“These sciences are inaccessible to all the other castes of people, to whom it is permitted to communicate certain compositions, grammar, poetry, and moral sayings.”
“The grammar of the Brahmans may fairly be classed in the rank of works of science. Never were analysis and synthesis more happily employed than in their grammatical works on the Sanskrit language. I am satisfied that this language, so admirable in its harmony, its wealth, and its energy, was at some remote period the spoken tongue of the country inhabited by the first Brahmans.”
Parenthetically, and also by way of comparison, let us look for a moment at the impression made by Sanskrit upon two other distinguished scholars from among those who were earliest in the field—Sir William Jones and Frederick von Schlegel.
At the outset of his researches, the first declared that, whatever its antiquity, it was a language of most 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 strong affinity. “No philologer,” he adds, “could examine the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family.” And Frederick von Schlegel (Essay on the Language and Philosophy of the Indians) says: “The similarity between Sanskrit, on the one hand, and Latin and Greek, Teutonic and Persian, on the other, is found not only in a great number of roots possessed by them in common, but it also extends to the inner structure and grammar. The remarkable coincidence is not merely such an accidental one as may be explained by an admixture of language, but an essential one which points distinctly to a common descent. Comparison further shows that the Indian (Sanskrit) tongue is the more ancient, the others younger and derived from it.”
But to return to our missionaries. The interest excited in Europe by the remarkable letter of Father Pons [pg 330] was purely one of surprise and speculation, inasmuch as Western scholars were without the means of testing the value of the great linguistic discovery. Sanskrit grammars, dictionaries, and even vocabularies were then unknown in any European tongue. This want, however, was soon supplied by another missionary, John Philip Wesdin, more widely known as Father Paulinus a Santo-Bartolomeo. He spent thirteen years in India, and subsequently published (1790) at Rome, under the auspices of the Propaganda, several works on Sanskrit grammar and upon the history, theology, and religion of the Hindus.
Referring to his numerous publications (vielen Schriften), no less an authority than Adelung qualifies them as indispensable to a knowledge of Sanskrit as also to the other languages of India (welche zur Kentniss sowohl dieser Sprache als auch Indiens überhaupt unentbehrlich sind); and he adds (writing in 1806): “Peradventure has no European up to this time so deeply penetrated into this language as he.”[140] Of his first Sanskrit grammar, published at Rome in 1790,[141] Prof. Max Müller says: “Although this grammar has been severely criticised, and is now hardly ever consulted, it is but fair to bear in mind that the first grammar of any language is a work of infinitely greater difficulty than any later grammar.”
In this connection we must not omit some mention of that prodigy of linguistic industry and erudition, the Spanish Jesuit, Don Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura, who, in the midst of his missionary labors, collected specimens of more than three hundred languages.[142] This of itself was a gigantic work, and its rich results furnished to Adelung an important portion of the material of his Mithridates. Hervas, moreover, prepared grammars for more than forty languages, and is the founder of the true method of ascertaining lingual affinity by grammatical analysis, rather than by etymology, always more or less deceptive. Klaproth's enunciation of this principle established by Hervas is so felicitous that we cannot refrain from citing it here: “Words are the stuff or matter of language, and grammar its fashioning or form.”
Concerning Hervas we need say no more than to add the noble tribute to his memory and his merits to be found in the pages of Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, p. 140:
“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. 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. He had proved that Basque 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. 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° of longitude, to the Easter Islands west of America, was made [pg 331]by Hervas long before it was announced to the world by Humboldt.”
English literature has made us familiar with the name of Sir William Jones as the European originator of the cultivation of Sanskrit. The merits of Sir William Jones are not a subject of doubt or contest. Full justice has been done them. But when we come to settle the question of priority of successful and distinguished labor in the field of Sanskrit, the names and transcendent services of the humble and self-sacrificing missionaries, Robert de' Nobili, Roth, Hanxleder, Beschi, Pons, Paulinus a Santo-Bartolomeo, Hervas, and scores of others, their predecessors and companions, must ever be gratefully remembered.