As the title shows, the author of this article does not hold with the theory that the spread of the Indo-European languages had its origin in northern Europe. At present we have no means of defining with certainty the starting point, the original 'home' of the Indo-Europeans. Their early appearance in Asia Minor, which the decipherment of Hittite has revealed, is at least no support for the theory of a northern origin; for migrations so swift and so far-reaching have little probability in the first half of the second millenium before our era. Of the proofs advanced for the theory, the alleged racial similarity between Indo-Europeans and Germans is above all scientifically worthless. For here two phenomena of human existence, one physical and hard to define (race), the other psychic (language), tho not necessarily connected, are arbitrarily brought into a causal relationship. Besides, it is urged that the Lithuanians, because of the very archaic type of their language, must have remained closest to the original home. The present distribution, however, of languages south of the Baltic is not an early inheritance.

Grammatical categories are so closely interlocked that a single grammatical concept can hardly be treated separately without certain important reservations. As regards the accusative case, which is by no means a universal category, it must be kept in mind that no case ever has the same range of application in any two given languages, and that, like any other grammatical term, the name of a case does not refer to a definite entity, but is merely a more or less adequate abstraction created for descriptive purposes. The syntactical functions of the accusative, according to the customary interpretation of the term, consist in designating (1) the immediate object of an action: I buy a house, I send a letter, (2) the intended result: I build a house, I write a letter, (3) the goal of a motion (= lative case): I reached my house, I walk home, urbem peto, and (4) the extent of an action: I walked two miles (two hours), I was bound hand and foot = τε πόδας τε. While no language clearly separates the functions (1) and (2) or entirely eliminates (3) and (4) from the domain of the accusative, there is a wide-spread tendency to express the purely concrete or local relations by other means. On the whole, this paper will be confined to the abstract-objective force of the case, especially in its connection with (I) the category of gender and (II) the grammatical device of word order.

The Albanian language constitutes a distinct branch in the Satem division of the Indo-European languages. It is the direct descendant of the ancient Illyrian of Roman times, together with some Thracian influences. Since Albania is an isolated and mountainous region, and there has been no attempt at standardizing a literary language until very recent years, the number of local dialects, varying in grammar and syntax, in vocabulary, and in phonetic structure, is enormous. At the present time, two principal dialectal divisions exist, Geg or Northern, and Tosk or Southern, which are more or less mutually intelligible. The inhabitants of Albania number one million, and at least another million speakers of the language live in the surrounding countries or across the seas.