Zend Avesta Part 01

Author(s): James Darmesteter
Publisher: Oxford

Page 27

xxiv
VENDIDAD.
cursor of both Grimm and Burnouf. He showed that the list of the Jehangiri referred to an epoch later than that to which Zend must have belonged, and to parts of Persia different from those where it must have been spoken; he showed further that modern Persian is not derived from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected with it; and, lastly, he showed what was still more important, that Zend was not derived from Sanskrit. As to the system of its sounds, Zend approaches Persian rather than Sanskrit; and as to its grammatical forms, if they often remind one of Sanskrit, they also often remind one of Greek and Latin, and frequently have a special character of their own. Rask also gave the paradigm of three Zend nouns, belonging to different declensions, as well as the right pronunciation of the Zend letters, several of which had been incorrectly given by Anquetil. This was the first essay on Zend grammar, and it was a masterly one.
The essay published in 1831 by Peter von Bohlen on the origin of the Zend language threw the matter forty years back. According to him, Zend is a Prakrit dialect, as it had been pronounced by Jones, Leyden, and Erskine. His mistake consisted in taking Anquetil's transcriptions of the words, which are often so incorrect as to make them look like corrupted forms when compared with Sanskrit. And, what was worse, he took the proper names in their modern Parsi forms, which often led him to comparisons that would have appalled Ménage. Thus Ahriman became a Sanskrit word ariman, which would have meant the fiend ;' yet Bohlen might have seen in Anquetil's work itself that Ahriman is nothing but the modern form of Angra Mainyu, words which hardly remind one of the Sanskrit ariman. Again, the angel Vohu-mano, or 'good thought,' was reduced, by means of the Parsi form Bahman, to the Sanskrit bå human, 'a long-armed god.
At length came Burnouf. From the time when Anquetil had published his translation, that is to say, during seventy years, no real progress had been made in knowledge of the Avesta texts. The notion that Zend and Sanskrit are two kindred languages was the only new idea that had been
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