Comparative philology. From the Edinb. review

Front Cover

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 22 - The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; 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 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 sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists...
Page 37 - It was a custom, borrowed from Assyria, that the bricks used in building the ancient cities on the Lower Tigris and Euphrates should be stamped with the name and titles of the royal founder.
Page 4 - The comparative study of languages shews how races of nations, now separated by wide regions, are related to each other, and have proceeded from a common seat ; it discloses the direction and the path of ancient migrations ; in tracing out epochs of development, it recognises in the more or less altered characters of the language, in the permanency of certain forms, or in the already advanced departure from them, which portion of the race has preserved a language nearest to that of their former common...
Page 5 - ... is an historical science. Language is here treated simply as a means. The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, or any other language, as a key to an understanding of the literary monuments which by-gone ages have bequeathed to us, as a spell to raise from the tomb of time the thoughts of great men in different ages and different countries, and as a means ultimately to trace the social, moral, intellectual, and religious progress of the human race. In...
Page 4 - ... as objects of the natural history of the human mind, being divided into families according to the analogy of their internal structure, have become, (and it is one of the most brilliant results of modern studies in the last sixty or seventy years), a rich source of historical knowledge. Products of the mental power, they lead us back, by the fundamental characters of their organisation, to an obscure and otherwise unknown distance.
Page 43 - This spirit of heaven is known in Chinese by the name of Tien, and wherever in other religions we should expect the name of the supreme deity, whether Jupiter or Allah, we find in Chinese the name of Tien or sky. This Tien, according to the Imperial Dictionary of Kanghee, means the Great One, he that dwells on high and regulates all below.
Page 21 - 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.
Page 37 - With regard to Babylonia Proper, it is a remarkable fact, that every ruin from some distance north of Bagdad, as far south as the Birs Nimrud, is of the age of Nebuchadnezzar. I have examined the bricks in situ, belonging perhaps to one hundred different towns and cities within...
Page 12 - Sanscrit is to him a very doubtful language, still more its modern descendants — Hindi, Bengali, Mahratti, &c. According to him ' the nation that is at one and the same' time Asiatic and Indo-Germanic remains to be discovered.' This prejudice against Sanscrit is not peculiar to Dr. Latham. It is, or at all events it was, shared by many who found it troublesome to learn this new language. Sanscrit was called a factitious idiom concocted by the Brahmins after the expedition of Alexander into India...
Page 21 - Zeus, is invoked in the following words (Rigveda, i. 57, 8) : " Know thou the Aryas, 0 Indra, and they who are Dasyus ; punish the lawless, and deliver them unto thy servant ! Be thou the mighty helper of the worshippers, and I will praise all these thy deeds at the festivals.

Bibliographic information