Page:A Grammar of the Telugu language.djvu/12

vi tensive subject as Grammar, may justly claim some indulgence to his own notions concerning it and to be allowed his own peculiar method of arranging his conceptions and communicating them to others.” This discretion may be most profitably used when we have to examine principles which the commonalty evidently understand correctly, and which the refinements introduced by the learned have much obscured.

A familiarity with the spoken Telugu as already alluded to, gives so little aid in reading the superior language used in poems, that some have hence imagined the latter to be obsolete: just as the Telugus, Canarese or Tamils, however fluent in colloquial English, are unable to read English poems; which we look upon as perfectly easy. And yet their poets are read with delight by persons of ordinary education: a fact which led me to the conclusion that the “high or Sanscrit dialect” was neither obsolete nor in general pedantic. An attention to the poets gradually dissipated those difficulties in Syntax which equally exist in both the strict and in the free dialect; and in time the path became easy.

As an Englishman residing in France or Germany must study Corneille or Goethe before he can converse idiomatically, so the true key to those modes of thought and peculiarities of expression which in India occur daily, can be found only in the classicks of India.