s, and Rhode sketched the religious
history of Persia after the translations of Anquetil.

Erskine's essay provoked a decisive answer from Emmanuel Rask, one of
the most gifted minds in the new school of philology, who had the honor
of being a precursor of both Grimm and Burnouf. He showed that the list
of the Jehangiri referred to an epoch later than that to which Zend must
have belonged, and to parts of Persia different from those where it must
have been spoken; he showed further that modern Persian is not derived
from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected with it; and, lastly, he
showed what was still more important, that Zend was not derived from
Sanscrit. As to the system of its sounds, Zend approaches Persian rather
than Sanscrit; and as to its grammatical forms, if they often remind one
of Sanscrit, they also often remind one of Greek and Latin, and
frequently have a special character of their own. Rask also gave the
paradigm of three Zend nouns, belonging to different declensions, as
well as the right pronunciation of the Zend letters, several of which
had been incorrectly given by Anquetil. This was the first essay on Zend
grammar, and it was a masterly one.

The essay published in 1831 by Peter von Bohlen on the origin of the
Zend language threw the matter forty years back. According to him, Zend
is a Pracrit dialect, as it had been pronounced by Jones, Leyden, and
Erskine. His mistake consisted in taking Anquetil's transcriptions of
the words, which are often so incorrect as to make them look like
corrupted forms when compared with Sanscrit. And, what was worse, he
took the proper names in their modern Parsi forms, which often led him
to comparisons that would have appalled Menage. Thus Ahriman became a
Sanscrit word ariman, which would have meant "the fiend"; yet Bohlen
might have seen in Anquetil's work itself that Ahriman is nothing but
the modern form of Angra Mainyu, words which hardly remind one of the
Sanscrit ariman. Again, the angel Vohu-mano, or "good thought," was
reduced, by means of the Parsi form Bahman, to the Sanscrit bahuman, "a
long-armed god."

At length came Burnouf. From the time when Anquetil had published his
translation, that is to say during seventy years, no real progress had
been made in knowledge of the Avesta texts. The notion that Zend and
Sanscrit are two kindred languages was the only new idea that had been
acquired, but no practical advantage for the interpretation of t