Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 25

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VENDIDÂD.
which makes Sir William Jones, in spite of himself, the creator of the comparative grammar of Sanskrit and Zend. When I perused the Zend glossary,' he writes, 'I was inexpressibly surprised to find that six or seven words in ten are pure Sanscrit, and even some of their inflexions formed by the rules of the Vyácaran', as yushmácam, the genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anquetil most certainly, and the Persian compiler most probably, had no knowledge of Sanscrit, and could not, therefore, have invented a list of Sanscrit words ; it is, therefore, an authentic list of Zend words, which has been preserved in books or by tradition ; it follows that the language of the Zend was at least a dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly to it as the Prácrit, or other popular idioms, which we know to have been spoken in India two thousand years ago?! This conclusion, that Zend is a Sanskrit dialect, was incorrect, the connection assumed being too close; but it was a great thing that the near relationship of the two languages should have been brought to light.
In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones's remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend languages. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to have been borrowed, viz. those that designate the degrees of relationship, the limbs of the body, and the most general and essential ideas. Another list, intended to show, on a special topic, how closely connected the two languages are, contains eighteen words taken from the liturgic language used in India and Persia. This list was not very happily drawn up, as out of the eighteen instances there is not a single one that stands inquiry ; yet it was a happy idea, and one which has not even yet yielded all that it promised. His conclusions were that in a far remote antiquity Sanskrit was spoken in Persia and Media, that it gave birth to the Zend language, and that the Zend-Avesta is authentic : Were it but a recent compilation,' he writes,' as Jones
1 The Sanskrit Grammar.
Asiatic Researches, II, $ 3. 3De antiquitate et affinitate linguae samscredamicae et germanicae,' Rome, 1798.
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