Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/73

Rh than the regular splendour of the parterre. Even as early as Prakrit times the dialect of the Indus valley shook itself free from trammels, and earned for itself from the pedantic followers of rule and line the contemptuous epithet of Apabhranśa, or vitiated. There is a flavour of wheaten flour and a reek of cottage smoke about Panjabi and Sindhi, which is infinitely more natural and captivating than anything which the hide-bound Pandit-ridden languages of the eastern parts of India can show us. I have not yet been able to procure Dr. Trumpp's Sindhi Grammar, and am obliged to work with Captain Stack's book, the deficiencies of which strike one at every step.

In Sindhi the preparation of the base for reception of the case particles assumes great importance, there being in nearly every case three separate base-forms in the singular, one for the nominative, a second for the oblique, and a third for the vocative; and three in the plural, the plural forms being in addition various and numerous for the oblique and vocative. That these forms result from a partial retention or half-effaced recollection of the Sanskrit inflectional system is apparent, and this fact places Sindhi in an inferior stage of development to that of the fore-named languages. The cases are formed, however, analytically by the addition of particles; that indicative of the possessive relation is so multifariously inflected as to raise that case into a pure adjective agreeing with the governing noun in gender, number, and case, whereas Hindi is satisfied with three forms of the genitive particle, Panjabi with four, Gujarati requires nine, and Sindhi twenty. The subject of postpositions is not properly worked out by Stack, and I labour under some difficulty in putting it clearly to myself, and consequently to the reader. The adjective is also subject to the same multiplied changes of termination as the substantive. The pronouns, as in Hindi, retain more traces