पृष्ठम्:The Sanskrit Language (T.Burrow).djvu/२३

l6 SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN believe that it ever existed as a regular component of the verbal inflection in those languages in which it is not recorded, its development in Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian must be regarded as a common innovation of the closely related dialects on which they are based. The elimination of the r- endings of the medio- passive in Sanskrit and Greek is a significant common characteristic. Phonetically Sanskrit and Greek show a common treatment of the sonant nasals (IE n t ip) , replacing them by the vowel a. In view of the close connection that exists between them in other respects this is unlikely to be a matter of chance. In other respects, e.g. in the matter of prothetic vowels Greek seems to be closest to Armenian, and there are also some remarkable coincidences of vocabulary between them. The fact that Greek shows more signs of close connection with the sataw-languages Armenian and Indo-Iranian than with any other is in striking contrast to the absence in it of the dis- tinctive sound changes of the satdm group. We must assume that the IE dialect on which Greek is based was originally in the closest contact with the central dialect group, but that this contact was severed at a period preceding the satdm sound changes. The most striking thing about the two Tocharian languages is that they have no special connections whatever with Indo- Iranian, the only other Asiatic family. They are no closer to Indo-Iranian — in some respects they appear more different — than to languages far to the West like Italic and Celtic-. This is in accordance with the fact that the parent dialect of Indo- Iranian was originally a central dialect, and as such would have with a dialect on the Eastern periphery, from which Tocharian is descended, no more in common than with the percursors of Italic and Celtic on the extreme West. Neither have they any special relations with any other of the individual groups of Indo-European. The prevalence of the middle terminations in r in Tocharian does not indicate any close relationship with Italo- Celtic on the one hand or with Hittite on the other, but merely a type of inflection that was characteristic of early Indo- European, but was tending to be reduced or eliminated in the later period in dialects of the central area. Attempts to find other evidence of connection with one group or another have been singularly lacking in results. The two languages have become much altered from the original Indo-European. The