Ancient India: Its Language and Religions

I must not attempt to follow in detail the course which the science of comparative grammar, apart from its connection with Hindu research, has taken. While the two branches of the study were rapidly advanced by Germans particularly, and likewise in France by the sagacious wise or insightful Burnouf, new material kept pouring in from India no less rapidly. In two countries on the outskirts of Indian civilization—in the Himalayan valleys of Nepal and in Ceylon modern-day Sri Lanka—the sacred literature of the Buddhists, which had disappeared in India proper, was brought to light in two collections: one in Sanskrit and one in the popular dialect Pali. The ingenuity of James Prinsep succeeded in deciphering the oldest Indian written characters on inscriptions and coins. In Calcutta, during the 1830s original: "the Thirties", the publication of the Mahabharata was undertaken and completed—a gigantic heroic poem of almost a hundred thousand [verses]

A Greek word is thus represented in Sanskrit by the sound a. Or, to use another example, the Greek menos (meaning "courage" or "spirit") is in Sanskrit manas; the Greek epheron (meaning "I carried") is abharam in Sanskrit. What now is the original form—that is, what sounds existed in the Indo-Germanic mother tongue today known as Proto-Indo-European for the three Greek sounds of a, e, and o, or the single sound of the Sanskrit a? When scholars began to study comparative philology the study of how languages change and relate to one another upon the basis of Sanskrit, they thought the a sound to be the only original sound. This was a conclusion apparently supported by the simplicity of the language, and it led them to believe that this vowel was later divided on European soil into three sounds: a, e, and o.

Investigations of the most recent time—and for these we are to thank Amelung, Brugmann original: "Burgman", Johannes Schmidt, and others—have shown that the development of the vowel system took the opposite course. The vowels a, e, and o were already present in the Indo-Germanic mother tongue. In Sanskrit—or more accurately, before the time of Sanskrit, in the language which the ancestors of the Indians and Persians spoke when both formed one people—these vowels were merged into a single vowel. Thus, the e sound of the Greek esti (meaning "is") and the o sound of apo (meaning "from" or "away") are more original than the a sound of the Sanskrit asti (is) and apa (from).

Now, we find in Sanskrit that where the Greek e corresponds to the Sanskrit a, certain consonants preceding this vowel, such as k, are affected in a different way than in instances where the Greek a or o is used for the Sanskrit a. From the linguistic form of Sanskrit alone, which has the same a in both cases, it would not be understandable why the k sound should meet a different fate each time. Because Greek has preserved the original differences of the vowels, it gives the key to understanding the peculiar transformations which have taken place in the k-sound in large and important groups of Sanskrit words.