unknown and unstudied, which are current in the empire of your Majesty and
on its frontiers, should be reduced to writing; also that dictionaries, or
at least small vocabularies, should be collected, and translations be
procured in such languages of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the
Apostolic Symbolum, and other parts of the Catechism, _ut omnis lingua
laudet Dominum_. This would increase the glory of your Majesty, who reigns
over so many nations, and is so anxious to improve them; and it would,
likewise, by means of a comparison of languages, enable us to discover the
origin of those nations who from Scythia, which is subject to your
Majesty, advanced into other countries. But principally it would help to
plant Christianity among the nations speaking those dialects, and I have,
therefore, addressed the Most Rev. Metropolitan on the same subject.”(120)
Leibniz drew up a list of the most simple and necessary terms which should
be selected for comparison in various languages. At home, while engaged in
historical researches, he collected whatever could throw light on the
origin of the German language, and he encouraged others, such as Eccard,
to do the same. He pointed out the importance of dialects, and even of
provincial and local terms, for elucidating the etymological structure of
languages.(121) Leibniz never undertook a systematic classification of the
whole realm of language, nor was he successful in classing the dialects
with which he had become acquainted. He distinguished between a Japhetic
and Aramaic class, the former occupying the north, the latter the south,
of the continent of Asia and Europe. He believed in a common origin of
languages, and in a migration of the human race from east to west. But he
failed to distinguish the exact degrees of relationship in which languages
stood to each other, and he mixed up some of the Turanian dialects, such
as Finnish and Tataric, with the Japhetic family of speech. If Leibniz had
found time to work out all the plans which his fertile and comprehensive
genius conceived, or if he had been understood and supported by
cotemporary scholars, the science of language, as one of the inductive
sciences, might have been established a century earlier. But a man like
Leibniz, who was equally distinguished as a scholar, a theologian, a
lawyer, an historian, and a mathematician, could only throw out hints as
to how language ought to be studied. Leibniz was not only the discoverer
of the differential calculus. He was one of the first to watch the
geological stratification of the earth. He was engaged in constructing a
calculating machine, the idea of which he first conceived as a boy. He
drew up an elaborate plan of an expedition to Egypt, which he submitted to
Louis XIV. in order to avert his attention from the frontiers of Germany.
The same man was engaged in a long correspondence with Bossuet to bring
about a reconciliation between Protestants and Romanists, and he
endeavored, in his Theodicée and other works, to defend the cause of truth
and religion against the inroads of the materialistic philosophy of
England and France. It has been said, indeed, that the discoveries of
Leibniz produced but little effect, and that most of them had to be made
again. This is not the case, however, with regard to the science of
language. The new interest in languages, which Leibniz had called into
life, did not die again. After it had once been recognized as a
desideratum to bring together a complete _Herbarium_ of the languages of
mankind, missionaries and travellers felt it their duty to collect lists
of words, and draw up grammars wherever they came in contact with a new
race. The two great works in which, at the beginning of our century, the
results of these researches were summed up, I mean the Catalogue of
Languages by Hervas, and the Mithridates of Adelung, can both be traced
back directly to the influence of Leibniz. As to Hervas, he had read
Leibniz carefully, and though he differs from him on some points, he fully
acknowledges his merits in promoting a truly philosophical study of
languages. Of Adelung’s Mithridates and his obligations to Leibniz we
shall have to speak presently.
Hervas lived from 1735 to 1809. He was a Spaniard by birth, and a Jesuit
by profession. While working as a missionary among the Polyglottous tribes
of America, his attention was drawn to a systematic study of languages.
After his return, he lived chiefly at Rome in the midst of the numerous
Jesuit missionaries who had been recalled from all parts of the world, and
who, by their communications on the dialects of the tribes among whom they
had been laboring, assisted him greatly in his researches.
Most of his works were written in Italian, and were afterwards translated
into Spanish. We cannot enter into the general scope of his literary
labors, which are of the most comprehensive character. They were intended
to form a kind of Kosmos, for which he chose the title of “_Idea del
Universo_.” What is of interest to us is that portion which treats of man
and language as part of the universe; and here, again, chiefly his
Catalogue of Languages, in six volumes, published in Spanish in the year
1800.
If we compare the work of Hervas with a similar work which excited much
attention towards the end of the last century, and is even now more widely
known than Hervas, I mean Court de Gebelin’s “Monde Primitif,”(122) we
shall see at once how far superior the Spanish Jesuit is to the French
philosopher. Gebelin treats Persian, Armenian, Malay, and Coptic as
dialects of Hebrew; he speaks of Bask as a dialect of Celtic, and he tries
to discover Hebrew, Greek, English, and French words in the idioms of
America. Hervas, on the contrary, though embracing in his catalogue five
times the number of languages that were known to Gebelin, is most careful
not to allow himself to be carried away by theories not warranted by the
evidence before him. It is easy now to point out mistakes and inaccuracies
in Hervas, but I think that those who have blamed him most are those who
ought most to have acknowledged their obligations to him. To have
collected specimens and notices of more than 300 languages is no small
matter. But Hervas did more. He himself composed grammars of more than
forty languages.(123) He was the first to point out that the true
affinities of languages must be determined chiefly by grammatical
evidence, not by mere similarity of words.(124) He proved, by a
comparative list of declensions and conjugations, that Hebrew, Chaldee,
Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Amharic are all but dialects of one original
language, and constitute one family of speech, the Semitic.(125) He
scouted the idea of deriving all the languages of mankind from Hebrew. He
had perceived clear traces of affinity in Hungarian, Lapponian, and
Finnish, three dialects now classed as members of the Turanian
family.(126) He had proved that Bask was not, as was commonly supposed, a
Celtic dialect, but an independent language, spoken by the earliest
inhabitants of Spain, as proved by the names of the Spanish mountains and
rivers.(127) Nay, one of the most brilliant discoveries in the history of
the science of language, the establishment of the Malay and Polynesian
family of speech, extending from the island of Madagascar east of Africa,
over 208 degrees of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of America,(128)
was made by Hervas long before it was announced to the world by Humboldt.
Hervas was likewise aware of the great grammatical similarity between
Sanskrit and Greek, but the imperfect information which he received from
his friend, the Carmelite missionary, Fra Paolino de San Bartolomeo, the
author of the first Sanskrit grammar, published at Rome in 1790, prevented
him from seeing the full meaning of this grammatical similarity. How near
Hervas was to the discovery of the truth may be seen from his comparing
such words as _theos_, God, in Greek, with _Deva_, God, in Sanskrit. He
identified the Greek auxiliary verb _eimi_, _eis_, _esti_, I am, thou art,
he is, with the Sanskrit _asmi_, _asi_, _asti_. He even pointed out that
the terminations of the three genders(129) in Greek, _os_, _ē_, _on_, are
the same as the Sanskrit, _as_, _â_, _am_. But believing, as he did, that
the Greeks derived their philosophy and mythology from India,(130) he
supposed that they had likewise borrowed from the Hindus some of their
words, and even the art of distinguishing the gender of words.
The second work which represents the science of language at the beginning
of this century, and which is, to a still greater extent, the result of
the impulse which Leibniz had given, is the Mithridates of Adelung.(131)
Adelung’s work depends partly on Hervas, partly on the collections of
words which had been made under the auspices of the Russian government.
Now these collections are clearly due to Leibniz. Although Peter the Great
had no time or taste for philological studies, the government kept the
idea of collecting all the languages of the Russian empire steadily in
view.(132) Still greater luck was in store for the science of language.
Having been patronized by Cæsar at Rome, it found a still more devoted
patroness in the great Cesarina of the North, Catherine the Great
(1762-1796). Even as Grand-duchess Catherine was engrossed with the idea
of a Universal Dictionary, on the plan suggested by Leibniz. She
encouraged the chaplain of the British Factory at St. Petersburg, the Rev.
Daniel Dumaresq, to undertake the work, and he is said to have published,
at her desire, a “Comparative Vocabulary of Eastern Languages,” in quarto;
a work, however, which, if ever published, is now completely lost. The
reputed author died in London in 1805, at the advanced age of eighty-four.
When Catherine came to the throne, her plans of conquest hardly absorbed
more of her time than her philological studies; and she once shut herself
up nearly a year, devoting all her time to the compilation of her
Comparative Dictionary. A letter of hers to Zimmermann, dated the 9th of
May, 1785, may interest some of my hearers:—
“Your letter,” she writes, “has drawn me from the solitude in which I had
shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to
stir. You will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you, for such
things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to
three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and I have had them
translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their
number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these
words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This
has taught me that the Celtic is like the Ostiakian: that what means sky
in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in
certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire. (Up to
here her letter is written in French; then follows a line of German.) I
became tired of my hobby, after I had read your book on Solitude. (Then
again in French.) But as I should have been sorry to throw such a mass of
paper in the fire;—besides, the room, six fathoms in length, which I use
as a boudoir in my hermitage, was pretty well warmed—I asked Professor
Pallas to come to me, and after making an honest confession of my sin, we
agreed to publish these collections, and thus make them useful to those
who like to occupy themselves with the forsaken toys of others. We are
only waiting for some more dialects of Eastern Siberia. Whether the world
at large will or will not see in this work bright ideas of different
kinds, must depend on the disposition of their minds, and does not concern
me in the least.”
If an empress rides a hobby, there are many ready to help her. Not only
were all Russian ambassadors instructed to collect materials; not only did
German professors(133) supply grammars and dictionaries, but Washington
himself, in order to please the empress, sent her list of words to all
governors and generals of the United States, enjoining them to supply the
equivalents from the American dialects. The first volume of the Imperial
Dictionary(134) appeared in 1787, containing a list of 285 words
translated into fifty-one European, and 149 Asiatic languages. Though full
credit should be given to the empress for this remarkable undertaking, it
is but fair to remember that it was the philosopher who, nearly a hundred
years before, sowed the seed that fell into good ground.
As collections, the works of Hervas, of the Empress Catherine, and of
Adelung, are highly important, though, such is the progress made in the
classification of languages during the last fifty years, that few people
would now consult them. Besides, the principle of classification which is
followed in these works can hardly claim to be called scientific.
Languages are arranged geographically, as the languages of Europe, Asia,
Africa, America, and Polynesia, though, at the same time, natural
affinities are admitted which would unite dialects spoken at a distance of
208 degrees. Languages seemed to float about like islands on the ocean of
human speech; they did not shoot together to form themselves into larger
continents. This is a most critical period in the history of every
science, and if it had not been for a happy accident, which, like an
electric spark, caused the floating elements to crystallize into regular
forms, it is more than doubtful whether the long list of languages and
dialects, enumerated and described in the works of Hervas and Adelung,
could long have sustained the interest of the student of languages. This
electric spark was the discovery of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the ancient
language of the Hindus. It had ceased to be a spoken language at least 300
B. C. At that time the people of India spoke dialects standing to the
ancient Vedic Sanskrit in the relation of Italian to Latin. We know some
of these dialects, for there were more than one in various parts of India,
from the inscriptions which the famous King Aśoka had engraved on the
rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri, and which have been deciphered
by Prinsep, Norris, Wilson, and Burnouf. We can watch the further growth
of these local dialects in the so-called _Pâli_, the sacred language of
Buddhism in Ceylon, and once the popular dialect of the country where
Buddhism took its origin, the modern Behár, the ancient Magadha.(135) We
meet the same local dialects again in what are called the Prâkrit idioms,
used in the later plays, in the sacred literature of the Jainas, and in a
few poetical compositions; and we see at last how, through a mixture with
the languages of the various conquerors of India, the Arabic, Persian,
Mongolic, and Turkish, and through a concomitant corruption of their
grammatical system, they were changed into the modern Hindí, Hindustání,
Mahrattí, and Bengálí. During all this time, however, Sanskrit continued
as the literary language of the Brahmans. Like Latin, it did not die in
giving birth to its numerous offspring; and even at the present day, an
educated Brahman would write with greater fluency in Sanskrit than in
Bengálí. Sanskrit was what Greek was at Alexandria, what Latin was during
the Middle Ages. It was the classical and at the same time the sacred
language of the Brahmans, and in it were written their sacred hymns, the
Vedas, and the later works, such as the laws of Manu and the Purâņas.
The existence of such a language as the ancient idiom of the country, and
the vehicle of a large literature, was known at all times; and if there
are still any doubts, like those expressed by Dugald Stewart in his
“Conjectures concerning the Origin of the Sanskrit,”(136) as to its age
and authenticity, they will be best removed by a glance at the history of
India, and at the accounts given by the writers of different nations that
became successively acquainted with the language and literature of that
country.
The argument that nearly all the names of persons and places in India
mentioned by Greek and Roman writers are pure Sanskrit, has been handled
so fully and ably by others, that nothing more remains to be said.
The next nation after the Greeks that became acquainted with the language
and literature of India was the Chinese. Though Buddhism was not
recognized as a third state-religion before the year 65 A. D., under the
Emperor Ming-ti,(137) Buddhist missionaries reached China from India as
early as the third century B. C. One Buddhist missionary is mentioned in
the Chinese annals in the year 217; and about the year 120 B. C., a
Chinese general, after defeating the barbarous tribes north of the desert
of Gobi, brought back as a trophy a golden statue, the statue of Buddha.
The very name of Buddha, changed in Chinese into Fo-t’o and Fo,(138) is
pure Sanskrit, and so is every word and every thought of that religion.
The language which the Chinese pilgrims went to India to study, as the key
to the sacred literature of Buddhism, was Sanskrit. They call it Fan; but
Fan, as M. Stanislas Julien has shown, is an abbreviation of Fan-lan-mo,
and this is the only way in which the Sanskrit Brahman could be rendered
in Chinese.(139) We read of the Emperor Ming-ti, of the dynasty of Han,
sending Tsaï-in and other high officials to India, in order to study there
the doctrine of Buddha. They engaged the services of two learned
Buddhists, Matânga and Tchou-fa-lan, and some of the most important
Buddhist works were translated by them into Chinese. The intellectual
intercourse between the Indian peninsula and the northern continent of
Asia continued uninterrupted for several centuries. Missions were sent
from China to India to report on the religious, political, social, and
geographical state of the country; and the chief object of interest, which
attracted public embassies and private pilgrims across the Himalayan
mountains, was the religion of Buddha. About 300 years after the public
recognition of Buddhism by the Emperor Ming-ti, the great stream of
Buddhist pilgrims began to flow from China to India. The first account
which we possess of these pilgrimages refers to the travels of Fa-hian,
who visited India towards the end of the fourth century. His travels were
translated into French by A. Remusat. After Fa-hian, we have the travels
of Hoei-seng and Song-yun, who were sent to India, in 518, by command of
the empress, with the view of collecting sacred books and relics. Then
followed Hiouen-thsang, whose life and travels, from 629-645, have been
rendered so popular by the excellent translation of M. Stanislas Julien.
After Hiouen-thsang the principal works of Chinese pilgrims are the
Itineraries of the Fifty-six Monks, published in 730, and the travels of
Khi-nie, who visited India in 964, at the head of 300 pilgrims.
That the language employed for literary purposes in India during all this
time was Sanskrit, we learn, not only from the numerous names and
religious and philosophical terms mentioned in the travels of the Chinese
pilgrims, but from a short paradigm of declension and conjugation in
Sanskrit which one of them (Hiouen-thsang) has inserted in his diary.
As soon as the Muhammedans entered India, we hear of translations of
Sanskrit works into Persian and Arabic.(140) Harun-al-Rashid (786-809) had
two Indians, Manka and Saleh, at his court as physicians. Manka translated
the classical work on medicine, Suśruta, and a treatise on poisons,
ascribed to Châņakya, from Sanskrit into Persian.(141) During the
Chalifate of Al Mámúm, a famous treatise on Algebra was translated by
Muhammed ben Musa from Sanskrit into Arabic (edited by F. Rosen).
About 1000 A. D., Abu Rihan al Birúni (born 970, died 1038) spent forty
years in India, and composed his excellent work, the Taríkhu-l-Hind, which
gives a complete account of the literature and sciences of the Hindus at
that time. Al Birúni had been appointed by the Sultan of Khawarazm to
accompany an embassy which he sent to Mahmud of Ghazni and Masud of
Lahore. The learned Avicenna had been invited to join the same embassy,
but had declined. Al Birúni must have acquired a complete knowledge of
Sanskrit, for he not only translated one work on the Sânkhya, and another
on the Yoga philosophy, from Sanskrit into Arabic, but likewise two works
from Arabic into Sanskrit.(142)
About 1150 we hear of Abu Saleh translating a work on the education of
kings from Sanskrit into Arabic.(143)
Two hundred years later, we are told that Firoz Shah, after the capture of
Nagarcote, ordered several Sanskrit works on philosophy to be translated
from Sanskrit by Maulána Izzu-d-din Khalid Khani. A work on veterinary
medicine ascribed to Sálotar,(144) said to have been the tutor of Suśruta,
was likewise translated from Sanskrit in the year 1381. A copy of it was
preserved in the Royal Library of Lucknow.
Two hundred years more bring us to the reign of Akbar (1556-1605). A more
extraordinary man never sat on the throne of India. Brought up as a
Muhammedan, he discarded the religion of the Prophet as
superstitious,(145) and then devoted himself to a search after the true
religion. He called Brahmans and fire-worshippers to his court, and
ordered them to discuss in his presence the merits of their religions with
the Muhammedan doctors. When he heard of the Jesuits at Goa, he invited
them to his capital, and he was for many years looked upon as a secret
convert to Christianity. He was, however, a rationalist and deist, and
never believed anything, as he declared himself, that he could not
understand. The religion which he founded, the so-called Ilahi religion,
was pure Deism mixed up with the worship of the sun(146) as the purest and
highest emblem of the Deity. Though Akbar himself could neither read nor
write,(147) his court was the home of literary men of all persuasions.
Whatever book, in any language, promised to throw light on the problems
nearest to the emperor’s heart, he ordered to be translated into Persian.
The New Testament(148) was thus translated at his command; so were the
Mahâbhârata, the Râmâyaņa, the Amarakosha,(149) and other classical works
of Sanskrit literature. But though the emperor set the greatest value on
the sacred writings of different nations, he does not seem to have
succeeded in extorting from the Brahmans a translation of the Veda. A
translation of the Atharva-veda(150) was made for him by Haji Ibrahim
Sirhindi; but that Veda never enjoyed the same authority as the other
three Vedas; and it is doubtful even whether by Atharva-veda is meant more
than the Upanishads, some of which may have been composed for the special
benefit of Akbar. There is a story which, though evidently of a legendary
character, shows how the study of Sanskrit was kept up by the Brahmans
during the reign of the Mogul emperors.