A Half-Century of Irano-Indian Studies

Extract

On this my first occasion of lecturing to the Society I have a more light-hearted theme to treat than the solemn lecturer on an obscure problem. The emphasis on the first part of Irano-Indian in the title of this brief allocution is for the Iranian tinged with Indian and excluding the Arabian content of Islam. The interaction of these two disciplines, Iranian and Indian, has been constant since the 18th century when the sacred book of the Zoroastrians was revealed to Europe by the voyaging of Anquetil du Perron, who published his famous book The Zend-Avesta in 1771. The abundant Indian documents gave the greater certainty to the understanding of ancient Indian language and literature. The Indian had been further removed to the east; it had lost a considerable part of the older basic vocabulary of the “parent” language (called for want of a good word “Indo-European”), so that words had vanished or survived as isolated evidence for an older stage of the language. In this matter of vocabulary, Iranian was more conservative. The phonetic shape of the language was modified both in the Iranian and the Indian field, but such an Iranian word as myazda- for the “solid offering” is more archaic than the corresponding oldest Indian miyédha-s. To the present day a mountain-dweller in the Pamirs will say nayant “they churn butter“, though the word survived in the oldest Indian 3,000 years ago only in nīta- “churned stuff, butter” and netra- “churning-cord”.