Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/15

PREFACE. ix not fear that that practical and profound research in utrâque linguâ, which is of most importance to the philologer can suffer prejudice by extension over too many languages; for the variety vanishes when the real identity is recognised and explained, and the false light of discrepancy is excluded. It is one thing, also, to learn a language, another to teach one, i.e. to describe its mechanism and organization. The learner may confine himself within the narrowest limits, and forbear to look beyond the language to be studied: the teacher's glance, on the contrary, must pass beyond the confined limits of one or two members of a family, and he must summon around him the representatives of the entire race, in order to infuse life, order, and organic mutual dependency into the mass of the languages spread before him. To attempt this appears to me the main requirement of the present period, and past centuries have been accumulating materials for the task.

The Zend Grammar could only be recovered by the process of a severe regular etymology, calculated to bring back the unknown to the known, the much to the little; for this remarkable language, which in many respects reaches beyond, and is an improvement on, the Sanskrit, and makes its theory more attainable, would appear to be no longer intelligible to the disciples of Zoroaster. Rask, who had the opportunity to satisfy himself on this head, says expressly (V. d. Hagen, p. 33) that its forgotten lore has yet to be rediscovered. I am also able, I believe, to demonstrate that the Pehlvi translator (tom. II. pp. 476, et seq.) of the Zend Vocabulary, edited by Anquetil, has frequently and entirely failed in conveying the grammatical sense of the Zend words which he translates. The work abounds with singular mistakes; and the distorted relation of Anquetil’s French translation to the Zend expressions is usually to be ascribed to the mistakes in the Pehlvi interpretations of the Zend original. Almost all the oblique cases, by degrees, come to take rank as nominatives: the numbers, too, are sometimes mistaken. Further, we find forms