Lastly—The inscriptions upon the Indo-Bactrian coins of the successors of Alexander are either Sanskrit or nearly Sanskrit.
It is convenient in speaking of these several forms of speech as a class, to designate them by the term Iranian.
It is convenient, also, to indicate the extent to which the approach made by the Persepolitan of a period so late as the reign of Darius, to the Vedaic dialect, said to be about one thousand years older, subtracts from the value of a common argument in favour of the antiquity of the Vedas, viz. the extent to which the language is more archaic than the Sanskrit of the Epics.
It is well too, to indicate as a further disturbance to the current opinions, the bearing of the Pali character of the inscriptions; whereby the oldest records are embodied in the newest form of language.
All these, however, are subordinate questions; the main point being the enumeration of the Iranian Indo-Germans.
The Iranian Indo-Germans are those nations and tribes, whatever they may be, who are descended from the speakers of the Iranian languages—be they Sanskrit Proper, the Sanskrit of the Vedas, Pali, Zend, or Persepolitan; languages, which, it must be observed, are, in the present state of our inquiry, dead languages.
What, then, are these tribes and nations? The answer to this gives us the Iranian Indo-Germans.
When the Sanskrit literature of India first commanded attention, the answer to this question was—all the nations of Hindostan.
The first researches (those of Ellis and others) upon the languages of southern India showed that the Tamul tongues, at least, were not in this category.
Further researches (those of Dr. Stevenson and others) gave reasons for making the Mahratta language Tamul rather than Iranian—not that the vocabulary was not Sanskritic, but that the grammar was such as could never have been evolved out of the grammar of that tongue.