The former includes the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton the Gadelic comprises Irish, Manx, and (Scottish) Gaelic. These six Celtic languages are grouped again into two branches, which may be named the Brittonic and the Gadelic. the 18th century there were six, when Cornish still lived. The Celtic group now comprises five living languages in. sing, of the o- declension (originally a locative), -tion- verbal nouns, a future in b, and the passive in -r. Latin and Celtic, further, show intimate relations in having in common an î in the gen. Similarly two or three other groups may be found with common peculiarities (e.g., Greek, Latin, and Celtic with oi or i in the nom. Again the Asiatic languages join with the Balto-Slavonic in changing Aryan palatal k into a sibilant sound. The European languages, inclusive of Armenian, present the three primitive vowels a, e, o intact, while the Indo-Iranian group coalesces them all into the sound a. Radiating as they did from a common centre, the adjacent groups are more like one another than those further off. These six groups cannot, save probably in the case of Latin 3 and Celtic, be drawn closer together in a genealogical way. Balto-Slavonic or Letto-Slavonic, which includes Lithuanian, dating from the seventeenth century, yet showing remarkable traces of antiquity, Lettic, Old Prussian of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, now extinct, Old Bulgarian or Church Slavonic, into which the Bible was translated in the ninth century, and the Slavonic modern languages of Russia, etc. (a) Indian branch, including Sanskrit, now dead, but dating in its literature to at least 1000 b.c., and the descendant modern (dialects or) languages, such as Hindustani, Bengali, and Mahratti. Indo-Iranian or Arian, divisible into two branches: The Aryan or Indo-European languages fall into six leading groups (leaving Albanian and Armenian out of account), thus:. The other races went their several ways-the Indians and Iranians eastward across the steppes, the Teutons went to the north-west, and the Hellenes to the south. In this way the Celts and the Italians parted from the old Aryan home to move up the Danube, the former settling on the Rhine and the latter on the Gulf of Venice.
Here a number of village communities, weary of the work of, agriculture, or led by the desire of better soil, cut their crops, pulled down their lightly built houses and huts, packed child and chattel on the waggons with their teams of oxen, and sought their fortune in a distant land. The civilization of the primitive Aryans appears to have been an earlier and more nomadic form of that presented to us by the Celtic tribe of the Helvetii in Caesar's time. in ancient Sarmatia or South Russia and from this as centre 2 the speakers of the Aryan tongue, which even then showed dialectal differences, radiated east, west, north and south to the various countries now occupied by the descendant languages. It was spoken, it is believed, some three thousand years B.C. This parent tongue is variously called the Aryan, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, and even the Indo-Celtic language. Gaelic belongs to the Celtic group of languages, and the Celtic is itself a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech for it has been found that the languages of Europe (with the exception of Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, and Ugro-Finnish), and those of Asia from the Caucasus to Ceylon, 1 resemble each other in grammar and vocabulary to such an extent that they must all be considered as descended from one parent or original tongue.
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