Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/56

34 to be the noblest, most perfect, most eloquent, and so on, of all Indian languages. Molesworth, however, who is remarkable for the sobriety of his judgment in linguistic matters, derives a considerable proportion of the words in his Marathi dictionary from the Hindi; although he guards himself by stating that he only introduces the Hindi word because it is the same as the Marathi, and may therefore be the origin of it. It is rather hasty to assume that modern Marathi is the lineal descendant of the Maharashtri Prakrit. There is quite as much of the Magadhi and Sauraseni type in the modern Marathi as there is of the Maharashtri; and in the long period which intervenes between Vararuchi and the rise of the modern languages, so much confusion took place, and such a jumbling together and general displacement of dialects, that it is absurd now-a-days to attempt to affiliate any modern Indian language as a whole to any Prakrit dialect, Maharashtri and Marathi have little in common except the name.

§ 10, I now return from a long digression to take up the thread of my remarks. In Hindi, as I have said, the number of Desaja and Tadbhava words is much larger than that of Tatsamas. In Bengali and Oṛiya it is not so. These languages delight in Tatsama words, and the learned in those provinces are proud of having such words in their language, being or pretending to be under the impression that they have always been in use and have come down to the present day unaffected by the laws of development to which all languages are subject. This is an obvious error. If the Pandits' idea were true, these languages would be real phenomena, absolute linguistic monstrosities. That a language should have preserved two-fifths of its words entirely free from change or decay, while the remaining three-fifths had undergone very extensive corruption, and that many of the uncorrupted words should be such as are of the commonest daily use, would indeed