Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/66

44 or remained and were absorbed into the conquering body, where they took rank at the bottom of the social system as Sudras, and learnt the speech of their conquerors, which speech in those days was Prakrit in some form or other. Now, all the forms of Prakrit are synthetical, and remained so as long as we have any definite trace of them, that is, till long after the absorption of the majority of the non-Aryans. The Bhars, Cherus, and other tribes, it is true, made a stand, and retained their individuality till a late period, and the Sonthals and Kols do so to the present day. Still the mass of non-Aryans residing in the valley of the Ganges who were absorbed at all, must have been absorbed not only many generations, but many centuries, before the Aryan languages began to show any signs of a tendency to analytical construction. It is my belief that the Indian languages did not begin to be analytical till about the ninth or tenth century, much about the same time that the European languages began to be so. Chand, though his structure is analytical, retains much that is synthetical still, and his particles and auxiliaries are in a very crude and unformed state. For the modern kâ, ke, kî, he chiefly uses an obscure क kă, which does not vary with the governed noun, and is more often left out altogether. है, the ordinary substantive verb, is unknown to him; था is still only हुंतो, three stages earlier than its present form. If then the non-Aryans were the cause of the Sanskrit changing its structure from synthetical to analytical, they must have taken an uncommonly long time about it, and, oddly enough, must have succeeded in effecting the change at a time when they had for centuries adopted the synthetical structure of the Aryans.

But even apart from the improbability of this theory, it is superfluous. We want no non-Aryan influence to account for a natural and regular process in all languages of Indo-Germanic build. When, by lapse of time and the effect of those