Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/99

Rh countrymen; and even when using words which are commonly current among the people, our Pandits will alter the spelling back again to what it was in classical Sanskrit, thus ignoring the changes made by time; and baffling the endeavours of those who wish to seize the language as it is, by presenting it to them in the guise which the Pandits think it ought to wear. In no part of India is it more necessary to go amongst the people, and try to find out from their own lips what they do really speak. Often, however, when a witness in court has used some strange and instructive Tadbhava, and I have asked him to repeat the word, that I may secure it for my collection, some Munshi or Pandit standing by will at once substitute the Tatsama form, and rebuke the peasant for using a vulgar word; so that all hope of catching the word is gone for that occasion.

Gujarati uses स in preference to श, though there is some confusion in the employment of these two letters, and in many parts of the province the peasantry, as in the Panjab, evince a tendency to reject the sibilants and substitute for them ह.

Marathi employs श and स indifferently, to such an extent that even the learned and careful compilers of Molesworth's Dictionary are often puzzled to decide which to use. Especially is this the case in early Tadbhavas and Desajas, where Molesworth and his Brahmans are often widely wrong in their ideas of derivation. In Marathi श is not quite sh, nor yet quite s; it inclines more to the former than to the latter, inasmuch as the palatal nature of श renders it necessary to pronounce it with somewhat of that clinging of the tongue to the roof of the mouth which is characteristic of the letters of that organ. Of the two principal dialects into which Marathi is divided, the Dakhani, or that spoken on the high table-lands above the Ghats, inclines more to the use of the clear, sharp, dental स, while the Konkani, spoken in the low line of country fringing the coast, prefers the softer and more clinging श. So also Bengali, the language of a low-lying country on the sea-shore,