We can imagine the suppressed excitement of the philologists of that time as they began to discover in that remote Eastern language, the sacred language of the Vedic hymns, words such as ‘vid’ (to see), ‘tara’ (a star), ‘sad’ (to sit), ‘bhratar’ (a brother). For it was not only the evident relation of Sanskrit to the languages of Europe that was exciting. Sanskrit, which had preserved the forms of its words more unchanged than any other Aryan tongue, threw a brilliant light on the close relations existing between those other languages themselves. For instance, although the sisterhood of words such as the Greek ‘onoma’, Latin ‘nomen’, and _name_, had long been suspected, yet there had been no way of distinguishing such a sisterhood from purely accidental resemblances like Hebrew ‘gol’, Greek ‘kaleo’, and _call_, and the connection between ‘brother’ and ‘frater’ was by no means obvious. But when the older Sanskrit form ‘bhratar’ was brought to light, the gap between these words was at once bridged. It could be seen at a glance how the three of them, _brother_, _bhratar_, and _frater_, had started from the same original form and diverged through the years. Gradually all doubt was blown away, and Sanskrit, the language of a race with whom Europeans had thought, and for the most part still think, that they had nothing whatever in common, stood revealed as an obvious relative of Latin, Greek, Modern English, and practically all the other languages of Europe. It seemed, therefore, to follow that our ancestors and those of the Hindoos were at one time living together, that our ancestors and theirs were, in fact, the same. At first it was thought that Sanskrit itself was the parent-language from which all the others had derived, and that the nations of Europe were descended from a body of Hindoos, some of whom had migrated westwards. We called ourselves “Aryans” because the people who had once spoken Sanskrit were known as “Aryas”, or worshippers of the God of the Brahmins. But soon the accurate methods of analysis which philology had now acquired made it plain that this could not be so. Therefore a still older language was postulated and called indifferently the Aryan, the Indo-Germanic, or the Indo-European parent-language. If there was a language, there must have been a people who spoke it, and attention was soon focused on the character, civilization, and whereabouts in space and time of the people who spoke the lost Indo-European, or “Aryan” parent-language.