Page:Proposals for a missionary alphabet; submitted to the Alphabetical Conferences held at the residence of Chevalier Bunsen in January 1854 (IA cu31924100210388).pdf/11

 arrived at results almost identically the same. We are here still in the sphere of physical science, where facts are arranged by observation, and observation may be checked by facts so as to exclude individual impressions and national prejudice. The classification of vowels and consonants proposed by modern physiologists is, so far as general principles are concerned, exactly the same as the one contained in Sanskrit grammars composed in the fifth century before Christ, and appended to the different collections of the sacred writings of the Brahmans,—the four Vedas. These grammatical treatises, called "Prâtisâkhyas," exist in manuscript only, and have not hitherto been published. The classification established by physiologists, as the result of independent research, would receive the most striking confirmation by a translation of these writings, now more than two thousand years old. But, on their own account also, these phonetic treatises deserve to be published. Their observations are derived from a language (the Vaidik Sanskrit) which at that time was studied by means of oral tradition only, and where, in the absence of a written alphabet, the most minute differences of pronunciation had to be watched by the ear, and to be explained and described to the pupil. The language itself, the Sanskrit of that early period, had suffered less from the influence of phonetic corruption than any tongue from which we can derive our observations; nay, the science of phonetics (Sikshâ), essential to the young theological student (who was not allowed to learn the Veda from MSS.), had been reduced to a more perfect system in the schools of the Brahmans, in the fifth