1 304 A JOURNEY IN INDIA, TIBET,
2 I presume you will scarcely have found any other basis
3 for anthropological comparison than some strained ety-
4 imologies from the Latin and the Sanscrit. But, as I
5 have already owned to you, I am perfectly ignorant of
6 the latter language, and only know as much of it as an
7 Englishman does of Latin who has not learnt it: that
8 is to say, a few isolated words, because the vulgar
9 Indian tongue which I speak has borrowed its vocabu-
10 lary partly from the Sanscrit, partly from the Persian,
11 the Arabic, and the Turkish, just in the same manner |
12 that the Latin has given to the English language for
13 the last eight centuries more than half of its existing
14 vocabulary, which at first was exclusively Saxon and
15 Gaelic.
16 Notwithstanding my ignorance of the Sanscrit,
17 I maintain that it possesses scarcely any other than
18 a philological interest. There have been already too
19 many translations from this language without advan-
20 tage either to science or to history, for us to expect any
21 benefit from future translations.
22 ' It is the same thing with the Tibetan, of which a
23 learned Hungarian, M. Csomo de Koros, was preparing
24 a dictionary and grammar in conjunction with the
25 Lamas of Kzenam, when I visited that part of the
26 Himalaya. I then had the honour, notwithstanding
27 my unworthiness, to inhabit a temple celebrated in
28 Tibet for the literary treasures it contained. M. de.
29 Koros often came thither with the Lama bishop, (I say
30 bishop, because the Tibetan priest had adopted the