PROGRESS DURING LAST CENTURY 19 



sacred language and sacred texts rescued from earlier days by means 

 of oral tradition. The meaning of the texts had grown hazy, but the 

 word was holy, and even though it remained but an empty shell to 

 human understanding, it was pleasing to the gods and had served 

 its purpose through the generations to bring gods and men into 

 accord, and must be preserved; likewise the language of ritual and 

 comment thereon, which, as the possession of a limited class, required 

 not only to be protected from overwhelming beneath the floods of the 

 vernacular, but demanded to be extended to the use of wider circles 

 in the dominant castes. Sanskrit had already become a moribund or 

 semi-artificial language before grammar laid hold upon it to continue 

 and extend it. But from the outstart the Hindoo grammarian sat 

 humbly at the feet of language to learn of it, and never assumed to be 

 its master or its guide. Inasmuch as the language had existed and 

 been perpetuated primarily as a thing of the living voice and not of 

 ink and paper, and had been used to reach the ears rather than the 

 eyes of the divine, it followed, in a measure remotely true of no other 

 grammatical endeavor, that the Hindoo grammar was compelled to 

 devote itself to the most exactingly accurate report upon the sounds 

 of the language. The niceties of phonetic discrimination represented 

 in the alphabet itself, the refinements of observation involved in the 

 reports on accent and the phenomenon of pluti, the formulation of 

 the principles of sentence phonetics in the rules of sandhi, the ob- 

 servation on the physiology of speech scattered through the Prati- 

 fakhyas are all brilliant illustrations of the Hindoo's direct approach 

 to the real substance of living speech. None of the national systems 

 of grammar, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Greek, or 

 the Arabic, had anything to show remotely comparable to this; and 

 up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite all the long 

 endeavors expended on Greek and Hebrew and Latin, nothing 

 remotely like it had been known to the Western world. The Greek 

 grammarians had really never stormed the barriers of written lan- 

 guage; they were mostly concerned with establishing and teaching 

 literary forms of the language. Even when they dealt with the 

 dialects, they had the standardized literary types thereof before their 

 eyes rather than the spoken forms ringing in their ears. When the 

 grammars of Colebrooke (1805), of Carey (1806), and of Wilkins 

 (1808) opened the knowledge of Sanskrit to European scholars, it 

 involved nothing short of a grammatical revelation, and prepared the 

 way for an ultimate remodeling of language-study nothing short of 

 a revolution. Though these Hindoo lessons in accurate phonetics as 

 the basis of sure knowledge and safe procedure had their immediate 

 and- unmistakable influence upon the scientific work of the first half 

 century, their l full acceptance tarried until the second half was well 

 1 Cf. H. Oertel, Lectures on the Study of Language, p. 30 ff. (1901). 



