Others exercised their ingenuity in picking the new
discovery to pieces, and still others attributed it all to the
machinations of Satan.
On the other hand, the more thoughtful men in the Church
endeavoured to save something from the wreck of the old system by
a compromise. They attempted to prove that Hebrew is at least a
cognate tongue with the original speech of mankind, if not the
original speech itself; but here they were confronted by the
authority they dreaded most--the great Christian scholar, Sir
William Jones himself. His words were: "I can only declare my
belief that the language of Noah is irretrievably lost. After
diligent search I can not find a single word used in common by
the Arabian, Indian, and Tartar families, before the intermixture
of dialects occasioned by the Mohammedan conquests."
So, too, in Germany came full acknowledgment of the new
truth, and from a Roman Catholic, Frederick Schlegel. He accepted
the discoveries in the old language and literature of India as
final: he saw the significance of these discoveries as regards
philology, and grouped the languages of India, Persia, Greece,
Italy, and Germany under the name afterward so universally
accepted--Indo-Germanic.
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