Sanskrit scholarship displaced Biblical authority on the origins of civilization and language

Evidence

On all sides, and in many different ways, what William Jones stated in his Anniversary Discourses (1785–1792), or what Franz Bopp put forward in his Vergleichende Grammatik (1832), is that the divine dynasty of language was ruptured definitively and discredited as an idea. A new historical conception, in short, was needed, since Christianity seemed unable to survive the empirical evidence that reduced the divine status of its major text. For some, as Chateaubriand put it, faith was unshakable despite new knowledge of how Sanskrit outdated Hebrew: “Hélas! il est arrivé qu’une connaissance plus approfondie de la langue savante de l’Inde a fait rentrer ces siècles innombrables dans le cercle étroit de la Bible. Bien m’en a pris d’être redevenue croyant, avant d’avoir éprouvé cette mortification.” (Alas! it has happened that a deeper knowledge of the learned language of India has forced innumerable centuries into the narrow circle of the Bible. How lucky for me that I have become a believer again before having had to experience this mortification.) For others, especially philologists like the pioneering Bopp himself, the study of language entailed its own history, philosophy, and learning, all of which did away with any notion of a primal language given by the Godhead to man in Eden. As the study of Sanskrit and the expansive mood of the later eighteenth century seemed to have moved the earliest beginnings of civilization very far east of the Biblical lands, so too language became less of a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves. There was no first language, just as—except by a method I shall discuss presently—there was no simple language. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 360

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘no first language, no simple language’ point is the scaffolding for what follows about Renan’s semitic/oriental method of reduction — and connects to Foucault’s genealogy as non-linear filiation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 360