Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/63

Rh dâg͟hnâ, where Arabic and Persian nouns have been furnished with a Hindi termination, but the usual form is taḥsîl karnâ, where the Hindi verb does all the grammatical work, and the Arabic noun is unaltered and uninflected throughout. When they are used as nouns, they take the usual postpositions indicative of case, but as these postpositions are merely appended to them without causing any internal change in their structure, it cannot be said that they are at all affected. In those changes which indigenous nouns undergo in the preparation of their base or crude form for receiving case appendages, the alien Arabic or Persian word is only affected in very few and exceptional instances. The rules for the preparation of the base are most intricate in Sindhi, Gujarati, and Marathi, in the first of which Arabic words, as I have said, are very numerous.

We cannot therefore take these words into consideration at all in examining the internal structure and constitution of the seven languages, though it may be proper to do so when treating of their external garb, and of the construction of sentences.

§ 12. Passing from the consideration of the constituent elements of this group of languages, to that of their structure and inflections, we are again met by the question of non-Aryan influence. It has been said that contact with the savage races of India had on the Aryans the effect of breaking down their rigid inflectional system, and causing them to substitute, for case-endings in nouns and verbs, distinct particles and auxiliaries, and that under this influence the Sanskrit gradually became modified into the present forms. There are, however, some difficulties in the way of accepting this theory, and in order to explain what they are, it will be better to state the whole argument from the beginning.

Languages, like trees, grow and develope, and their stages