Sanskrit : A Grammarian’s View
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed was a grammarian, friend and contemporary of Sir William Jones. Both knew multiple languages. Halhed wrote in 1778 a book titled “A Grammar of Bengal Language”: in the preface of this book he remarks:
“The grand-Source of Indian Literature, the Parent of almost every dialect from the Persian Gulph to the China Seas, is –the Shanscrit; a language ot the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity; which although at present shut up in the libraries of Bramin and appropriated solely to the. records of their Religion appears to have been current .over most, of the Oriental World; and traces of its original extent may still be discovered almost every district, of Asia.
I have been astonished to find the similitude of Shansckrit words with those of Persian and Arabic and even of Latin and Greek: and these not in technical and metaphorical terms which the mutuation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced; but in the main ground-work of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such things as would be first discriminated on the immediate dawn of civilization.
The resemblance which may be observed in the characters upon the medals and signets of various districts of Asia, the light which they reciprocally reflect upon each other, and the general analogy which they all bear to the same grand Proto type, afford another ample field for curiosity. The coins of Assam, Napaul, Cassimeere and many other kingdoms are all stamped with Shanscrit letters, and mostly contain allusions to the old Shanscrit Mythology : the same conformity I have observed on the impressions of, seals from Bootan and Tibet.
A collateral inference may likewise be deduced from the peculiar arrangement of the Shanscrit alphabet, so very different from that of any other quarter of the world. This extraordinary mode of combination still exists in the greatest part of the East, from the Indus to Pegu, in dialects now apparently unconnected, and in characters completely dissimilar; but is a forcible argument that they are all derived from the same source. Another channel of speculation presents itself in the names of persons and places, of titles and dignities,- which are open to general notice, and which, to the farthest limits of Asia, may be found manifest traces of the Shanscrit.
But though these several proofs of the former prevalence of the Shanscrit are now thinly scattered over an immense continent, and interspersed with an infinite variety of extraneous matter, arising from every possible revolution in the manners and principles of the nations, who have by turns cultivated or destroyed it ; that part of Asia between the Indus and the Ganges still preserves the whole language pure and inviolate; still offers, a thousand books to the perusal of the curious, many of which have been religiously handed down from the earliest periods of human existence.
The fundamental part of the Shanscrit language is divided in to three classes: Dhaat or roots of verbs, Shubd or original nouns, and Evya or particles. These latter are ever indeclinable as in other idioms : but the words comprehended in the two former classes must be prepared by certain additions and inflexions to sit them for a place in composition. And here it is that the art of the Grammarian has found room to expand itself, and to employ all the powers of refinement. Not a syllable, not a letter can be added or altered but by regimen; not the most trifling variation of the sense in the minutest subdivision of declension or conjugation can be effected without the application of several rules:, and all the different forms for every change of gender, number, cafe, person, tense, mood or degree are methodically arranged for the assistance of the memory; resembling (-though on a scale infinitely more extensive) the compilations of propria quae manbus and as in presenti.
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To this triple source I conceive that every word of truly Indian original in every provincial and subordinate dialect of all Hindostan may still be traced by a laborious and critical analysis; and all such terms as are thoroughly proved to bear no relation to any one of the Shanscrit roots, I would consider as the production of some remote and foreign idiom, subsequently engrafted upon the main stock. A judicious investigation of this principle would probably throw a new light upon the first invention of many arts and sciences, and open a fresh mine of philological discoveries.
The Hindostanic, or Indian language, appears to have been generally spoken for many ages through all proper Hindostan. It is indubitably derived from the Shanscrit, with which it has exactly the same connection, as the modern dialects of France and Italy with pure Latin. For while the same founds are almost constantly applied in both languages to represent the same ideas, the inflexions by which they are affected and the modes of grammatical regimen are widely different .
The Characters also peculiar to the Hindostanic are exactly the same with those of the Shanscrit, but of a ruder shape: yet still exhibiting a more accurate resemblance than is found in many of the Greek letters upon inscriptions of different Ærask .
Both Halhed and Jones recognized “the same facts about Sanskrit and the modern languages of northern India”, but drew diametrically opposite conclusions from them: Both saw the etymological links between Sanskrit and the modern vocabularies, and both noted the structural differences exhibited by the verbal inflexions and the verbal phrases. Halhed declared that on the evidence of the etymologies the Hindustani language(s) were ‘indubitably derived from the Sanskrit’ although ‘the inflexions by which the words are affected and the modes of grammatical regimen are widely different’. But Jones, despite his admission that ‘five words in six’ in Hindi are derived from Sanskrit, argued that the typological diversity of the languages in the inflexions and regimen of verbs’ precluded any relation of descent, asserting that Hindi was a surviving original language of India which had been heavily invaded by Sanskrit loan words. There is methodological irony in this: the same structural criteria which allowed Jones to group Sanskrit with the other Indo-European languages — as well as with several unrelated languages — prevented him from accepting the correct genetic relationship between Sanskrit and Hindi,
