Ancient India: Its Language and Religions

THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT.

and the Celts. Among these related languages, one sheds light on the obscure features of the others, just as natural history explains the underdeveloped original: "stunted" organs of some animals by pointing out the same organs in their original, perfect form in other animals.

The image of the "mother tongue"—whose descendants are the languages of our linguistic family—was no longer seen with vague or doubtful features. The laws governing the system of sounds and grammatical forms in the separate descendant languages as they developed from the mother tongue The author refers here to what modern linguists call Proto-Indo-European are being discovered more fully and defined more precisely than ever before.

From the very beginning, the essential tool—indeed, the very foundation—of this investigation was the Sanskrit language. At first, the belief in the "primitiveness" the quality of being the original source of Sanskrit compared to its related languages was too strong. During the last few years, however, this mistaken concept has been fully corrected, and this in itself is a major step forward. We now know that the apparently simpler and clearer state of Sanskrit sounds and forms is, in many respects, less original than the complicated structures of other languages, such as Greek. We must often start with these other languages rather than Sanskrit to successfully explain how Sanskrit forms were created. Thus, Sanskrit now receives back the light which it once provided for the historical understanding of European languages.*

* It may be permitted here to illustrate this reversal of methods with a single point that has become especially important to grammar. Greek has five short vowels: a, e, o, i, u. Sanskrit has i and u corresponding to the Greek i and u; but for the three sounds a, e, o, Sanskrit has only a single vowel, a. Thus, for example, the Greek word apo meaning "from" is written in Sanskrit as apa; the a of the first syllable and the o of the second syllable of the [Greek text]...