Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/55

Rh Indian group, inasmuch as it has led them to drop their Tadbhavas, which are the most valuable class of words that a language can possess, not only on account of the light they throw on the philological processes which the language has undergone, but because, having cast away all that was difficult of pronunciation, cumbrous, and superfluous in the ancient language, they possess the perfection of flexibility, neatness, and practical usefulness. In some languages, notably in Bengali, Tatsama words have been borrowed from Sanskrit, and employed in written works, in cases where there already existed good serviceable Tadbhavas. The result has been that the unfortunate peasant who knows no Sanskrit finds it more and more difficult every day to acquire knowledge, and the education of the masses is thus retarded. In respect of Tadbhavas, Hindi stands pre-eminent, whether it be that form of Hindi which relies principally upon indigenous sources for its words, or that other widely employed form which has incorporated the flower and grace of Persian and Arabic nouns, and which is called sometimes Urdu, sometimes Hindustani.

All the other languages of the group were originally dialects of Hindi, in this sense that Hindi represents the oldest and most widely diffused form of Aryan speech in India. Gujarati acknowledges itself to be a dialect of the Sauraseni Prakrit, the parent of Hindi. Panjabi, even at the present day, is little more than an old Hindi dialect. Bengali, three centuries ago, when it first began to be written, very closely resembled the Hindi still spoken in Eastern Behar. Oṛiya is in many respects more like Hindi than Bengali. There remain only the Sindhi and the Marathi. The former of these has always been very distinct from the rest; nevertheless it shades off in some respects imperceptibly into Panjabi on the one hand, and the wilder Hindi dialects of the great Rajputana desert on the other. I am half afraid to speak about Marathi, as some of the Bombay authors who have written on that language proclaim it VOL. I.