Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/71

Rh a paraphrastic construction with sab or log being generally preferred. The pronouns exhibit a slight advance upon the Prakrit forms, but have evidently come down to modern time through Prakrit, and therefore retain more of an inflectional character. In the pronouns, each case must be derived from the corresponding case in Sanskrit, just as in an Italian verb each person of each tense is a distinct corruption of the corresponding Latin person and tense. But with the Hindi noun the case is different. The noun owes to Sanskrit merely its base, or crude form. All its cases are formed out of its own resources, resources perhaps themselves of Sanskrit origin, but put together and employed in a way quite foreign to Sanskrit ideas. Thus when a Sanskrit noun exhibits three base forms, the Anga, Pada, and Bha, all differing from each other, as राजन्, Anga base राजान्, Pada राज, Bha राज्ञ्, the Hindi rejects all these niceties, and takes the simple nominative राजा for its sole base, declining it by means of postpositions राजा को, etc.

In the verb Hindi has still more markedly thrown away the Sanskrit inflectional system. The Hindi verb is an arrangement of participles conjugated by means of the substantive verbs, derived from the roots as and bhû. Only one tense is synthetical, the indefinite present, corrupted from the present indicative of the Sanskrit.

Panjabi follows Hindi as regards its nouns, having the same simplicity of declension and the same absence of inflection; although the particles used to denote cases are different from those used in Hindi, yet the method of their use is precisely the same; only bases ending in â are subject to modification, all others remain unchanged. The verb is identical in structure with Hindi, and the differences of form are hardly more than dialectic. The pronouns are also nearly the same as Hindi. The claim of Panjabi to be considered an independent language rests more upon its phonetic system, and its stores VOL. I.