Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/74

52 of an inflectional system, and closely resemble those of that language. The verb is, as in other languages, composed chiefly of participial forms combined with the three auxiliaries, but, like Gujarati, the future, as well as the indefinite present, shows signs of the synthetical system of Sanskrit, and in some other respects also is less purely analytical than Hindi. The passive in particular exhibits a system of combination in which a tendency to analytical treatment is not fully emancipated from synthetical ideas.

Marathi, which I place next on the list, is, like Gujarati and Sindhi, more complicated in its structure than the other languages. These three languages of the Western Presidency, perhaps from political reasons, and the less frequent intercourse between them and the northern and eastern members of the group, retain a type peculiar to themselves in many respects, notably so in the greater intricacy of their grammatical forms. In Marathi we see the results of the Pandit's file applied to a form of speech originally possessed of much natural wildness and licence. The hedgerows have been pruned, and the wild briars and roses trained into order. It is a copious and beautiful language, second only to Hindi. It has three genders, and the same elaborate system of preparation of the base as in Sindhi, and, owing to the great corruption that has taken place in its terminations, the difficulty of determining the gender of nouns is as great in Marathi as in German. In fact, if we were to institute a parallel in this respect, we might appropriately describe Hindi as the English, Marathi as the German of the Indian group,—Hindi having cast aside whatever could possibly be dispensed with, Marathi having retained whatever has been spared by the action of time. To an Englishman Hindi commends itself by its absence of form, and the positional structure of its sentences resulting therefrom; to our High-German cousins the Marathi, with its fuller array of genders, terminations, and inflections, would probably