Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/50

28 Ital. uccello, Fr. oiseau; from auricula, Ital. orecchio, Span. oreja, Fr. oreille; and thus the weak os, oris, has given way to the coarse and strong bucca, Fr. bouche, Ital. bocca, Span. boca.

That the same process took place in Indian languages is proved by the fact that we find in the earlier Hindi poets weak words in a great state of dilapidation, just as we do in the early Provençal Troubadours. These words have now dropped out of use, and are replaced by stronger and more enduring words, which, though in their turn they have been subjected to the usual laws of development, yet retain sufficient stuff and substance to make them practically useful.

§ 8. Hitherto I have been writing as though the proportion of the three classes of words were the same in all the languages. This is, however, so far from being the case that it is necessary to enter on some details to show how the matter really stands. The point is one on which it is very difficult to come to a definite conclusion. It is characteristic, though little to our credit as a nation, that after a century of rule in India we should have produced so few good dictionaries of this group of languages. In Hindi we have Shakespear and Forbes, but neither of these works is more than a very copious vocabulary, and both are derived almost exclusively from the written language. In Bengali Dr. Carey’s huge quartos are a Sanskrit dictionary in Bengali characters, and Mendies’s is merely a vocabulary. Sutton’s Oṛiya dictionary is meagre, incorrect, and full of Bengali and Sanskrit words, instead of pure Oriya. The Ludiana missionaries' Panjabi work is a meritorious and accurate performance, but it can scarcely be called a dictionary, and the same may be said of Captain Stack’s vocabularies of Sindhi. Shahpurji Edalji’s Gujarati dictionary is a very inferior and scanty contribution to our knowledge, and I am driven, by comparison with works written in that language, to