Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/130

108 these numerous dialects had the pre-eminence over any of the others, we must not be contented with taking for the basis of our researches or arguments merely such words and forms as are to be found in the literary dialect of each language, because every one of the spoken dialects is presumably of equal antiquity and equal authority with the one written dialect. There is thus a most important and most valuable task waiting for hands to perform it. In every part of Aryan India there are now highly-educated English officials, who take a real and earnest interest in the people over whom they rule; it would be an easy and to many, it is hoped, a pleasing task to collect the words and forms current in their neighbourhood. The pages of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal are always open to contributions of this kind, and have already received many such; but many more remain to be done: will not those who can save these rare and curious words from perishing rouse themselves to do so ere it be too late? Before the spread of education local dialects are already beginning to die out, and will doubtless disappear more and more rapidly as time goes on, taking with them into an oblivion whence they cannot be recovered, words which might throw invaluable light upon dark places in the history of the development of the language to which they belong.

§ 30, The whole of these languages, including all their varied dialectic forms, exhibit at every turn marks of a common origin, and the changes and developments—I cannot call them corruptions—which they have undergone are all in the same direction, though in different degrees. There is hardly any special peculiarity in any one of them of which traces may not be found in a greater or less degree in all or most of the others. As regards mutual intelligibility, which has been proposed as the test whereby to distinguish languages from dialects, there is much divergence. An Oṛiya can generally understand what