53. Here, I think, is as triumphant a proof of the truth of the system as can well be desired. Here is the exact number of the Calculi 28, and here they are interwoven into the decimal calculation in a very wonderful manner; the 1000 exactly answering to the number of 28 figures. If I be told that the present Arabic alphabet is, comparatively speaking, modern, I reply, however the forms of its letters may have been changed by the Califs, the principle, the system, is evidently ancient, both of the letters and figures. No one can for a moment believe that they invented a new alphabet and system of notation which, by mere accident, coincided with all the old systems of the world; the idea is ridiculous; it involves a contradiction in terms.
54. Some persons have pretended that the Irish selected their letters from the Latin and Greek. How came they to select the identical letters which Cadmus brought to Greece, and no others? This at once disposes of this pretence, and proves to a certainty, that, if the Irish received their letters from Greece, they must have received them before the time of Homer; if from Syria, before the time of Moses, whose Pentateuch contains twenty-two letters. This carries back Irish literature to a time surprisingly ancient.
55. The alphabets of ancient nations have attracted the attention of several learned men at different times and places, and they have endeavoured, with very great care, to ascertain the original number of letters in those alphabets. Nearly all their investigations have terminated in demonstrating the same facts, viz. that the different systems of letters agree within one; that they all amount to sixteen or to seventeen letters; that they have a striking similarity in their names; and that the correspondent letters have the same numerical powers; and, from incidental circumstances, it is very evident that the learned men to whom I allude, Morton, Chishull, Burgess, &c., have had no intention of making the different alphabets systematically agree with one another. This I have most clearly proved in my essay on The Celtic Druids, to which, for the complete proof of the truth of these assertions, I must refer.
56. I now beg my reader to refer back to page 5, to the account given by the ancient traveller Jambulus of the alphabet of Sumatra, and I think when he has read it with attention he will be obliged to believe that it must have been the same in system as the Arabic, and both to have come from the first system of notation founded on the supposed age of the Moon; and I also beg him to consider the tree alphabet found in the Arabic language by professor Hammer in Egypt; in fact, an Arabic treatise written in an Irish Ogham letter. Before I finish I shall trace these Arabians to the borders of China.
57. The Sanscrit alphabet consists of not less than fifty letters, but the number of simple articulations may be reduced to twenty-eight, (the number of the Arabic and of my first numbers,) five vowels and twenty-three consonants. May not the original twenty-eight numerals have been adopted by the Indians for their letters, and sixteen only of them selected by the Arabs? And may not this have been the reason why the difference between the Arabic and Sanscrit appears to be greater than that between the Sanscrit and all the other Western languages? if indeed there be this difference, a fact which I very much doubt.
58. Though I am ignorant of the Sanscrit language, a close attention to great numbers of its proper names had made me strongly suspect that its system of letters was originally the same as that of the Western nations. The following two passages which I have discovered will shew that I had good grounds for my suspicion. Colonel Wilford says, “The Sanscrit alphabet, after striking off the double letters, and such as are used to express sounds peculiar to that language, has a surprising affinity with the old alphabets used in Europe, and they seem to have been originally the same.”[1] In another place Col. Wilford says, “I have observed that gradual state of decay in the Sanscrit language, through the dialects in use in the Eastern parts of India down to the lowest, in which last, though all the words are Sanscrit more or less corrupted, the grammatical part is poor and deficient, exactly like that of our modern languages in Europe, whilst that of the higher dialects of that country is at least equal to that of the Latin language. From such a state of degradation no language can recover itself: all the refinements of civilization and learning will never retrieve the use of a lost case or mood. The improvements consist only in borrowing words from other languages, and in framing new ones occasionally. This is the remark of an eminent modern writer, and experience shews that he is perfectly right. Even the Sanscrit alphabet, when stripped of its double letters, and of those peculiar to that language, is the Pelasgic, and every letter is to be found in that, or the other ancient alphabets, which obtained formerly all over Europe, and I am now preparing a short essay on that interesting subject.”[2]
59. This is confirmed by Col. Van Kennedy, who says, “In all essential respects, the Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit alphabetical systems are similar.”[3]
60. In The Celtic Druids I have pointed out a very curious circumstance of a Sanscrit sentence being found at Eleusis. This is confirmed by an observation of Col. Van Kennedy’s, that there are 339 Sanscrit words in the poems of Homer.[4] I shall resume the subject of the Sanscrit language hereafter.
