Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/70

48 ku (kku), and that of the Hindi, ko, and Dr. Caldwell in particular seems to have gone quite wild on the subject (see pp. 225-227 of his Grammar); but leaving aside all the Dravidian, Scythian, Ostiak, Russian, Malay, and all the rest of the jumble of analogies, it is demonstrable from actual written documents that the modern Hindi ko is a pure accusative or objective, and was in old Hindi kauṉ कौं, which is the usual and regular form of the Sanskrit कं kam, the accusative of nouns in kah; so that there does not appear to be the slightest reason for connecting it with anything but the cognate forms in its own group of languages.

For the reasons above given, I am of opinion that there is nothing in the structural phenomena of the modern Aryan vernaculars which may not, by a fair application of reasonable analogies, be deduced from the elder languages of the same stock; and though not prepared to deny the presence of non-Aryan elements in those languages, I do strenuously deny that they have had any hand in the formation of the analytical system which the Aryan tongues at present exhibit.

§ 15. Looking upon the change from a synthetical to an analytical state as progress and development, not as corruption or decay, it may be interesting to institute a comparison between the several languages in this respect. And here, as might be expected, we find in most instances that those languages which are most prone to the use of Tatsama words are also most backward in development.

The most advanced language is the Hindi, which is closely followed by the Panjabi and Gujarati. In Hindi the noun has lost nearly all traces of inflection; the only vestiges remaining are the modification of the base in the oblique cases of nouns ending in â or ah, as ghoṛâ, oblique base ghoṛe, bandah, oblique base bande, and the terminations of the plural eṉ, âṉ, oṉ; and in common talk the plural is very little used,