Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/17

PREFACE. xi remark on the age of the Vocabulary to which I advert; while he ascribes to another, in which the Pehlvi is interpreted through the Persian, an antiquity of four centuries. The et fais néaesch.” I do not insist on translating the adjective Nu valima by "præclarus," but I am certain of this, that vahměn and vahmâi are nothing else than the accusative and dative of the base vahma; and theat vahmâi could be the first person of a verb is not to be thought pos- sible for a moment. Anquetil, however, in the interlinear version of the be- ginning of the V. S. attempted by him, gives two other evident datives com- pounded with the particle as cha, "and," as the first person singular of the present, viz. psujesnaothrâi-cha, po vstupu vald fraiastoya-cha (see §. 164.), by "placere cupio," "vota facio. One sees then, from the example bere adduced, the number of which I could with ease greatly increase, that the Pehlvi Translator of the said Vocabulary has, no more than Anquetil, any grammatical acquaintance with the Zend language, and that both regarded it rather in the light of an idiom, poor in inflexions; so that,as in the Pehlvi and Modern Persian, the grammatical of the members of a sentence would be to be gathered rather from their position than from their terminations. And Anquetil expressly says (II. 415.): "La construction dans la langue Zende, semblable en cela aux autres idiomes de l'Orient, eat astreinte à peu de regles (!). La for- mation des tems des Verbes y est à peu près la même que dans le Persan, plus trainante cependant, parce qu'elle est accompagnée de toutes les voyelles (!). How stands it, then, with the Sanskrit translation of the Jzeschine made from the Pehlvi more than three centuries before that of Acquetil. This question will, without doubt, be very soon answered by M. E. Burnouf, who has already supplied, and admirably illustrated (Nouv. Journ. Asiat., T. III. p. 321), two passages from the work in a very interesting extract from its Commentary on the V. S. These pas- sages are, however, too short to permit of our grounding on them over- bold influences as to the whole; moreover, their contents are of such a nature that the inflexionless Pehlvi language could follow the Zend ori- ginal almost verbatim. The one passage signifies, "I call upon, I mag- nify the excellent pure spell, and the excellent man, the pure and the strict, strong like Dámi (? cf. Sansk. upamana, "similarity;" and V. S., p. 428, dámóis drujo) Izet." It is, however, very surprising, and of evil omen, that Neriosengh, or his Pehlvi predecessor, takes the feminine genitive dahmayás as a plural genitive, since this expression is evidently, as Burnouf rightly remarks, only an epithet of afritóis. I abstain from speaking of the dubious expression dámôis upamanahé, and content