Note 9 — Chapter I · THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.

Thus, though Zend and Sanskrit are the oldest languages of the Indo-European family, they are offsets of an older primitive one. “Among other evidences of this, may be mentioned the changes that words had already undergone in Zend and Sanscrit from the original form they had in the parent tongue; as in the number ‘twenty,’ which being in the Zend ‘visaiti,’ and in Sanscrit ‘vinsaiti,’ shews that they have thrown off the ‘d’ of the original ‘dva,’ two.”—Sir G. Wilkinson in Rawlinson’s Herod. i. p. 280.