(b) Iranian branch, which comprises Zend or Old Bactrian (circ. 1000 B.C.), Old Persian and Modern Persian.
II. Greek or Hellenic, inclusive of ancient and modern Greek (from Homer in 800 b.c. onwards). Ancient Greek was divided traditionally into three dialects—Ionic (with Attic or literary Greek), Doric, and Æolic.
III. Italic, divided in early times into two main groups—the Latin and the Umbro-Oscan. From Latin are descended Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Rhoeto-romanie and Roumanian, called generally the Romance languages.
IV. Celtic, of which anon.
V. Teutonic, which includes three groups—(a) East Teutonic or Gothic (fourth cent, A.D.); (b) North Teutonic or Scandinavian, inclusive of Old Norse and the modern languages called Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish; and (c) West Teutonic, which divides again into High German (whence modern German), the Old High German being a language contemporary with Old Irish, and Low German, which includes Old Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, English, Dutch, and Frisian.
VI. 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.
These six groups cannot, save probably in the case of Latin3 and Celtic, be drawn closer together in a genealogical way. Radiating as they did from a common centre, the adjacent groups are more like one another than those further off. 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. Again the Asiatic languages join with the Balto-Slavonic in changing Aryan palatal k into a sibilant sound. 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. pl. masc. of the o- declension). Latin and Celtic, further, show intimate relations in having in common an î in the gen. sing, of the o- declension (originally a locative), -tion- verbal nouns, a future in b, and the passive in -r.
