Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/18

xii PREFACE. one in question cannot therefore be ascribed to any very late period. The necessity, indeed, of interpretation for the Zend must have been felt much sooner than for the Pehlvi, which remained much longer current among the Parsee tribes. It was therefore an admirable problem which had for its solution the bringing to light, in India, and, so to say, under the very eye of the Sanskrit, a sister language, no longer understood, and obscured by the rubbish of ages;—a problem of which the solution indeed has not hitherto been fully obtained, but beyond doubt will be. The first contribution to the knowledge of this language which can be relied on—that of Rask—namely, his treatise “On the age and authenticity of the Zend Language and the Zend-Avesta,” published in 1826, and made generally accessible by V. d. Hagen’s translation, deserves high honour as a first attempt. The Zend has to thank this able man (whose premature death we deeply deplore) for the more natural appearance which it has derived from his rectification of the value of its written characters. Of three words of different declensions he gives us the singular inflections, though with some sensible deficiencies, and those, too, just in the places where the Zend forms are of most interest, and where are some which display that independence of the Sanskṛit which Rask claims, perhaps in too high a degree, for the Zend; a language we are, however, unwilling to receive as a mere dialect of the Sanskṛit, and to which we are compelled to ascribe an independent existence, resembling that of the Latin as compared with the Greek, or the Old Northern with the Gothic. For the rest, I refer the reader to my review of Rask’s and Bohlen’s treatises on the Zend in the Annual of Scientific Criticism for December 1831, as also to an earlier work (March 1831) on the able labours of E. Burnouf in this