ZEND,* the language in' which are composed the ancient sacred books of Zoroaster, first became known through Anquetil-Duperron (q.v.). Many scholars of eminence, like William Jones, Meiner. Henning, W. Erskine, and others, warmly contested the age of these writings. They held that the idiom in which they were couched had never been spoken in any part of Persia, but was a Sanskrit dialect which had been introduced from India for sacred use. The so-called Zoroastrian writhigs, they said, dated from the time of Ardeshir-Bahegan, the first Sassanian, in 230 p.c., or had at least been rewritten and redacted at that time. The first who endeavored to lay the foundations for a real gra matical knowledge of Zend was Bask, the Dane, who in 1816 undertook a journey to India and Persia, in order to make researches into the origin and nature of this language on the spot. Although he did not live to make known all the results his investiga tions, he yet proved irrefutably that the sacred language of the Parsees was closely con nected with that of the Brahmans; or, in other words, that Zend was akin to Sanskrit, and that, like the latter, it had retained some of the earliest formations of the Aryan dialects. Eugene Burnouf followed in his steps. He was indeed the real founder of Zend studies in modern Europe. By the aid of his knowledge of Sanskrit and com parative grammar, he proceeded to decipher, for the first time, the sacred writings of Zoroastor in the original; while Anquetil-Duperron, who first made the Zend-Avesta known in a European garb, composed his translation only from a modern Persian trans lation. Both he and Bopp contended for the independent and ancient existence of Zend, holding that Sanskrit, being a new language which came from the north, was more likely to be derived from the Zend than the latter from Sanskrit. The opinion of Haug, the latest. and by far the most successful investigator of Zend language and literature, is,' i that Zend is almost identical with the most primitive—the Vedic—form of Sanskrit. We shall give in the following sketch the results of his studies, which unfortunately have as yet appeared only in the preparatory shape of essays.
The Zend idiom, in its widest sense, embraces two so-called "Bactrian" dialects, which, together with the "West Iranian" languages, i.e., those of ancient Media and Persia, form the stock of Iranian tongues. These tongues were once spoken in what Zend-Avesta calls the " Aryan countries" (Airydo danliciv6). The former, the "East Iranian" or " Bactrian" branch, has survived, in its two dialects, in the scanty fragments of the Parsee scriptures only. The more ancient of them is called the " Gatha dialect" because the largest and most important pieces preserved in this peculiar idiom are the Gilthas, or songs; or "ancient Bactrian," also "classical Zend language," is the one in which the greater part of the Zend-Avesta (q.v.) itself is written. don dia
lects seem to have died out in the 3d c. leaving no linguistic progeny. The general character of Zend, in its widest sense, is that of a highly developed idiom, inasmuch as it is as rich in inflections (there are no less than three numbers and S cases) as is the Vedic Sanskrit, and is richer even than the Latin in the variety of forms inherent in its verbs and nouns. There are numbers of compound words in it; and the whole syn tax bears the stamp of an advanced stage of linguistic progress. A genuine sister of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic, it is yet only known to us, much as is the Hebrew in its declining phase. The forms arc no longer accurately kept distinct, and a return to the originally uninflected state, is noticeable, principally iu the verbs. It may be that the Bactrian grammar had never been properly fixed by rules, and that, in the absence of that tender care which the Brahmans took of the preservation of the Sanskrit texts and idiom, many corruptions and abbreviations gradually crept from the colloquial into the classical language of Zend, and were thus perpetuated in the surviving remnants. As soon as the language of the Zoroastrian books died out from daily use, these books were mechanically copied, time after time; and any number of blunders, unchecked by an understanding of the structure or details of the language, crept in unheeded. The oldest copies are the best, comparatively speaking: the more modern the copy, the oftener the terminations are found as separate words; vowels are inserted according to the faulty pronunciation of the writer, and a number of other faults, of omission, or commission, are patent at first sight, solely due to carelessness and ignorance. Before indicating the general character of Zend, we shall briefly observe that its two dialects differ both pho netically and grammatically • and the phonetical differences are so great, that at first sight, it would almost appear as if they were caused by different localities rather than ages, but, on closer inspection, it is found that the singing of the Gilthas, whereby certain vowels were lengthened out, has caused many of these striking peculiarities. Gram matically, the dialect shows many deviations from Zend, traceable to the more primitive state of the Bactrian language which it represents. But the differences between the two are not so great as between the and the classical Sanskrit, and between the Greek of Homer and the Attic dialect. At most, the Gatlin May be reckoned to be 100 or 200 years older than that classical Zeud which formed the classical language of the ancient Iranian empire, as depicted in the earlier parts of the Shalt _Yarnell.