Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/65

Rh etc., correspond exactly to the Turkish in, lah, dan, and the rest, in that they have no meaning when standing alone, and though perfectly separable from the word which they modify, nevertheless cannot be used without it. The two classes are therefore very much alike, and might by inexperienced persons be easily mistaken one for another. In fact, to settle the question in which of the two stages any given language is, we have to inquire into its past history, and to ascertain what family it belongs to. Moreover, it will always be found that no language is purely analytical. The most advanced languages, such as English, still retain traces of the synthetical phase through which they have formerly passed. Thou goest, he goes or goeth, went, gone, though much altered from their original form, still exhibit the inflectional or synthetic type. On the other hand, agglutinative languages having not yet got so far as the synthetic stage, naturally cannot possess any traces of its system, though, to complicate the matter, there are found some languages of this stage whose agglutinative system, aided by the working of the laws of euphony, has advanced so far as to be almost synthetical,—that is to say, their particles have become so much altered by use, and are so habitually written as parts of the word modified, that they may almost be taken for inflectional terminations. So that while on the one hand we may have agglutinative languages almost entering the synthetical stage, we have analytical ones which have not quite left it.

§ 13. To apply the above remarks to the Indian languages. The Aryan dialects remained purely synthetical for many centuries after the race entered this country. When it first came here, it found the land covered with non-Aryan races, and it is almost certain that it came more into contact with them during those early ages than it did in later times, because these alien races were after a time either driven out altogether,