Transactions of the second session held at London, in September, 1874 / edited by R.K. Douglas.

  • International Congress of Orientalists
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Transactions of the second session held at London, in September, 1874 / edited by R.K. Douglas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    192/514 (page 182)
    ARYAN SECTION. Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. More than a hundred years ago, in a letter written to Prince Adam Czartoryski, in the year 1770, he says: “Many learned investigators of antiquity are fully persuaded that a very old and almost primeval language was in use among the northern nations, from which not only the Celtic dialect, hut even Greek and Latin are derived; in fact we find %raTijp and p.pr7]p in Persian, nor is OuyuTrjp so far removed from dodder, or even ouofia and nomen from Persian ndm, as to make it ridiculous to suppose that they sprang from the same root. We must confess,” he adds, ‘ ‘ that these researches are very obscure and uncertain, and, you will allow, not so agreeable as an ode of Hafez, or an elegy of Amr’alkeis.” In a letter, dated 1787, he says: “ You will he sur- prised at the resemblance between Sanskrit and both Greek and Latin.” Colebrooke also, the great successor of Sir William Jones, was fully aware of the relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and even Slavonic. I possess some curious MS. notes of his, of the year 1801 or 1802, containing long lists of words, expressive of the most essential ideas of primitive life, and which he proved to be identical in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and Slavonic.1 Yet neither Colebrooke nor Sir William Jones perceived the full import of these facts. Sir William Jones died young; Colebrooke’s energies, marvellous as they were, were partly absorbed by official work, so that it was left to German and French scholars to bring to light the full wealth of the mine which those great English scholars had been the first to open. We know now that in language, and in all that is implied by language, India and Europe are one; but to prove this, against the incredulity of all the greatest scholars of the day, was no easy matter. It could be done effectually in one way only, viz. by giving to Oriental studies a strictly scientific character, by requiring from Oriental students not only the devotion of an amateur, but the same thorough- ness, minuteness, and critical accuracy which were long considered the exclusive property of Greek and Latin scholars. I could not think of giving hero a history of the work done during the last 1 These lists of common Aryan words were published in the Academy, October 10th, 1874, and in the fourth volume of my Chips, p. 418.