1 88 The Loom of Language THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY Similarities are comparatively easy to trace in closely i elated languages such as Swedish and German or French and Italian We can still detect some3 when we compare individual members of these groups with those of others Centuries back some people felt, though dimly, that the Teutonic group was not an isolated unit In 1597, Bonaventura Vulcamus observed that twenty-two words are the same in German and Persian. Twenty years later,, another scholar stressed the similari- ties between Lithuanian and Latin Both were right, though both drew the wrong conclusions from their findings, the former that German had an admixture of Persian, the latter that the Lithuanians were of Roman stock. Two hundred years latei, in 1817, Rasmus Knsnan Rask, a brilliant young Dane who had been investigating the origin of OH Norse m Iceland, first drew attention to sound-correspondence between Greek and Latin on the one hand, and the Teutonic languages on the other Text-books usually refer to this discovery as Gnnwrfs Law — after the German scholar who took up Rusk's idea One item of this mos>t cele- brated of all sound-shifts is the change fiom the Latin p to the Teutonic/: IATIN 1NGLISII .SWiDLSa GERMAN plenus /uil full /ed-i$» /cot /ot Fuw pater /ather /adcr Fater * The German V stands for the / sound in far, A httle later the German scholar FranxC Bopp (1791-1867) showed that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic in us earlier stages, have similar verb-flexions His studies led him to the conclusion that Aryan verb- and case-flexion have come about by the gluing on of what were once independent vocables such as pronouns and prepositions It was a brilliant idea* Bopp's only weakness was that he tried to establish its validity i^hen sufficient evidence was not available. Inevi- tably, Jake other pioneers, he made errors. His disciples grossly neglected the important part which analogy (pp 93 and 204) has played in the accretion of affixes to roots. Subsequently a strong reaction set m. Even now, many linguists approach Bopp's agglutination theory squeamishly, as if it dealt with the human pudenda This attitude is none the less foolish when it affects scientific caution for its justification, because