528 Professor Rasx’s Remarks on the Zend Language. 
the oldest books of the Persians nine hundred years gffer Christ, which makes 
a space of fourteen hundred years, during which period, the Farsi, continuing 
to be a living language, must naturally have undergone a very considerable 
alteration. With respect to the Pahlavi, although it is more ancient than 
the Fursi, yet as it is confessedly mixed with the latter and Chaldean or 
Syriac, still less can it be expected that the Zend should account for its 
structure and expressions. 
Thus much in the first instance, to invalidate the opinion above men- 
tioned. I shall next try to establish positively that the relation between Sans- 
crit and Zend is not so close as to make the latter a mere dialect of the former, 
nor the difference between the Zend and Farsi so great as to make the former 
appear a foreign language, introduced from another country. I must here 
insert some grammatical details, which I perhaps overrate as my own disco- 
veries, but which I think indispensable, in order to judge of a language 
so little known. I even hope they may have some interest for philologists, 
as they are derived, not from the memoirs and vocabularies of ANQuETIL, 
but from some of the most accurate and ancient manuscripts existing. 
The pronunciation and whole external form of the Zend is very different 
from that of the Sanscrit. It has twelve single vowels, fourteen diphthongs 
(ai, di, au, du, ao, do, ni, ni), &c., and three triphthongs (aei, aoi, aow), 
besides the syllables formed by the consonants y and w, and it has thirty 
consonants. There are some few figures more; for instance, the letter y 
has two forms in the beginning of words different from a third one, used 
only in the middle, and w has one for the beginning, but another for the 
middle of words ; but there are only forty-two * really different letters. In 
* As I have no where seen a correct Zend alphabet, I shall here go through that given by 
ANQUETIL in the Zendavesta, tom. ii, p. 24, in Mem. del’ Académie des Belles Lettres, tom. xxxi, 
and repeated in Mreninsk1’s Thesaurus, introd. tab. 2 (second edition), in order to show what 
original character I mean by each of the letters mentioned in the text already, or occurring in 
the words to be quoted in the following lines. His No. 1 is short a or u, according to Grt- 
CHRIST’s system, but note; No. 2 is b, No. 3 ist, and No, 4 is the English 7, or French dj ; 
No. 5 contains two distinct letters, as I infer from finding them used in different words, and 
never confounded in any good manuscript ; the latter character I take for g, or the Arab (3; 
the former for the same letter aspirated gh, that is to say z, because I have observed that the 
line which makes the lower part of the figure even in other letters, denotes aspiration. No 6 
contains four characters, which make three distinct letters: the first is the common d; the 
second I would express by the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic 8, it is never confounded, though 
sometimes 
