language-roots

Updated: May 16, 2025

He would find it modifying and modified by the Greeks, and reproduced by them with divers variations, extinguished by Christianity, revived, with a new face, among the theurgies and cabala of Alexandria; he would catch the merest glimpse of it amid the Christian legends and credulities of the Middle Ages, but the Arabs would have kept a stronger hold on it; he would see it in the background after the revival of learning, till, gradually, as modern commerce opened the East, scholars, also, discovered that there were wonders behind the classic nations; and finally he would see how modern research, rushing back through comparison of language-roots, through geological data, through ethnological indications, through antiquarian discoveries, has rooted out of the layers of ages all the history attendant upon its original production.

Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864