatolian group.