Sanscrit Writing and Language. 119 



I apprehend, the inquiring mind must be struck ; namely, that, notwithstanding 

 the number and complication of the rules of the Sanscrit grammar, there are, it 

 is said, no deviations from them. Now this is a peculiarity which never took 

 place in any national language ; even Latin, which is perhaps the most regular 

 of all, occasionally presents to us, in the writings of the very best Roman authors, 

 expressions which are not strictly reducible to any rule ; and the necessity for 

 the occurrence of this irregularity in every dialect spoken by the whole popula- 

 tion of a country is obvious. Illiterate persons are continually introducing 

 incorrect phrases, which are at first avoided by the learned ; but as soon as ever 

 one of those phrases is adopted by the great majority of the people, it then, in a 

 manner, forces itself upon men of better education. Alphabetic writing, indeed, 

 checks this evil, but it cannot completely stop it ; and the consequence is, that 

 there never was a national language, without its idioms. It was the assertion of 

 grammarians, that the Sanscrit tongue was free from all irregularities, which first 

 turned my attention to the extreme unlikelihood of its having ever been used 

 generally by an entire nation ; and more particular consideration of its grammar 

 has confirmed me in this view of the subject. 



In the first place then, — to proceed to particulars, — the letters of the Sanscrit 

 alphabet are arranged according to the organs by which they are uttered. This 

 is an arrangement that has been made by grammarians in the case of many 

 alphabets, but it never has been adopted by the nations using them. The order 

 in which the letters of each national system are placed, has been determined by 

 imitation of some older one, or by accidental circumstances ; and when once 

 fixed, people who have learned them in this order, will not submit to the trouble 

 of changing it. The artificial arrangement, therefore, of the Sanscrit letters 

 clearly distinguishes the system to which they belong from all that have com- 

 menced in national use ; and marks out that it was originally formed not for the 

 bulk of a people, but for and by a particular class of persons who had already 

 made a considerable progress in the technicalities of the grammatic art. 



In the second place, there is a metaphysical refinement in the grammar of 

 this tongue, which never could have originated in national practice. If the 

 Sanscrit words be distinguished into sets of a common general meaning and a 

 common original, most of those sets have, each of them, a tfTrf DHaTw or root, 

 which expresses a general idea abstracted from every modification of it that cor- 



