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remark, though relating only to myself; and this is to remind you, that the difficulties of a first course on any subject are materially increased, if they co-exist, as they do in my own person, with the first time of lecturing at all. That facility of communicating information, usually only the result of experience, will therefore, I fear, be wanting; but labouring to avoid prolixity, I shall endeavour to be full; and I trust I may escape being superficial, when I wish to be brief. The almost necessary failings which, with the best endeavours to avoid, will still exist, require that consideration, which, on a first course, it is usual and becoming to bestow. More than that it would be unbecoming in me to ask, and injustice, both to yourselves and the Institution to which I have the honour to belong, for you to grant.
- »* While these last pages have been passing through the press, some
observations by my friend, Mr. Prinsep, Secretary of the Asiatic Society, have arrived, "on the very great similarity between the old Sanscrit and the Greek character, more palpable the farther we retire into antiquity, the older the monuments we have to decipher; so that we might almost advance, that the oldest Greek (that written like the Phoenician from right to left) was nothing more than Sanscrit turned topsy turvy."
The connexion of the Greek with the Phoenician and Samaritan alphabets has been admitted as a strong evidence, that "the use of letters travelled progressively from Chaldea to Phœnicia, and thence along the coasts of the Mediterranean;" (Pantographia, p. 107.) The Greek language has besides been now indisputably proved to be but a branch of the Sanscrit stem.
As Mr. Prinsep's arguments are solely those of graphic similitude and ocular evidence, he has printed the letters of the two alphabets in parallel columns. Of the Greek vowels the majority, and in the consonants every one of the letters, "excepting those of after-invention, are represented with considerable exactness," by the several corresponding letters of the oldest Sanscrit alphabet, "although there is hardly a shadow of resemblance between any two in their modern forms." "Whether the priority is to be conceded to the Greeks, the Pelasgians, or the Hindoos, is a question requiring great research, and not less impartiality, to determine." Journal Asiat. Soc. of Bengal, May 1837, p. 391.
