Arabic Words.

Analogies.

standing, changed into Mnemon. Herodotus calls Susa the city
of Memnon, which in Persia, as well as in Egypt, was a name
of the sun. The meaning of Memnon in Arabic is in perfect
harmony with the description of the sun in Hebrew poetry
(Psalm xix. 5.), in which it is said that "He rejoiceth as a
strong man to run a race," and with the gigantic statues of
Memnon in Egypt. That the Sun in the Greek Mythology
was regarded as a giant, and the son of the Earth, see Lem-
priere in voce Titan.

Mahal, formidable, dreadful .........
Nati, swelling, prominent ....
Nubah, a barker

Nabil, grand, beautiful

Malus (Latin), bad.

Nates, Latin.

Latrator Anubis, Latin.
Noble, English.

And by Metonymy, perhaps, the
nose itself; hence we have,
Nasus, Latin.

Naso, Italian.

Nez, French.

Nose, English.

Ness, Northern.

Hence Nail (English) of the toes and fingers.

Mar (Hebrew), bitter.

Mare (Latin), the sea.

Mer (French), the sea.

Als (Greek), salt.

Als (Greek), the sea.

Als Pontos, in Homer, the salt sea, not the Hellespont. Real names can hardly originate in mythological stories like the extravagant one of Helle, and in every instance, probably, the name is centuries older than the fable which pretends to account for it.

Wasit, the middle

Wahim, imagination, fancy .....
Watar, singular, alone

Waist (English), by transposition.
Whim, English.

Perhaps Water (English), in the
sense of pure, an element.

Woe, English.

Haaha, laughing. This word appears to be imitative, like the

English Ha, Ha!

Hubbub (English), a sudden dis

turbance.

101

CHAP. XII.

ON THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR,

"Ye orient realms, where Ganges' waters run!

Prolific fields! dominions of the sun!

How long your tribes have trembled and obey'd!
How long was Timur's iron sceptre sway'd!
Whose marshall'd hosts, the lions of the plain,
From Scythia's northern mountains to the main,
Raged o'er your plunder'd shrines and altars bare
With blazing torch and gory scymitar,

Stunn'd with the cries of death each gentle gale,
And bathed in blood the verdure of the vale.
Yet could no pangs the immortal spirit tame
When Brama's children perish'd for his name;
The martyr smiled beneath avenging power,
And braved the tyrant in his torturing hour!"

Pleasures of Hope.

1. THE primary division of every alphabet, according to my view of the subject, is into two classes.

1. Those characters which are the signs of simple or elementary sounds, and are all the genuine letters.

2. Those characters which are not the representatives of simple sounds, and therefore, strictly speaking, not letters, but merely contractions in writing, and combinations of elementary sounds, like the Greek long vowels, aspirates, and double letters.

3. But all the signs of simple, or elementary sounds, are not distinct letters; but merely different characters for, or modes of, expressing the same simple sound. Should the English ever become a dead language, because we have two or three modes of writing R, S, and T, in manuscript, remote posterity will fancy each form a distinct letter with a power of its own, as has been the case in most of the dead languages (more especially the Sanskrit), and in the Arabic, a living one.

As the Greeks appear to have possessed the most musical ears of any people that ever existed, if we could ascertain

with certainty the number of letters which constituted their primitive alphabet, together with their power, it would form something like a criterion to guide us in all other cases. The precise power of their letters is matter of great doubt and obscurity, as it must necessarily be with every dead language; but we have strong reasons for believing that the letters themselves did not exceed sixteen.

II. The Sanskrit Alphabet, says Wilkins, appears to possess no less than fifty letters; but, upon examining their power, the number of simple articulations may be reduced to twentyeight, namely, five vowels, and twenty-three consonants. Diodorus Siculus appears to be the first European who has described the Sanskrit alphabet, in his relation of the voyage of Iambulus to Ceylon, though it must be confessed that his account is neither very clear nor very circumstantial. He says in their writing they make use of seven characters, or letters; but each of these characters has four different positions, which gives in all twenty-eight names of letters. They extend their lines, not as we do from left to right, but from top to bottom. (Diodorus, lib. ii.) It must be acknowledged that the twenty-eight names of letters would, at the first view, appear to indicate the Arabic alphabet beyond a doubt, as that is the precise number which it now contains, and Savary's Arabic Grammar gives four forms of letters, varying according to their position of initial, medial, or final. On the other hand, I believe there was a period when the Arabic alphabet contained fewer letters than it does at present, perhaps not more than the Hebrew, or twenty-two. But we may remark that in Wilkins's Sanskrit Grammar, the arrangement of the letters (consonants) is seven perpendicularly, and five horizontally; and as many of these are double letters, and many different forms of the same letter, which are of little use in writing Sanskrit, and hardly occupy a place in the Lexicon, it is highly probable that the primitive alphabet did not contain more than twenty-eight characters, to which number Wilkins has remarked the existing one may be reduced. But the mode of writing described by Diodorus, from the top to the bottom of the page, which the Greeks

denominated Kionedon, and made use of in columnar inscriptions, is still practised in Ceylon; and there is every reason to believe that their ancient religious books were written in the Pali language, which may almost be regarded as a dialect of Sanskrit; two circumstances which render it highly probable that Diodorus intended to describe the Sanskrit alphabet, and the Devanagari characters.

III. A knowledge of the native languages of India appears to have been acquired by Europeans very slowly and gradually. On their first introduction into that vast continent, they found the language of conversation and general intercourse to be the Hindustani or Moors, while the Persic was, and continued up to a late period to be, the language of diplomacy, the court, and the law. That distinguished Oriental scholar, Reland, must at least have felt some interest on the subject, as is proved by the titles of some of the essays in his Dissertationes Miscellaneæ (3 tom. 12mo. Traj. 1706), De Veteri Lingua Indica, which appears to allude directly to the Sanskrit, and De Linguis Insularum quar. Orientalium; but as I have never seen the work itself, I can give no opinion as to the extent or accuracy of his knowledge.

IV. If I am not much mistaken, Anquetil du Perron has the merit of having made the Sanskrit alphabet, in its present state, first known in Europe, though it does not appear that he made much progress in the language itself. He describes it as consisting of sixteen vowels and thirty-five consonants and has given the names of the letters, though not their forms, very accurately. (Zend Avesta, tom. i. p. 172., note.) The abridged account of his travels was published in 1762, while Mr. Halhead's remarks on the Sanskrit language were not earlier than 1778, and Sir William Jones's Discourse on the Hindus was not delivered until the 2d of February 1786.

v. According to the late Sir Charles Wilkins, one of the highest possible authorities, to Mr. Halhead is due the distinguished honour of having been the first European Sanskrit scholar. In the preface to his Grammar of the Bengal lan

guage, which was published in 1778, he expresses himself as . follows:-"The great source of Indian literature, the parent of almost every dialect from the Persian Gulf to the China Seas, is the Sanskrit, a language of the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity; which, although at present shut up in the libraries of the Brahmins, and appropriated solely to the records of their religion, appears to have been current over most of the Oriental world; and traces of its original extent may still be discovered in almost every district of Asia. I have been astonished to find the similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Latin and Greek; and those not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced, but in the main groundwork of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as would be first discriminated on the immediate dawn of civilization." (Wilkins's Preface to Sanskrit Grammar, p. 8.)

VI. The literal meaning of the word Sanskrit appears to me to occur in the phrase "Sanskrita Yavan," when the barley is winnowed (Wilkins, Gramm. page 562.), i. e. the language from which all colloquial barbarisms, provincial peculiarities, and grammatical anomalies are excluded. The unsifted language is the Prakrit, or natural, which confers on it a double value in the eyes of the etymologist and the inquirer into the philosophy of language. The great cause of the slow growth and imperfect state both of etymology and the theory of language, has been, first, because almost all the efforts of philologists have been exerted on the two languages of all others the least fit for their purpose, because the most polished and refined, that is, in other words, differing most widely from their original structure — the Greek and Latin; and secondly, because all have confounded the artificial arrangements of grammarians, made solely with a view to classification and facility of reference, with the essential nature of language itself. The above etymology of the word Sanskrit derives a slight degree of support from the name of the Florentine Academy. The Academy of