1851. Origin of the name 'Arian.' 21 parentage be ever disclosed, will probably prove of Arian descent. If we add to these, the three great branches, Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic, we have before us a tolerably complete list of the members of the Arian family. It is by itself of no great importance whether this family be called the Arian, or the Japhetic, the Sarmatic, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European family, as long as we know that all these names are meant to express one and the same idea. Parents, however, quarrel about the names, by which their children are to be christened, and it is not to be wondered at that savans should have done the same. Instead of entering into discussions on the relative merit of each name, it will be more interesting to point out the origin of the title, which we have throughout given to these languages. Arian' is derived from árya, which, as it seems, is the oldest name by which the nations speaking these languages used to call themselves. Traces of this name are found scattered in the most distant quarters of the world, and it is but lately that it has been recognised and adopted for scientific purposes. In the later Sanskrit literature, árya means of a good family,' 'venerable,' a master;' but it is no longer used as a national name, except as applied to the holy land of the Brahmans, which is still called A'rya-âvarta, the abode of the A'ryas. In the Veda, however, A'rya occurs very frequently, as a name of honour, reserved to the higher classes, in opposition to the Dasyus, their enemies. For instance, Rigveda, i. 54. 8., Know thou the A'ryas, o Indra, and they who are Dasyus; 'punish the lawless and deliver them unto thy servant! Be 'thou the mighty helper of the worshipper, and I shall praise all these thy deeds at the festivals.' And again, i. 103. 3., 'Bearing the thunderbolt and trusting in his strength, he strode about rending in pieces the cities of the slaves. Thunderer, thou art wise, hurl thy shaft against the Dasyu; let the power ' of the A'ryas grow into glory!' -bráhmana. 6 In the later dogmatical literature of the Vedic age, the name of A'rya is distinctly appropriated to the three first castes of the Brahmanic society. Thus we read in the S'atapathaA'ryas are only the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vais'yas, for they are admitted to the sacrifices. They shall 'not speak with everybody, for the gods did not speak with everybody, but only with the Brahman, the Kshatriya, and the Vais'ya. If they should fall into a conversation with 'a S'údra, let them say to another man, "tell this S'údra so." This is the law for an initiated man.' But while this old name A'rya' fell afterwards into oblivion amongst the Hindús, it was more faithfully preserved by the Medians and Persians. In the Zendavesta, the first created and holy land is called Airyaném vaejo, the source of the Arians,' and this name was in later times transferred to Media, a country too far west to be mentioned in the Zendavesta. Herodotus was told in his Oriental travels, that the Medians originally called themselves "Aptol, and Hellanicus gives Aria as a synonyme of Persia. And now, that we can read, thanks to the wonderful discoveries of Rawlinson, Burnouf, and Lassen, the same records from which Herodotus derived his information, we find Darius calling himself in the cuneiform inscriptions, a Persian, the son of a 'Persian, an Arian, and of Arian descent.' And when, after centuries of foreign invasions and occupation, the Persian empire rose again to historical importance under the Sassanian sway, we find their kings also calling themselves in the inscriptions, decyphered by De Sacy, Kings of the Arian and un-Arian • races.” (Irán va Anirán, 'Αριάνων καὶ ̓Αναριάνων). This is the origin of the modern name of Iran. Again in the mountains of the Caucasus, we find an Arian race, the Ossetes, calling themselves Irón, and a tribe of Arii was known to Tacitus in the forests of Germany. Here then we have the faint echoes of a name, which once sounded through the valleys of the Himalaya; and it seems but natural, that Comparative Philology, which first succeeded in tracing the common origin of all the nations, enumerated before, should have selected this old and venerable title for their common appellation. It must not be supposed that Professor Bopp was the first who discovered the connexion of the Arian languages. The close relationship which the ancient vernacular of India bears to Greek and Latin, did not escape the eye of our ingenious Oriental scholar, Sir William Jones, who was the first to point out the wonderful structure of the Sanskrit. He said, at once, 'that the old sacred language of India was more perfect than 'the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely ' refined than either-yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all 'three, without believing them to have from some comsprung 'mon source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a 'similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very 'different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.' We may observe, also, that the three founders of Sanskrit philology in England - Colebrooke, Prinsep, and Wilson - were, from the first, aware of this affinity. A comprehensive view of 1851. Relation of Sanskrit to the other Arian Languages. 23 the close relationship of the Germanic and classical languages had been previously given by Rask in his valuable prize treatise 'On the Thracian Tribe of Languages.' The same scholar, who himself travelled across the Caucasus to Persia and India, and brought back with him the most valuable MSS. of the Zendavesta, was the first to establish, on a safe ground, the common origin of the Sanskrit and the old Persian; and in a letter of his, written from Petersburgh, in May, 1819, we find a classification of languages, where the Sarmatic, i. e. the Arian race, is stated to comprehend the Indian, Median, Thracian, Lithuanian, Slavonic, Gothic, and Celtic. Professor Bopp himself acknowledges this. But at the same time he observes*, that Rask halts almost everywhere half-way towards the truth, be'cause he had no knowledge of Sanskrit.' Rask's works on the classification and comparison of languages are, indeed, the best specimen of what could be accomplished in Comparative Philology without the aid of Sanskrit. Rask is learned, ingenious, and bold; yet, compared with Bopp, he is like a sailor without a compass. The discovery of the Sanskrit, and its application to grammatical comparison, form quite a new era in the history of languages, in the same way as the discovery of the loadstone, and its application by the sailors of the Mediterranean, form a most important epoch in the history of navigation. As soon as the Sanskrit appeared above the horizon, the broad fact of the connexion of the Arian languages became as clear as daylight; and we should entirely misapprehend the purpose of Bopp's Comparative Grammar, if we thought that its object was to prove the common origin of the Arian languages. 'The establishment ❝ of a connexion of languages,' he says himself, 'was not so much final object with me as the means of penetrating into the 'secrets of lingual development; since languages, which were 'originally one, but during thousands of years have been guided by their own individual destiny, mutually clear up and complete one another, inasmuch as one in this place, another in that, ' has preserved the original organisation in a more healthy and 'sound condition. Most European languages, in fact, do not 'need proof of their relationship to the Sanskrit; for they themselves show it by their forms, which, in part, are but very little changed. But that which remained for philology to do, and which I have endeavoured to the utmost of my ability to effect, was to trace, on one hand, the resemblances into the ' most retired corner of the construction of language; and, on the other hand, as far as possible, to refer the greater or less a *Bopp's Comparative Grammar,' transl. by Eastwick, Preface p. viii. 'discrepancies to laws through which they become possible or necessary.' In all these researches Sanskrit is the principal and safest guide, because, in general, it is more complete, more distinct, or, as Professor Bopp calls it, more organic, in its structure than the other Arian languages. Yet the other Arian languages can by no means be considered as derived from the Sanskrit, or as standing to it in the same relation in which the Romance languages stand to the Latin. Although the Sanskrit of the Veda is, even chronologically, older than either the Greek of Homer or the Persian of Cyrus; yet, as far as relationship goes, it is only the eldest sister, and holds, with regard to the other cognate tongues, exactly the same position in which the Provençal stands to the Romance languages. This is evidently the opinion of Professor Bopp, although he has more than once been accused of believing too much in the imaginary inviola'bility and pristine fidelity and perfection of the Sanskrit.' 6 The first part of the Comparative Grammar is devoted to the phonetic system of the Arian languages. After giving an explanation of the principal Arian alphabets, Professor Bopp tries to find which letters in any one language correspond to certain letters in another. The laws of the interchange of letters are arrived at by a comparison of words whose identity cannot be doubted. Safe coincidences, for instance, may be looked for in the numerals of the Arian languages. If we compare Latin quatuor with Sanskrit chatvar, four, we learn that Sanskrit ch can be represented by Latin qu. If we compare Latin quinque with the Sanskrit pancha, five, we find that Sanskrit p can be represented by Latin qu. Knowing, therefore, these letters to be interchangeable, we can now also identify the Sanskrit pach, ' to cook,' with Latin 'coquo.' Again, as Sanskrit chatvar corresponds to the Attic τέσσαρ or τέτταρ, for which we have also the Eolic Tíoup (Oscan petur), we may compare the Greek TÉTTO with Sanskrit pach, to cook. And, as coquo=pach, and πέπτ=рach, .. coquo=πέπτω. If Sanskrit das'a, ten, corresponds to Greek Séka, and Latin decem, Sanskrit as'va, horse, becomes identified with equus; the Sanskrit s'van (genit. s'unas), ' dog,' with Greek Kúwv, and Latin canis. These phonetic coincidences and the etymological results based on them, have been worked out by different scholars, particularly by Pott, in his Etymologische Forschungen.' Amongst others, the late Dr. Rosen was the first to point out that Sanskrit ksh corresponds with Greek xp, and Latin cr; for instance, S. kshatra, power,' кpáтos; S. kshipra, quick,'= кpaiтvós ; = 6 = S. kshura, hoof,' Latin crus. On this he founds afterwards the identification of the Vedic urukshaya, wide-ruling, with the Homeric suρUKρeίwv. These comparisons, however, have someεὐρυκρείων. times been carried too far. Because one letter corresponds to another in words whose common origin is certain, it does not follow that it does so always. Professor Bopp identifies, for instance, the Bengali bohini, sister, with the Sanskrit svasar (the Latin soror, Gothic svistar), by means of the following process: The initial s is rejected, and the second corrupted 6 to h. The Sanskrit v is, in Bengali, regularly pronounced as 'b, and a like o. As regards the termination ini, I look upon the i as an interposed conjunctive vowel, and the n as a corruption ' of r, as in the numeral tin, three. Properly speaking, bohini 'presupposes a Sanskrit svasri from sva-stri.' Now, although we have no doubt that Professor Bopp has analogies for all these changes, yet this process reminds us a little of the old etymology of fox,' which was alopex (ảλón§), lopex, opex, pex, pax, pox, and fox.' The fact is, that the Bengali bohini, 'sister,' is simply the Sanskrit bhagini, sister.' On the other hand, the systematic regularity—the almost absolute certainty -to which the phonetic laws of different languages can be brought, may be seen from what is generally called Grimm's Law, on the transposition of sounds (Lautverschiebung). According to this law, which is based on the most minute observations, and which helps, as Grimm expresses himself, to break in wild and vicious etymologies, 6 1. Greek (and generally Sanskrit, Latin, and Lithu anian) P, corresponds with Gothic PH (f), and Old High German B (v, f). PH (f) B, P, PH (f, ø), |