Eminent
commentators, Catholic and Protestant, accepted and developed it.
Great prelates, Catholic and Protestant, stood guard over it,
favouring those who supported it, doing their best to destroy
those who would modify it.
In 1606 Stephen Guichard built new buttresses for it in
Catholic France. He explains in his preface that his intention
is "to make the reader see in the Hebrew word not only the Greek
and Latin, but also the Italian, the Spanish, the French, the
German, the Flemish, the English, and many others from all
languages." As the merest tyro in philology can now see, the
great difficulty that Guichard encounters is in getting from the
Hebrew to the Aryan group of languages. How he meets this
difficulty may be imagined from his statement, as follows: "As
for the derivation of words by addition, subtraction, and
inversion of the letters, it is certain that this can and ought
thus to be done, if we would find etymologies--a thing which
becomes very credible when we consider that the Hebrews wrote
from right to left and the Greeks and others from left to right.
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