SANSKRIT, according to Professor Muller, is not the mother of Greek and Latin, as Latin is of French and Italian ; but Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin are sister tongues, varieties of one and the same type, though Sanskrit is the older sister. It was Mr. Colebrooke's opinion that Sanskrit drew its origin from a primeval tongue, which was gradually refined in different climatls, and became Sanskrit in India, Pehlavi in Persia, and Greek on the shores of the Mediterranean. The discovery and the study of Sanskrit have revealed to us the origin and the roots of the classical languages, and have enabled us to seize the relations existing between the idioms now designated by the name of Indo-Germanic or Indo-European. All the most readable Sanskrit Hindu works, the drama, the lyric, the sentirnental and philosophical Kavya, Nala and the Bhagavat Gita, the romantic histories and historical romances, the fables, Hito paclesa, Vetala, Panchavinsati, and so forth and most of the works on science, are supposed to belong to the first ten centuries of the Christian era. It had ceased to be a spoken language at least 300 B.c. At that time the people of India spoke dialects standing to the ancient Vedic Sanskrit in the relation of Italian to Latin. Of these dialects there were more than one in various parts of India, from the inscriptions which the famous king Asoka had engra,ved on the rocks of Dhauli, Girnar, and Kapurdigiri, and which have been deciphered by Prinsep, Norris, Wilson, and Burnout We can watch the further growth of these local dialects iu the Pali, the sacred language of Buddhism in Ceylon, and once the popular language of the country where Buddhism took its origin, the modern I3ehar, the ancient Magaclha. Virc meet the same local dialects again in what are called the Prakrit idioms, used in the later plays, in the sacred literature of the Jaina, and in a few poetical com positions ; and we see at last how, through a mixture with the languages of the various con querors of India,—Arabic, Persian, Mongolic, and Turki, —and through a concomitant . corruption of their grammatical system, they were changed into the inodern Hindi, Hindustani, Mahrati, and Bengali. During all this time, however, Sanskrit continued as the literary language of the Brah mans. Like Latin, it did not die in giving birth to its numerous offspring ; and even up to the middle of the 19th century it has been said that an educated Brahman. would write with greater fluency in Sanskrit than in Bengali. But thii must be accepted with grave doubts. Sanskrit was what Greek was at Alexandria. what Latin was during the middle ages. It was 'the classical, and at the same thne the sacred, language of the Brahmans, and in it were written their sacred hymns, the Vedas, and the later works, such as the laws of Menu and the Puranas. Sanskrit and its congeners are inflectional languages, after the manner of the languages of Europe ; while the Turki, Mongol, Tangus, and Ugrian in the north and west, and the Tamil in the south, are agglutinate tongues. The Tibetan, Burmese, and
all the Nepalese dialects axe monosyllabic tongues. The Sanskrit differs from the Tamil of the south, and much inore so from the Tibetan, Nepalese, and Burmese on its north and west. It has no relations with the Arabic. Armenian and Persian are modern dialects of sister languages to Sanskrit.
Inscriptions in the Aryan and Lat characters are engraved on the rocks at Kapurdigiri in Afghanistan, and at Cuttack, at Dehli on a pillar, also on pillars at Allahabad, Betiah, Muttiah, and Radhya. Later inquirers have agreed upon the contrasted terms of Aryan Pali, i.e. Bactrian, and Indo-Pali, i.e. the Asoka, Lat, and rock in scriptions, or the home-created writing of the Indian continent, before Semites or Sanskrit Brahmans entered India. Though the Sanskrit and Pali languages have ceased to be spoken in any part of India, both of them are in use as the sacred languages of the Brahmanical IIindus and the Buddhists.
Of European tongues, the nearest congeners to the Sanskrit are the Sarmatian languages of the Russian empire, then the classical tongues of Rome and Greece, then those of Gertnany and the Keltie, this class of languages being called the Indo.Germanie. Of the Sclavonie and Lith uanian, the two branches of the Sarmatian, the affinitiee of the Sanskrit are closer with the Lithuanian than with any other known tongue. Sanskrit, next to Lithuanian, is most like the Sclavonic. It will thus be observed that the Aryan or Sanskrit-speaking races of India seetn to have been closely connected with the Zend speaking, Greek-speaking, Latin-speaking, Ger man-speaking, and Sclavonie-speaking races, and not at all with the Arabic, Phcenician, and Hebrew families.
Sanskrit philosophy has been greatly advanced by eminent writers of Europe, — Colebrooke, ;Wilson, Max Muller, Burnout, the two Schlegels, W. von Humboldt, Bopp, Lassen, Sir Charles Wilkins, James Prinsep, Dr. Mill, Mr. Norris, Professor Dowson, Edward Thomas, Dr. J. Muir, Mr. Bayley, Bhan Daji, Babu Rajendra Lal Matra, Dr. Burnell, General Ctinninghant, Barth, Williams, and Weber.
The Sanskrit language is flexible, ductile, pol ished, expressive, and copious. Its vast literature embraces law, philosophy, and logic, and boasts of old poems which reveal much that is curious in the adventures of hermits, princesses, warriors, and kings, as well as of drams remarkable for originality and skill of plot and delicacy of poetic sentitnent. But even in the works of the greatest of Indian poets there are occasional fanciful conceits, combined with a too studied and artificial elabora tion of diction, and a constant tendency to what It European would consider an almost puerile love of alliteration and playing upon words.