Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/636

 612 SANSKRIT than a century back, to the establishment of English supremacy in India, nor did it gain a foothold on European ground till after the beginning* of the present century. The earli- est translations of Sanskrit works were of the Bhagavad- Gltd in 1785, the Hitopadesa in 1787, ' and the Sakuntald in 1789. Sir William Jones, and later Colebrooke and Wilson, were the Englishmen who did most in India to foster and advance the study ; the Schlegels in Ger- many and Chezy in France were the first who introduced it upon the continent. Bopp (from 1830 onward) founded upon it the new sci- ence of the comparative grammar of the Indo- European languages, of which others before him had given but hints or fragments. With- in 30 years the introduction of the Vedas to the knowledge of the world has made a new era in Sanskrit study. Hundreds of Sanskrit texts have been published in the East and in the West ; translations from them, with gram- mars, glossaries, and other apparatus for the learner, are to be found in every cultivated language of Europe ; all the considerable uni- versities have instructors in Sanskrit, and its students are everywhere numerous. The San- skrit is ordinarily written in a character called ittwndgari, "divine city," which, in its pres- ent fully developed form, is of a date several centuries later than the Christian era. The ancient alphabet from which it is descended was derived, according to the best opinion, from a Semitic source. Respecting the origin of writing there are not even any traditions in the Hindoo literature, as regards either its pe- riod or its place of derivation; and scholars are still at variance as to whether whole depart- ments of the literature were composed before or after the knowledge of a written character. The earliest dated monuments known are those of the Buddhist monarch Priyadarsi, of the 3d century B. C. ; their language is already Pra- krit. The detandgarl is written from left to right; it is a complete mode of writing, repre- senting every analyzable sound by a separate sign ; it is syllabic, each consonant implying a short a, if the sign of no other vowel is attached to it ; if more consonants than one are to be spoken with one vowel, their signs are united into a single compound character. (See INDIA, RACES AND LANGUAGES OF, vol. ix., p. 217; and for the method employed in transcribing the sounds, see WRITING.) The completeness of this system of written signs, and its nice adaptation of sign to sound, are very evident. Not less evident is the richness of the system of sounds, and the harmony and proportion of its development. The spoken alphabet has the proper characteristics of an ancient and prim- itive system, lacking many of the later inter- mediate vowels, spirants, and the like, and the written alphabet, of course, is corresponding- ly defective; the English has at least five vow- els (or nine, if long and short be counted as separate) and six consonants for which the Sanskrit alphabet has no signs. A peculiar and striking feature of the external form of the Sanskrit is presented by its highly elabo- rate system of euphonic rules, which have play both in the formation and inflection of words, and also, in a yet more searching and extend- ed manner, in the combination of words into a sentence. The ends sought are chiefly the avoidance of the hiatus and of the concurrence of surd and sonant letters, the assimilation of nearly kindred sounds, and the modification of combinations difficult of utterance ; and the physical theory of most of the rules is readily traceable. As an illustration of the euphonic combination of the phrase, we take the words indras apabharan apdm garbhdn charati apu antar; they form the sentence indro 'pabha- rann apdng garbhdihf charaty apsv antah. That there is something artificial and arbitrary in the strict application of the system of eupho- nic changes to the sentence is in itself high- ly probable, since we can hardly conceive that any people, in its ordinary use of language, should so sacrifice the independence of individ- ual words to an exaggerated sense of euphony ; and the probability becomes a certainty when we observe that in the Vedic poetry, the ear- liest and least artificial literature of the lan- guage, the euphonic rules, as is shown by the metre, are in great part unobserved. The ac- cents are the acute and the circumflex, corre- sponding in value to those of the Greek. Nei- ther is limited to any particular part of the word, like those of the Latin and Greek ; it may stand, in a word of whatever length, on what- ever syllable the rules of derivation or compo- sition may direct. The circumflex but seldom rests on a simple long vowel ; it belongs chiefly to a syllable whose vowel is preceded by a semi-vowel convertible into a vowel, as kwft, nady&s. As regards the etymological part of grammar, the distinguishing characteristic of the Sanskrit is (besides the great affluence of forms, and the unlimited facility of form- ing new derivatives and new compounds) its remarkable preservation of original materials and processes, the great regularity and conse- quent transparency of its formative methods. In most words there is no difficulty in distin- guishing root, affix, and termination, and in recognizing the original form and signification of each. For analyzing words, retracing their history, and referring them to their ultimate roots, the utmost facilities are afforded. This character of the language has determined that of the native science of grammar, on which our own grammatical treatment of it is mainly based. The Hindoo grammar is essentially an- alytical and etymological, dissecting out roots, affixes, themes, and terminations, and laying down the rules which govern their combi- nation into vocables. About 2,000 roots are catalogued by the native authorities, but the greater part are of no account, being either slightly varied forms of others, or mere gram- matical artificialities. The Indo-European roots are far more numerously and faithfully pre-