As sure as the six Romance dialects point to an original home of Italian shepherds on the seven hills at Rome, the Aryan languages together point to an earlier period of language, when the first ancestors of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and the Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay, under the same roof. . . . Before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colo- nies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectic germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state of agricultural civilisation; that had recognised the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage; and that invoked the Giver of Light and Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.
German-born British philologist, orientalist and indologist (1823–1900)
Friedrich Max Müller (6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900), more commonly known as Max Müller (or Mueller), was a German philologist and Orientalist, who was a major pioneer of the discipline of comparative religion.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Native Name:
Max Müller
Alternative Names:
Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Muller
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F. Max Müller
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Professor Friedrich Max-Muller
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F. M. M.
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Friedrich Maximilian Müller
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Max Muller
From Wikidata (CC0)
[A]s in his language and in his grammar [the Indian] has preserved something of what seems peculiar to each of the northern [Indo-european] dialects singly, as he agrees with the Greek and the German where the Greek and the German seem to differ from all the rest … no other language has carried off so large a share of the common Aryan heirloom – whether roots, grammar, words, myths or legends.
Muller may have well felt the need to stress that "an ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan eyes and hair, and Aryan blood is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolicocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar"; after all, it was he who had been a principal cause in such misconceptions through his earlier remarks on the common blood that the "English soldier" shared with the "dark Bengali".
No authority could have been strong enough to persuade the Grecian army [of Alexander] that their gods and their hero-ancestors were the same as those of [the Indian] King Porus, or to convince the English soldier that the same blood was running in his veins, as in the veins of the dark Bengalese. And yet there is not an English jury now-a-days, which, after examining the hoary documents of language, would reject the claim of a common descent and a legitimate relationship between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton. Many words still live in India and in England that witnessed the first separation of the northern and southern Arians, and these are witnesses not to be shaken by any cross-examination. The terms for God, for house, for father, mother, son, daughter, for dog and cow, for heart and tears, for axe and tree, identical in all the Indo-European idioms, are like the watch- words of an army. We challenge the seeming stranger, and whether he answer with the lips of a Greek, a German, or an Indian, we recognize him as one of ourselves. Though the historian may shake his head, though the physiologist may doubt, and the poet scorn the idea, all must yield before the facts furnished by language. There was a time when the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the Slaves [sic], the Greeks and Italians, the Persians and Hindus, were living together beneath the same roof, separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races.
The hostile spirit of a party, which has been working for the last years, particularly in this country, to attack all the theories of the Sanscrit antiquarians, has chosen the modern languages of India as a weak point, in order to prove that, as they have no connexion by their grammatical system with the pretended old language of India, the Sanscrit, this sacred language itself has never exercised any real influence upon the people, just as they have tried to prove that the literature, the religion, morals and philosophy of the Brahmins have never historically existed but in the hands of some foreign intriguing priests.
It was the celebrated Friedrich Max Muller who gave the last two testimonies in a 1882 lecture in defence of the “Character of the Hindus,” and he observed: It is surely extremely strange that whenever, either in Greek, or in Chinese, or in Persian, or in Arab writings, we meet with any attempts at describing the distinguishing features in the national character of the Indians, regard for truth and justice should always be mentioned first.
हे गंगा, यमुना, सरस्वती, शुतुद्रि, परुष्णी मेरी स्तुति स्वीकार करो। हे मरुद्वरीधा अस्किनी के साथ और हे अर्गिकीया सुशोमा के साथ, मेरी स्तुति सुनो। तुम त्रिस्तमा, ससर्तु, कुभा, गोमती, मेहत्नू तथा क्रमु आदि अपने दाएँ बहने वाली नदियों को साथ कर अपनी यात्रा पर निकल रही हो। यह सिन्धु अपनी जगमग शानदार जलप्रवाहों को इस विशाल भू भाग में इतनी तीव्रता से प्रवाहित होती चलती है, जैसे कोई सुन्दर घोड़ी जा रही हो।
यदि हम यहूदी या सेमेटिक धर्म के हैं, हमारा दर्शन ग्रीक है, हमारी राजनीति रोमन है और यदि हमारी नैतिकता सेक्सन है, तो यह मान लिया जाता है कि ग्रीकों, रोमनों के इतिहास का या ग्रीस से इटली तक और जर्मनी से लेकर इन द्वीपों तक की सभ्यता के प्रवाह का ज्ञान, उदार अर्थात ऐतिहासिक और विवेकपूर्ण शिक्षा का अनिवार्य तत्त्व है।