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It has been asserted that in these two Aryan branches must we look for our ancestors. How shall we verify the truth of this assertion? What family likeness must we seek in order to recognise the relationship? How feel certain that the languages we speak have been derived from them? “If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin—if no historical documents existed to tell us of the Roman empire—a mere comparison of the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common.”[23]

Let us conjugate the verb to be in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Walachian, and in Rhætian, and we shall see that it is clear: first, that all are but varieties of one common type: secondly, that it is impossible to consider any one of these six dialects as the original from which the others had been borrowed, since no single one contains the elements composing them. “If we find such forms as j’ai aimé, we can explain them by a mere reference to the grammatical materials which French has still at its command, and the same may be said of j’aimerai, i.e. je-aimer-ai, I have to love, I shall love. But a change from je suis to tu es is inexplicable by the light of French grammar; it must have been a part of some language antecedent to any of the Romance dialects; it is, in fact, the verb to be in Latin, which solves this difficulty; each of the six paradigms is but a metamorphosis of the Latin.”[24]