light.

In 1798 Father Paulo de St. Barthelemy further developed Jones's remark
in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language. He showed its
affinity with the Sanscrit by a list of such Zend and Sanscrit words as
were least likely to have been borrowed, viz., those that designate the
degrees of relationship, the limbs of the body, and the most general and
essential ideas. Another list, intended to show, on a special topic, how
closely connected the two languages are, contains eighteen words taken
from the liturgic language used in India and Persia. This list was not
very happily drawn up, as out of the eighteen instances there is not a
single one that stands inquiry; yet it was a happy idea, and one which
has not even yet yielded all that it promised. His conclusions were that
in a far remote antiquity Sanscrit was spoken in Persia and Media, that
it gave birth to the Zend language, and that the "Zend-Avesta" is
authentic: "Were it but a recent compilation," he writes, "as Jones
asserts, how is it that the oldest rites of the Parsis, that the old
inscriptions of the Persians, the accounts of the Zoroastrian religion
by the classical writers, the liturgic prayers of the Parsis, and,
lastly, even their books do not reveal the pure Sanscrit, as written in
the land wherein the Parsis live, but a mixed language, which is as
different from the other dialects of India as French is from Italian?"
This amounted, in fact, to saying that the Zend is not derived from the
Sanscrit, but that both are derived from another and older language. The
Carmelite had a dim notion of that truth, but, as he failed to express
it distinctly, it was lost for years, and had to be rediscovered.

The first twenty-five years of this century were void of results, but
the old and sterile discussions as to the authenticity of the texts
continued in England. In 1808 John Leyden regarded Zend as a Pracrit
dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect
and Zend with the Sauraseni. In the eyes of Erskine, Zend was a Sanscrit
dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never
spoken in Persia. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among
the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the
Farhang-i Jehangiri, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close
relationship with Zend.

In Germany, Meiners had found no followers. The theologians appealed to
the "Avesta," in their polemic