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There is another list of paradigms which, under a less familiar aspect than the first, presents the same phenomenon. Conjugate the verb to be in Doric, Latin, old Slav, Sanscrit, Celtic, Lithuanian, Zend, Gothic, and Armenian, and you will see that the nine are varieties of one common type, and that it is impossible to consider any one of them as the original of the others, since, here again, none of the languages possess the grammatical material out of which these forms could have been framed. Sanscrit cannot have been the source from which the rest were derived, since Greek, in several instances, has retained a more organic form than the Sanscrit. Nor can Greek be considered as the earliest language from which the others were derived, for not even Latin could be called the daughter of Greek, since Latin has preserved certain forms more primitive than the Greek. Hence all these nine dialects point to some more ancient language, which was to them what Latin was to the Romance dialects; only at that early period there was no literature to preserve to us any remnant of that mother-tongue that died in giving birth to all the modern Aryan dialects.[25]

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