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From The Science of Language (1891) by Max Müller
It was formerly the fashion to speak of a Proto-Aryan language from which Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic were all derived, just as French was derived from Latin, or English from Anglo-Saxon. That theory, however, has hardly held its own for a longer time than the theory which it was meant too replace, namely that all Aryan languages were derived from Sanskrit.
And yet there was some truth in that theory, if only rightly understood. To imagine that there was a settled Proto-Aryan language, as settled as Sanskrit, and that it became modified afterwards, according to strict phonetic rules, is no doubt, impossible. That process can be studied to great advantage in the transition of Sanskrit into Prâkrit dialects. But we have only to study languages, before they are reduced to writing, in order to see that the natural state of language is always dialectic, and dialectic, not in the sense in which Italian, Spanish, and French are dialects, derived from Latin, but as we often find in
the smallest Polynesian island two or three dialects existing side by side, not one of which has a right to claim precedence before the others.
Founded on lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1861 and 1863
New York : Scribners 1891, Vol. II, pp. 184-185.
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