It is admitted that, however inferior to
the classical Sanskrit of Panini, the language of the oldest portions of
Rig Veda, notwithstanding the antiquity of its grammatical forms, is the
same as that of the latest texts. Every one sees--cannot fail to see and
to know--that for a language so old and so perfect as the Sanskrit to
have survived alone, among all languages, it must have had its cycles of
perfection and its cycles of degeneration. And, if one had any
intuition, he might have seen that what they call a "dead language"
being an anomaly, a useless thing in Nature, it would not have survived,
even as a "dead" tongue, had it not its special purpose in the reign of
immutable cyclic laws; and that Sanskrit, which came to be nearly lost
to the world, is now slowly spreading in Europe, and will one day have
the extension it had thousands upon thousands of years back--that of a
universal language. The same as to the Greek and the Latin: there will
be a time when the Greek of Aeschylus (and more perfect still in its
future form) will be spoken by all in Southern Europe, while Sanskrit
will be resting in its periodical pralaya; and the Attic will be
followed later by the Latin of Virgil.
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