﻿54 the sixth discourse: 



formed by the rules of the Vyacaran ; as yushnacam* 

 the genitive plural of yushmad. Now M. Anqnetil 

 most certainly, and the Persian compiler mosr proba- 

 bly, had no knowledge of Sanscrit ; and could not, 

 therefore, have invented a list of Sanscrit words : it 

 is, therefore, an authentic list of Zend words which 

 had been preserved in books, or by tradition ; and it 

 follows, that the language of the Zend was at least a 

 dialect of the Sanscrit, approaching perhaps as nearly 

 to it as the Pracrit, or other popular idioms, which we 

 know to have been spoken in India two thousand 

 years ago, From ail these facts it is a necessarj con- 

 sequence, that the oldest discoverable languages ot 

 Persia were Chaldaic and Sanscrit ; and that, when 

 they had ceased to be vernacular, the Pahlavi and 

 Zend were deduced from them respectively, and the 

 Parsi either from the Zend, or immediately from the 

 dialect of the Brahmins', but all had perhaps a mix- 

 ture of Tartarian ; for the best lexicographers assert, 

 that numberless words in ancient Persian are taken 

 from the language of the Cimmerians, or the Tartars 

 of Kipchak ; so that the three families, whose lineage 

 we -have examined in former discourses, had left visible 

 traces of themselves in Iran, long before the Tartars 

 and Arabs had rushed from their deserts, and re- 

 turned to that very country from which, in all pro- 

 bability, they originally proceeded, and which the 

 Hindus had abandoned in an earlier age, with posi- 

 tive commands from their legislators to revisit it no 

 more. I close this head with observing, that no re- 

 position of a mere political or commercial inter- 

 course between the different nations, will account for 

 the Sanscrit and Chaldaic words, which we find in the 

 old Persian tongues ; because they are, in the first 

 place, too numerous to have been introduced by 

 such means ; and secondly, are not the names of 

 exotic animals, commodities, or arts, but those of 

 material elements, parts of the body, natural objects 



