Now as to the way in which this kinship among languages may be detected. Among some languages there is such a close relationship that even an unskilled eye can discover it. When we see, for instance, such likenesses as exist in English and German between the very commonest words of life--_kann_ and _can_, _soll_ and _shall_, _muss_ and _must_, _ist_ and _is_, _gut_ and _good_, _hart_ and _hard_, _mann_ and _man_, _für_ and _for_, together with an innumerable number of verbs, adjectives, substantives, prepositions, etc., which differ but slightly one from another--we may feel sure either that the English once spoke German, that the Germans once spoke English, or that English and German have both become a little altered from a lost language which was spoken by the ancestors of the present inhabitants of England and Deutsch-land. As a matter of fact the last is the case. English and German are brother languages, neither is the parent of the other. Now having our attention once called to this relationship, we might, any of us who know English and German, at once set about making a long list of words which are common to the two languages; and it would not be a bad amusement for any reader just to turn over the leaves of a dictionary and note how many German words (especially of the common sort) they find that have a corresponding word in English. The first thing we begin to see is the fact that the consonants form, as it were, the bones of a word, and that changes of a vowel are, as a rule, comparatively unimportant provided these remain unaltered. The next thing we see is that even the consonants do not generally remain the same, but that in place of one such letter in one language, another of a sound very like it appears in the other language.