formed a second voyage to England, charged with a special mission from his sovereign to His Majesty George the IVth: returning after this mission, he went to Paris, and departed from thence in the course of 1823 for St. Petersburgh. We now pass on to the Granimar of Mr. Price.

.

We know not upon what foundation Mr. Price could establish that the Hindoostanee, the Persian, and the Arabic, are the three principal languages of the East, to the exclusion of the Sanscrit, of the Chinese, of the idioms of Tartary and of Tibet, &c.; but this question is scarcely worth a discussion: what is more important is the announcement which he has made, of having composed his Grammar, or more properly, the three Grammars which he has united in this volume, according to a plan altogether new, and which is recommendable by the extreme facility which it presents to students. If, to possess the merit of introducing into the study of a language a new and an easier method than was before known, it be sufficient to limit oneself to simple rudiments, extremely incomplete, to neglect in a considerable degree the rules of Syntax, and to place at the end what preceding grammarians for very good reasons had been used to place at the beginning, we will readily admit that Mr. Price has fulfilled all these services, particularly in his Arabic Grammar. But we fear not to acquaint him, that what renders the study of a language difficult, is not a voluminous grammar, or a multiplicity of developements, when well classed after a methodical analysis, or a synthetical arrangement, but it is rather a too great concision, an insufficiency of developements, and above all, the want of method. Of the three languages of which Mr. Price has undertaken to give the grammar, none presents more difficulties, none consequently requires more method in the exposition of its multiplied forms and its Syntax, than the Arabic language; and our author has also devoted to that language a much larger space than to the two others. Nevertheless, it appears to us, that we are left to desire in this work complete portions of Arabic grammar, which are indispensably necessary to the student.

It is almost impossible to assimilate Arabic grammar with that of the Persian language. On the other hand, it is not difficult to co-dispose the forms of the Persian with those of the Hindoostanee, although this last language has a greater variety of inflections; Mr. Price, whom this observation could not es

On this double method vide La Grammaire Arabe de M. le Baron de Sacy, vol. ii. pages 13 and 14.

cape, has edited harmonically the Persian with the Hindoostanee: but as I do not understand the Hindoostanee I shall confine my observations to the Persian and Arabic grammars only.

The first of these languages is remarkable for the very small number of forms which it employs; and all the etymological part, that is to say, that which teaches the knowledge of the inflections of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, might have been explained in a still shorter space than Mr. Price has taken to elucidate them. But we find not in what he has said on this subject much exactitude. The Persian language has no cases; these are supplied by particles: but our author attributes to them a declination of six cases; no doubt because there are six cases in the Latin. They have two ways of forming the plural of nouns; in adding at the termination or : and he altogether omits the second form. In receiving these inflections, the singular sometimes suffers alterations, as 8, plural

ails, plural ilx Mr. Price does not even notice this.

x

The Persian language has no pronominal adjective, vulgarly called pronoun possessive; where these are used in other languages the Persian language substitutes pronouns personal, or prefixes which represent them, and instead of saying my book, his book, it uses the term the book of me, the book of him. Mr. Price leaves this to be discovered by the student, and translates

ش or او x ت or تو م or من ,these pronouns personal x ×

by my, thy, his, &c. He does not inform us that in certain cases we ought to write, in isolating the prefix, lxxlo He omits to notice how mine and thine, &c. are to be expressed

وازان من joined to the personal pronoun ازان by means of

mine;, thine. He says not a word of the compounds so frequent in Persian, or of the manner of indicating the dependence that one noun hath with respect to another noun, or with a pronoun; as, in the House of the brother of the King,

x and it is remarkable, that in this respect he خانه برادر شاه

has committed a great fault in the title of his work, in writing for a fault, however, which Sir William Jones had committed before him.

:

The same negligence is remarkable in that which concerns the conjugation of the verb. All the Persian verbs relate to two forms, which are distinguished by the termination of the infinitive inor in

our author neglects this distinction; he gives

for a paradigm of the active voice the verb

x and for

but, to

that of the passive voice he chooses the verb speak correctly, as there is no passive voice in Persian, it would have been better if he had given the conjugation of the verbs

which, joined to the است and of the verb بودن شدن

مي

participle of the past active, serve to express the passive voice. The conjugation of the Persian verb is composed of a very small number of forms and inflections, which they modify by the help of two particles prefixed, and auxiliary verbs, from whence the result is, that it can be reduced to a very limited table. Our author has preferred to present it more developed, possibly to co-dispose it with the Hindoostanee verb; but, notwithstanding, he has omitted one of its primitive and simple tenses, the preterite x which, according to our author, appears but imperfect, and consequently united to the particle In fact, the great number of irregular Persian verbs which take their imperative and indicative from a verb disused or obsolete, forms almost the only difficulty that occurs in the etymological part of grammar. We might seek in vain the slightest notice of this in Mr. Price's work, who, satisfied with this mutilated skeleton of a grammar, says not a word of Persian Syntax, nor of that of the Hindoostanee. We now pass to the Arabic grammar. Here the author commences by the verb, according to the usual custom, and he chooses for a model the verb, to which he gives the signification of to bless, a signification which it never has in Arabic but in the derived forms; whilst under the primitive form, , its ordinary signification is to kneel, in speaking of the camel.

By an inconsistence, he translates the participle active S, feminine a, by blessed. But what is still more extraordinary, because it is not less opposed to all theory of language, as well as to Arabic grammar in particular, is, that our author gives entirely the conjugation of the verb,, to be, to which he attributes for the infinitive, LiK,

=

=

a word of his own invention, instead of x and divides this

erb into active and passive voice. He has given to this last voice, of which assuredly no one ever heard before him,

the same meaning as in the active voice, without having been enabled by this circumstance to perceive his error. After similar mistakes, there are no other particular errors that can surprise us; we are not astonished to find Persian words, as Lug annulment, (page 85); or Arabic words with a form appropriate to the Persian language, as, (which Mr. Price translates by Sanctity, page 48), classed among Arabic words; to see the nouns divided, we know not why, into six declinations; to find nothing said on the irregular plurals, called by grammarians rompus, the knowlege of which is indispensable, Finally, to find everywhere numerous errors of Syntax; errors which, in a work composed with more knowlege of the subject, one would be disposed to attribute to errors of the press; after which it is almost useless to say, that the Syntax, which occupies 14 pages, is nothing but a number of rules taken up at a hazard, which can be of no use whatever, for want of method; and that those, the application of which is most frequent, are there wholly omitted, whilst others, which might have been omitted without detriment, are. inserted. One observation alone will justify this opinion, however severe it may appear: in this Syntax we find not a single word on the employment of the various modulations of the Aorist, moods which Erpenius and most of the grammarians who succeeded him have denominated antithetical future, apocopal, and paragogical. Moreover, in this respect, Mr. Price has been in unison with himself, since in his paradigms of the conjugation of verbs he has entirely suppressed all these inflections.

A remarkable singularity of this grammar is in that without doubt which the author denominates a plan entirely new, and in that he has placed last, what all former grammarians have considered as preliminary notions necessary to the understanding of all the rest. Thus he has placed the rules of permutation of the letters x x x at the conclusion of the etymological part of the work, whilst they are the key of all the irregularities of the verbs and the nouns; and it is not till after the Syntax that he speaks of the division of letters into classes, according to the parts of the vocal organs which perform the principal part in their pronunciation; of their systematic division into radical and servile letters, solar and lunar; of the formation of syllables; of the accent; and of the punctuation. The author, it is true, has said somewhat respecting the servile letters in regard to the inseparable particles, page 76, and following pages; but that of itself is a farther proof of the disorder which prevails

throughout the work. A very incomplete treatise of Arabic Prosody terminates this Grammar.

We are sorry that we can say nothing in praise of the Grammars of which we have above given an analysis. We presume that what makes the Arabic grammar, above all, so defective, is, that the author knew the Arabic language merely as an integral and necessary part of the Persian, and that he never studied it for itself, and systematically. We dare assert that all persons so situated cannot analyse, nor consequently translate, two lines of Arabic without exposing themselves to fall into the most serious errors; and if we have stopped to discover so many faults, it has been thoroughly to convince such as are desirous of understanding Persian otherwise than for the ordinary purposes of life, that it is indispensable that they should first acquire a solid and methodical knowlege of the Arabic. The contrary path will never produce but half-learned scholars, who will be stopped at every page of a Persian book by Arabic phrases or parts of phrases: they may perhaps sometimes be able to guess the meaning; but they will never be able to render a satisfactory interpretation.

Nevertheless we recommend to the amateurs of Persian literature Mr. Price's work, on account of the Persian dialogues which it contains.

Note. The foregoing is a translation of a French article, by the celebrated Orientalist, the Baron Silvestre de Sacy.

Sceaux, March, 1824.

J. G. JACKSON.

REMARKS ON

Some Passages in the New Testament, inaccurately rendered in the present version.

Τὸ ἀληθὲς οὐδέποτε ἐλέγχεται.-PLATO.

WHEN writer after writer has employed his hours of study on the subject of erroneous translations in the common version of the New Testament, it will hardly be thought inconsistent with a general feeling of respect to that version to state a few instances