[Read Sept. 17, 1858.] 



SANSCRIT AND ENGLISH ANALOGUES. 



BY PLINY E. CHASE. 



Few Etymologists will be disposed to claim for their favorite 

 study the dignity of a Science; for neither its elementary princi- 

 ples, its legitimate ends, nor its ethnological uses in verifying history, 

 or determining the pre-historical migrations and affiliations of tribes, 

 are definitely settled. Resemblances, that one investigator regards 

 as valuable and important, are pronounced trivial, accidental, or 

 insignificant by another, whose most serious dicta are, in their turn, 

 made the subject of ridicule by those who advocate a theory of 

 language differing from his own. 



Such students as Bopp, Grimm, Curtius, Pott and others, have 

 accumulated a mass of information, from which some rules have 

 been deduced that must be recognized in every attempt to find a 

 scientific basis for comparative philology. But even their labors 

 have been ridiculed by sciolists, who, placing undue stress on the 

 mistakes that are inseparable from all human effort, lose sight of the 

 merit that rewards all sincere investigation. It is not strange that a 

 tyro, perplexed between the assumed derivation of "wig" on the one 

 hand,* and the curious "Ten Paradoxes" of Haldeman on the 

 other, I should be disposed to assert the worthlessness of Etymology, 

 and to regard as its fundamental rule, that " all consonants are mu- 

 tually interchangeable, and all vowels are of no account,'' or to set 

 the derivation of "fox" from "rainy day" and "mango" from 

 "King Jeremiah," on a level with the results of the most abstruse 

 philological researches. 



But the earnest student will soon outgrow all disposition to ridi- 

 cule even what may appear to him as absurd in the deductions of 

 careful investigators. He will feel that every addition to knowledge 



*■ Pilus, pelo, peluco, paruik, periwig, wig. 

 t See Trans. Am. Phil. So. Vol. XI. page 270. 

 VOL. VII. — X 



