THE FIFTH MONARCHY.
PERSIA.
CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE AND WRITING.
It has been intimated in the account of the Median Empire which was given in a former-volume that the language of the Persians, which was identical, or almost identical, with that of the Medes, belonged to the form of speech known to moderns as Indo-European. The characteristics of that form of speech are a certain number of common, or at least widely spread, roots, a peculiar mode of inflecting, together with a resemblance in the inflections, and a similarity of syntax or construction. Of the old Persian language the known roots are, almost without exception, kindred forms to roots already familiar to the philologist through the Sanscrit, or the Zend, or both; while many are of that more general type of which we have spoken—forms common to all, or most of the varieties of the Indo-European stock. To instance in a few very frequently recurring words—“father” is in old Persian (as in Sanscrit) pitar, which differs only in the vocalization from the Zendic patar, the Greek [ ], and the Latin pater, and of which cognate forms are the Gothic fadar, the German voter, the English father, and the Erse athair.
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