SANSKRIT AND INDO-EUROPEAN 13 languages. The most striking and important early dialect dis- tinction is that which separates the sate*»-languages from the em/wra-languages. These two groups are so named from the way they treat IE h in the word for ' hundred ’ (IE *krpt6m ) . The ctfwfton-languages preserve it as such (Lat. centum , Gk. €#caroi/, Ir. cet f Toch. A. kdnt) ; in the satam-languages it is changed to some kind of sibilant (Skt. iatdm , Av. satem, Lith. Siihtas , O. SI. suto). Similar changes occur in the case of IE § and gh. The languages participating in this change are Indo- Iranian, Balto-Slavonic, Armenian, Albanian. Since this fea- ture is so wide-spread, and since it occurs without any variation of the conditions in all the languages concerned, it must be assumed that the change took place in the Indo-European period, before the dispersal of the several languages, and that it affected a group of contiguous dialects within the Indo-Euro- pean area. The unity of these dialects, and of the languages derived from them is further confirmed by the fact that the loss of the labial element in the IE series k w , g w , g m h (e.g. Skt. kd- f who ? Lith. kds as opposed to Gk. tto-6*v, Lat. quo-d t Goth, has) is characteristic of precisely this same group of languages. Before the discovery of Tocharian and Hittite it was common to regard the centum-satem division as a division between Western and Eastern Indo-European, and it was customary to regard the centum - languages as a united group like the satem - languages. This was never altogether satisfactory, since not only ts Greek cut off from the Western IE languages by the intervening safcm-language Albanian, but also because apart from this it displays no special similarities with them, but rather with the satera-languages. The discovery of the new languages, which were unmistakeably centum- languages, made it quite impossible to speak of an East-West division any longer, and also made it clear that there was no unitary centum- group. The centum-la.ngua.ges are alike only in preserving original k, g, gh as occlusives, and it is a commonplace of lin- guistics that common preservations are not necessarily a sign that dialects or languages are closely related. We may there- fore substitute a division of the Indo-European dialects into : I. A central group which can be equated with the satem- languages, and is characterised by the innovations mentioned above.
