Words the only monuments. Beginnings of Sanskrit scholarship
As tradition itself does not begin its doubtful records till ages after this original separation, and the dawn of history finds most of the nations which we ascribe to the Aryan stock established on the lands of which they had severally taken possession, it follows that we have just been contemplating a picture for which we have not the slightest tangible materials. No monuments, no coins, inscriptions, hieroglyphic scrawls, reach back as far as the time we have endeavored to retrace. Indeed, the first really historical monuments of any kind at our command are the inscriptions, caused to be engraved in various parts of Hindustan, on pillars and rocks, by ASHOKA, a king who reigned as late as 250 B.C. The same applies to architecture ; no buildings or ruins of buildings are to be traced further back than 500 B.C. Was it then an imaginary sketch, the features of which were put together at random, supplied by fancy or any trite .description of pastoral life? So far from it, we can boldly say : would that all information that comes down to us as history were as true to nature, as well authenticated, as this short sketch of an age on which not even the marvellously trained skill of modern historical investigation could fasten by so much as a single thread. But where history throws down the web, philology takes it up and places in our hands the threads which connect us with that immeasurable past—threads which we have held and helped to spin all the days of our lives, but the magic power of which we did not suspect until the new science, Ariadne-like, taught us where to fasten them, when we have but to follow ; these threads are—our languages.
A hundred years ago, several eminent English scholars resided in India, as servants of the East India Company, and, unlike their coarse and ignorant predecessors, thought it their duty to become familiar both with the spoken dialects and the literary languages of the country they helped to govern. They were earnest and enthusiastic men, and the discovery of an intellectual world so new and apparently different from ours drew them irresistibly on, into deeper studies than their duties required. Warren Hastings, then the head of the executive government, representing the Company in India, cordially patronized their efforts, from political reasons as well as from a personal taste for scholarly pursuits, and not content with lending them his powerful moral countenance, gave them material assistance, and even urgently commended them to the Board of Directors at home. It was then that Charles Wilkins translated portions of the great national epic, the MAHABHARATA, and compiled the first Sanskrit grammar in English ; that Sir William Jones' translated the national code known as “The Laws of Manu”; while Cole- BROOKE wrote masterly treatises on Hindu law, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. These indefatigable learners could not but be struck with the exceeding resemblance, nay frequently the obvious identity, between a great number of Sanskrit words and the corresponding words in all or many of the living languages of Europe, as well as in the dead tongues of ancient Greece and Rome, the old Teutonic and Slavic idioms. The great future importance of this discovery at once flashed on the mental vision of these gifted and highly trained students, and comparative studies were zealously entered upon. Great and noble was the work which these men did, with results, on the whole, marvellously correct ; but, as is always the case with such zealous pioneering in a new field, some of the conclusions they arrived at were necessarily immature and misleadingly positive and sweeping.
Thus it was for many years universally believed that Sanskrit was the mother tongue, to which all languages could be traced. This theory was not by far as absurd as that which had been set up some time previously by certain religious zealots who, from an exaggerated regard, untutored by science, for all that is connected with the “ inspired books ” of our creed, went so far as to assert that Hebrew was the mother of all the languages in the world. Still it might, from its plausibility and the large percentage of truth it contained, have done much harm, by leading people to imagine that they had touched the goal, when, in reality, they were at the initial stage of knowledge ; but the question was placed on its proper ground by the somewhat later discovery of a still more ancient language, standing to Sanskrit in the relation of Latin to French, Italian, and Spanish, or Old German to English. Since then Jacob Grimm discovered the law that rules the changes of consonants in their passage from language to language,—the law that bears his name, although it is but one among the many titles to glory of that most indefatigable, most luminous of searchers. The unity of Aryan speech is now established beyond the possibility of a doubt.
The Root in philology.
Almost everybody will have noticed that words go in families. That is—several words, and sometimes a great many, are connected with or derived from one another, all expressing different forms or shadings of one common fundamental idea. On examining such words more closely, it will turn out that this common idea resides in a certain combination of sounds which will be found in all. This combination we detach from the words to which it gives their general meaning, and call it “ a root.” Let us take as an example the following words :“ stay, stand, stable, stiff, stile, stalwart, staff, stick, stack, stump, stem, stool, stead, state, station, statue, statute, stoic," and many more, with all their numerous derivatives, like steady, unsteady, unstable, standard, statuary, statutory, etc. Different as these words are, they all ring the changes on one central idea—that of permanence, stability, remaining fixed in one place. It will readily be seen that this central idea is conveyed by the combination ST, which is as the soul of all these words. In philological parlance, ST is “ the root from which they all sprang ” ; these and a vast number more, for ST being a Sanskrit root, it runs through all the Aryan languages, ancient and modern, and is in each unusually prolific ; if counted, the words to which it serves as family bond, would go into the hundreds. Let usnow take the Sanskrit root AR, of which the general and original meaning is “ plough.”
We find it intact in Latin and Italian are, in Slavic arati—“ to plough ” ; in Greek arotron, Latin aratriim, Tchekh (so-called Bohemian, a Slavic language) oradlo—“ aplough ” ; in English arable—“ fit to be ploughed ”;in Greek aroura, Latin arvum—“ a ploughed field,”whence aroma, originally beyond a doubt signifyingthe peculiar fragrance of a ploughed field, of the loose, moist, upturned earth. It has even been suggested— but the attractive suggestion has unfortunately not proved capable of sufficient scientific proof—that the name Arya itself is connected wit this root, and that the people who took it for their own originally meant to call themselves “ the people who plough,” in proud distinction from their sheep-raising, steppe-roaming, robber-neighbors, the Tura.' At the time at which we begin to know them, “ Arya ” meant “ noble,” “ exalted,” “ venerable ” ; the name had become something almost sacred, it embodied the Aryan peoples’ national pride,—or a feeling deeper still, more intense, enduring, and inspiring : their pride of race, and that down to a very late period ; for was not Dareios, the great Persian king, careful to preface his family genealogy in his famous inscriptions by the statement
: “ I am an Arya, the son of an Arya ” ?