Excerpt from A Dictionary of English Etymology IT requires only a superficial acquaintance with the principal languages of Europe to recognise their division into four or five main classes, each comprising a number of subordinate dialects, which have so much in common in their stock of words and in their grammatical structure, as irresistibly to impress us with the conviction that the peoples by whom they are spoken, are the progeny, with more or less mixture of foreign elements, of a common ancestry. If we compare German and Dutch, for instance, or Danish and Swedish, it is impossible in either case to doubt that the people speaking the pair of languages are a cognate race; that there was a time more or less remote when the ancestors of the Swabians and the Hollanders, or of the Danes and Swedes, were comprised among a people speaking a common language. The relation between Danish and Swedish is of the closest kind, that between Dutch and German a more distant one, and we cannot fail to recognise a similar relationship, though of more remote an origin, between the. Scandinavian dialects, on the one hand, and the Teutonic, on the other, - the two together forming what is called the Germanic class of Languages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.