Professor Max
Muller has brilliantly demonstrated that Sanskrit was the "elder
sister"--by no means the mother--of all the modern languages. As to
that "mother," it is conjectured by himself and colleagues to be a "now
extinct tongue, spoken probably by the nascent Aryan race." When asked
what was this language, the Western voice answers: "Who can tell?"
When, "during what geological periods did this nascent race flourish?"
the same impressive voice replies: "In prehistoric ages, the duration
of which no one can now determine." Yet it must have been Sanskrit,
however barbarous and unpolished, since "the ancestors of the Greeks,
the Italians, Slavonians, Germans and Kelts" were living within "the
same precincts" with that nascent race, and the testimony borne by
language has enabled the philologist to trace the "language of the gods"
in the speech of every Aryan nation. Meanwhile it is affirmed by these
same Orientalists that classical Sanskrit has its origin at the very
threshold of the Christian era; while Vedic Sanskrit is allowed an
antiquity of hardly 3,000 years (if so much) before that time.
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