Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/94

72 dot-makers are forgotten. But they have never, oddly enough, thought of dotting the Bengali ज, জ, which is really often pronounced z without the help of dots.

Marathi has two methods of pronouncing the palatals. In Tatsamas and modern Tadbhavas and before the palatal vowels इ, ई, ए, and ऐ, च is ch, and ज j; but in early Tadbhavas, Desajas, and before the other vowels, च sounds ts, and ज dz. This peculiarity is not shared by any of the cognate languages, while, on the other hand, the ts and dz sounds, so to speak the unassimilated palatals, are characteristic of the lower state of development of the non-Aryan, Turanian, or what-you-will class of languages. Tibetan on the one side, and Telugu among the Dravidians on the other, retain them. Marathi, from its juxtaposition to Telugu and other non-Aryan forms of speech, might naturally be expected to have undergone somewhat of their influence, and this pronunciation of the palatals is probably an instance in point.

By the expression "unassimilated palatals" I mean that, whereas in the Aryan palatals the dental and sibilant of which they are composed have become so united into one sound that the elements can no longer be separately recognized, in the Turanian class the elements are still distinct. The earlier languages of the Aryan and Semitic families knew no palatals. Even Hebrew has got no further than צ Tsadde; Greek and Latin probably had not these sounds either. They are then of late origin, and though as regards the formations in which they occur they must be considered as sprung from the gutturals, yet they are so derived not directly, but through the often observed change from k into t; so that by adding a sibilant to the guttural we get from k + s into t + s; this change being facilitated by the fact that in Sanskrit at least the sibilant employed is a dental, and naturally, as will be shown in Chapter IV., draws over the guttural into its own organ, thus, वाक + स (= वात + स) = वाच.